Page 48 of Let It Be Me

She draws in a slow breath, her lips parted. “Say that again,” she says, her voice low, pulling me in.

Now I’m staring at her lips, remembering the determined way she kissed me like she had no doubt it was right. “You’re an amazing fucking kisser.”

Her body is closer than it was a minute ago. Did she move or did I? She smells like the floral soap her mom has kept in the shower as long as I’ve known Ruby, and she smells like a lifetime of summers together. If I just lean forward, I’ll be kissing her. And I don’t think I can do anything else right now. Desire has a death grip on my muscles.

“You always said we should never kiss.”

I hear her, but the meaning of the words takes a few seconds to hit me. I drag my eyes off her lips to meet her gaze.I said that?

She nods, seeing the question in my eyes.

“I said we should never kiss,” I repeat slowly. I did say that. A long time ago. But my brain is foggy with wanting her, and I can’t string together a coherent series of memories to tell me why I said that. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers. Her fingers reach for my face, and adrenaline pumps through me, my body hungry to kiss her. Hungry to pull her T-shirt over her head and slide her panties down her legs and push her up against the counter. Fuck. What’s happening? But she’s not reaching out to kiss me. Her thumb slides over my eyebrow, the one with the scar, and I remember that night.

Suddenly I’m awake, dragged back to reality by memory and my own prescient warning that we should never kiss. This is dangerous. Stupid. I’m about to blur the lines all over again and drag us into round three of drunken kissing. Ruby and I have too much history to do this without knowing what we’re getting into. I owe her better than that. “Yeah, I—” I blink, straightening up, pulling my gaze off hers. “I don’t either. But I should probably go.” I clear my throat. “To bed.”

“Oh.” I feel rather than see the way her body sags. “Okay.”

“I’ll sleep at my place.” Suddenly I need to get as far away from her as I can.

“You can sleep here,” she says innocently.

I stare at her. Does she even realize how close I just came to undressing her? To stripping her bare and tasting every inch of her skin and fucking her right here against the kitchen counter? I shake my mind free of the notion. “I’ll sleep better in my own bed.”

She nods. “So I’ll see you in the morning.” The way she holds my gaze, her body still frozen in the same position, tells me she realizes exactly how close we just came to destroying every rule we set for ourselves.

“Yeah.” I turn and head out of the kitchen. “Sleep well.” I stop in the doorway just before I reach the foyer and turn back to her. She’s watching me. “Ruby?”

“Yes?”

I pause. “Lock up behind me.”

NINETEEN

lorenzo

“Oh, there’s Ruby now,”my mom says happily from the kitchen window.

I take a sip of lukewarm coffee. My parents came home earlier than expected this morning, jolting me out of a dream about a boat and a bikini and a body that had to have been Ruby’s but I’d rather assume wasn’t. It hit me last night while walking from her house to mine why I said we should never kiss; after the night she kissed me on the dock and told me she loved me, I knew there could never be any such thing as an innocent kiss between us. I have to remember that.

My mom hurries to open the door and sweeps Ruby into a hug. “Don’t knock, just come in!”

Ruby grins, catching my eye over Mom’s shoulder. Her hair is swept back in a messy ponytail, and she’s thrown an old shirt of her dad’s over what I assume is the shorts and tank top she slept in. Droplets of water cling to her hair, and something black, probably from cleaning the boat, is smudged against her bare thigh.

“Morning all. Sorry I’m a mess.” She closes the shirt over her chest, but not before I catch sight of several wet spots where the hose has turned her tank top sheer. I look at the table.

“Ruby!” My dad hugs her and pulls out a chair for her, settling her into it and placing a steaming mug of coffee in front of her. “What a great start to a Sunday.” He sits down and looks at me. “You two took the boat out yesterday?”

I look at Ruby. Our parents aren’t besties, but they’re longtime friends and neighbors. Mine know the relationship between Ruby and hers.

Ruby hesitates, then shrugs. Avoiding trouble has never been a motivating factor in her life. “Just for a bit. Nothing like Lake Foster in June to raise a man’s spirits, right?” She smiles at me, then looks to my parents.

My mom shares the smile. “We won’t say a word.”

We settle into “coffee chat,” as my parents call it, tedious talk about neighbors, kids we went to high school with, and everything else that makes Lakeside as boring as it is. It wouldn’t take much for me to extricate us, but Ruby glows as she sits between my parents. They want to know about her classes and her summer plans, and they don’t ask about her future. Or mine. Actually, the mere fact that I survived surgery and am ambulatory seems to delight them.

Later, while my mom is showing Ruby some old recipe card, Dad and I step outside.

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