Page 15 of It's Always Been You
This pretty girl.
I can hear Molly’s low gasp as she whirls around. Startled, she takes a quick step backward, bumping into the back of the man standing in front of her in line. She stumbles a bit on the high platforms of her sandals, and on instinct, I snake an arm around her waist to steady her.
Electricity immediately sparks up my arm, and warmth unfurls from the place where my body touches hers. The hitch in her breath and dilating of her pupils tells me she feels it too. Our faces are close enough that I can see the riot of colors in her eyes. If I leaned in an inch, my mouth would be on hers.
Our eyes are locked together in a stare-off. I don’t think either of us breathes. My body starts to lean of its own volition, and I think hers does too. We are two magnets, helpless to do anything but draw closer together. I can feel her breath on my lips. I can remember how she tastes like the last time I kissed her was hours and not years ago, and then?—
“Next!”
The call of the cashier startles us apart. Molly jumps back like I burned her and spins around, taking a giant step towards the counter.
I stand frozen for a second, wondering what the fuck just happened, when the sound of her voice breaks me out of my daze.
“Iced peppermint mocha, extra whip.”
“Same for me,” I say to the cashier, sidling up next to Molly at the counter. “And three muffins, please. Blueberry, chocolate chip, and coffee cake.”
I wonder if she remembers our college coffee dates.
“What the hell are you doing?” Molly hisses at me.
I just grin at her, ignoring the butterflies I have in my stomach because, oh, yeah, she remembers. Love that for me.
“Ordering us breakfast.”
“This isn’t a fucking coffee klatch, Gabe. I have to go to work.”
The way she says my name has heat searing up my spine. I have to fight to keep my voice even and my dick under control.
“You still have to eat breakfast,” I say, accepting the pastry bag from the cashier and giving her my name for the drinks.
“I hate breakfast,” Molly grumbles, rooting around in one of her many bags for, I’m sure, a wallet. I take my phone out of my pocket and tap it on the credit card reader, paying with my digital wallet just as she locates her actual wallet. She glares at me, but she’s so fucking cute I just chuckle and walk the couple steps to the low counter to wait for our drinks.
She follows me, her eyes glued to the phone I still have in my hand. She’s staring at it like it’s a foreign object.
“What?” I ask. “You don’t tap to pay?”
She growls at me. Literally growls. The row of earrings in each of her ears glint under the coffee shop lights, and I notice that none of them match. Her bracelets jingle as she clenches her fists, and the sound brings back a thousand memories. I thought the first time I really talked to her would be sad and painful. Turns out, it’s none of those things. It’s everything. I just really fucking missed her, and now she’s right here in front of me. I’m so damn happy to see her.
“No, Gabe, I don’t tap to pay. Not everyone has that big, fancy phone you invented.”
“I mean…like sixty-five percent of people in the country with smartphones do.”
“Well, I’m not one of them,” she says in what I’m sure is the haughtiest voice she can conjure up. I almost laugh, but I want to keep my balls attached to my body.
“What the fuck are you even doing here?”
“Here in this coffee shop?”
Molly narrows her eyes at me. “I guess we can start there.”
“I was walking down the street, and I saw you come in here, so I followed you.”
She starts readjusting the straps of all her bags, and I reach out, sliding two of them off her shoulder to take them myself. My fingers accidentally graze her collarbone, and I feel that spark of electricity again. Molly shivers, goosebumps breaking out over her skin along the path of my fingers. She stares at me for a second before shrugging. I know how her mind works. She figures that she might not know what to make of this whole interaction or me standing in front of her or the fact that her body still reacts to me after all these years, but at least she doesn’t have to carry her own bags.
It is exactly, perfectly her.
“Okay, maybe let’s go a little bigger than that. Why are you walking down a street in my neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at eight in the morning when you live in San Francisco?”
