Page 154 of Falling Backwards
I want so strongly to kiss her that it chokes the breath out of me.
The knowledge pounds in my head, my lips, my ribcage, my stomach—
I sit up on my forearm and move until I’m slanting over her, causing her to tip backwards slightly, but even as I stop holding her hand and turn her face to mine, she doesn’t catch on to the shift in me.Her eyes are closed and she’s grinning as she dwindles into giggling again, still all amused.
Heart racing, I push my mouth solidly onto hers, claiming that smile and that laughter.
And…she kisses me back.
Like it’s instinct, the most natural thing.
Until a weak gasp stutters out of her and the kiss slips to an end.
My heartbeat stutters too.
She fumbles to touch me, finding and gripping my arm, now firmly in the reality of this moment with me.
Both of us are suddenly breathing hard.
My heartracesfrom how that was our first kiss in eight years and how it has been burned into me and how I’m worried she’s going to push me back from her in anger.
This heavy breathing is the only sound now.My hand is still on her face, so that arm I had around her is bent halfway between us, settled against her chest in a way that tells me her heart is racing too.
She isn’t shoving me away, though.She’s…she’s….
I hold still, muscles aching and chest aching more, as she slowly moves closer and lifts her lips back to mine.I memorize how it feels for her to press a kiss up to me on purpose.
And as I let myself sink into returning it, I memorize the soft little noise she makes.
I’m an instant addict.
We take a quick breath and give right in to another kiss, more fervently, and I dizzily think of this Maggie and younger Maggie at once, of how I never got a whimper-moan like that from her before.Things were so different back then—we cared about each other and were drawn to each other like now, but….
My hand shifts up from her chin so I can slide my palm over her bangs and thumb at her eyebrow, and now the sound she makes is breathless, and I hear myself echo it.I don’t know which of us tries to kiss the other about it first.
But we were teenagers.We didn’t havethis.We couldn’t have had it.
We were sweet because we were an easy match but also because we hadn’t broken each other yet.We didn’t know the perfection and pain of finding our way back to something we thought was gone.
We know it now.
It’s in how sincere these kisses are.It’s in the way the air buzzes between us when we finally stop.It’s in the way she says my name—gentle, nervous, her voice touching the parts of me that feel exactly like that.
I swallow hard and try to catch my breath.
Then, partly to her and partly to myself, I whisper, “We said we wouldn’t do that.”
“Yeah.”She gulps too.Her chest rises with her inhalation.“Why did you…?”
It takes me a few moments to be able to confess, “I thought I might die if I didn’t.”
She squeezes my arm and huffs a breath onto my lips, tempting me to kiss her again and spillallmy confessions to her and tell her how much I want us to just….
Now I whisper, “What have you been doing to me, Maggie?”
“What haveyoubeen doing tome?”
I shake my head a little as if to insist,‘Nothing,’because that’s what was supposed to have happened during our pretend relationship.Nothing.
