Page 18 of Star-Crossed
“I hadn’t realized you were paying so much attention to my dating life,” Cy teased.
She gave him an incredulous look. “The whole school was. You were kind of a big deal, remember?”
He remembered.
Bitterly, most days.
The only thing more humiliating than achieving local celebrity status in high school was sticking around long enough to lose it.
“Anyway, Kiki basically dared me to choose a date to the senior prom based on IQ points instead of cup size. So, I picked the smartest girl I knew.”
Lyra’s cheeks turned the peachy color that Cy was already coming to adore. “You aresofull of shit.”
“We all are,” Cy pointed out. “But not about this.”
Lyra swiveled to face him, causing her sleep shorts to ride up on her smooth, muscular thighs. “There’s a serious lack of evidence to support these allegations.”
What was it about her spouting legalese at him that made Cy want to drag her into his lap?
“My not being full of shit, or my asking you to the prom?” he asked.
“Both,” she answered. “Whereas my case revolves around one indisputable fact.”
“Which would be?”
A smug smile pursed her lips. “You never asked me to prom.”
He couldn’t dispute that. “Kinda hard to do with your tongue down my throat.”
Lyra’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open in an intensely endearing expression of outrage. “Excuse me?Mytongue downyourthroat? You must have been hit harder than I thought, because I seem to remember you being the one to make the first move.”
In that, she had him at a disadvantage. Because Cy had no memory of the precise circumstances of how their ravenous encounter began. Only the physical sensations of where their bodies met.
“I did, did I?”
“You most certainly did,” she said, sitting up straighter on the cushion. “I was sitting back there, minding my own business and studying for my AP exam in political science, when you came sauntering back there and—”
“Sauntering?” Cy interrupted. “I sauntered?”
“You sauntered.”
“Care to demonstrate?” he asked.
“Fuck off,” she said playfully.
“Fair enough. Please, continue.”
Lyra reached for her beer and took a swallow. “As I was saying, there I was, minding my own business and studying for my AP exam in political science, when you come sauntering back there and sat down next to me without even asking.”
Cy felt himself cringe, an indicator that she was almost certainly telling the truth. It was just the kind of swagger he used to have back when his hormones outstripped his common sense by an order of magnitude.
“And then what?”
“Then I asked you what you thought you were doing, and you said, ‘Baby, you must be gibberellin, because I’m experiencing some stem elongation.’”
Cy pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a very, very long sigh.
Yeah. He’d done that shit, all right.
