Page 44 of Wreck Me

He cast his eyes downward, looking uncharacteristically shy. “I don’t know why, but…I kinda like you.”

Ginny laughed. “I know, right? It doesn’t make any sense, but I kinda like you too.”

His expression when he looked back up held more of that boyish hope, but there was still a reticence. “When I found you in the kitchen and you were mumbling, you said something about a Greta Linda hiring Mick Jagger to put a hit on me?”

Ginny was confused for a second, then smiled. “That would be my Great Aunt Lydia, man hater of the ages.”

“Should I be looking over my shoulder in case Jagger shows up with a gun and a silencer?”

“Not unless Great Aunt Lydia made the arrangement from her grave. She and her misandry passed away about a year ago.”

He scrunched his eyes as if fearing blowback from what he was about to say. “Sometimes it seems like she left a piece of it behind?”

“Who, me? I don’t hate all men, just…,” she crinkled her nose and shuddered, “…specific categories.”

“The ones wearing suits?”

“Definitely. But then, really, who doesn’t? Though I hear they are good in the air fryer with a spicy buffalo sauce.”

“So, you obviously don’t date suit wearers, but do you date any of us or are you…”

“I date men, but I’m picky, and I don’t get serious. I have a full life all on my own. I guess, maybe like you, I get a little bored. Long-term, you guys seem more trouble than you’re worth.” She winked at him. “At least, that’s what Great Aunt Lydia always said.”

He squared his shoulders. “Well, my equally wise mother says we’re crunchy pickles. So…maybe we try this, but with the stipulation that no one gets hurt when one of us calls ‘boredom’?”

Her smile was coquettish as she reached for his hands. “I do like crunchy pickles.” She gave his hands a squeeze and then went up on her toes, all the better to stare at his lips, so near and yet so far. “I think I need a kiss first to know whether it’s worth the risk.”

His voice became a smolder that rumbled through her. “Then you’re in luck, because I’ve been wanting to do just that.”

Still coming to terms with the fact that the man she’d recently wanted to rend limb from limb was about to oblige her request that he kiss her, she puckered her lips—only to find that he wasn’t aiming for them.

“It’s…,” he said, as he placed the lightest of kisses high on her cheek, “these…,” he continued, as he placed a second tinykiss ever so slightly closer to her lips, causing her knees to melt, “freckles.”

Whether he intended to so tantalizingly miss her lips a third time, she would never know. She took matters into her own lips, shifting her face to meet his mouth, and he didn’t seem to mind one bit. His kiss was like the man himself –a seemingly impossible mix of strength and tenderness, stone and fragility. Letting go of his hands, she reached up and did the thingshe’dbeen longing to do. Tracing the arc of his strong cheekbones, she sunk her hands into his hair, feeling him deepen their kiss as her fingers ruffled through his soft curls.

Her mind, so often a frenetic butterfly unable to land, stilled up there on that mountain with her lips pressed against his and the taste of him on her tongue. The gulls still called overhead, and the scent of sage swirled around them, but there was only one sensation in her universe just then, and that was Nico Vitale.

20

Driving back down the canyon road and into the city, Nico shared story after story from his childhood with Ginny– mostly the many death-defying antics he and Vince had gotten up to—and they laughed so hard his faced ached. Ordinarily, telling people about his life made him feel vulnerable, as if someone could use something he’d said against him somehow. With Ginny, it felt good. Really good. His mother’s words were becoming truer by the minute.

That girl is a little bit magical, I think.

Maybe not just a little.

By the time they reached the outskirts of the city, they were on to his college days.

“What do you mean the bully was so drunk you moved himintothe freight elevator?” she asked, eyes twinkling in anticipation.

“I mean, we moved him, and his dorm bed, and everything else we could fit from his dorm room, into the elevator. We set it up just like a tiny dorm room and then sent him to the top floor, and he never even woke up! People rode that elevator all nightlong, singing him lullabies and taking selfies while he snored like a baby.”

“I bet he never bullied your friends again,” she said between giggles.

“He never found out who did it. The list of people he’d pissed off was long enough to have its own zip code.”

She laughed some more of her twinkly laugh – a sound Nico was getting a little addicted to—then swiveled toward him. “Whew! I feel like the dullest person in LA right now. The most exciting thing art history majors ever get up to is art openings full of sweaty cheese and derivative sculpture. Did you know that if you make some ordinary object, like a plug or a toaster, big enough, it automatically provides insightful commentary on the meaninglessness of modern existence?”

“I did not know that,” he said, smiling.

---