Page 16 of Back for More
* * *
We’d stared at each other’s lips for what felt like an eternity—just like we had right before I left his office this afternoon. Finally, I’d said I guessed I’d see him later before I went back to the house to get ready for Jean-Pierre to pick me up in a white stretch limo.
I’m not proud of what happened later that night, and I’m sure he isn’t either, though we’ve never discussed it. Wes and I just glared at each other from across the dance floor while we danced with our dates, and then we kept leaving our dates, ostensibly to use the restroom or go outside to call and check in with our dads. But we’d meet up behind the gym to make out. Even now, I can remember how it felt to have his strong, calloused hands on the skin of my bare back, the way his tongue confidently explored my mouth while I gasped and moaned. I had to re-do my up-do twice, and then finally I decided to wear it down. We’d met up three times. The last time, I was so mad at myself for going back out there after stating so definitively that the last time we’d kissed would be the absolute last time.
But it was never enough.
Kissing had still been so new for me, but it had felt like I had been dying to kiss Wes forever and I would never, ever get enough of him.
* * *
“We can’t do this,” I said in a hushed, throaty voice, in between sighs and moans, while Wes pushed me up against the brass door and casually took my breath away.
“Let’s stop, then,” he said as he kissed my neck and I tugged on his jacket lapels.
“Stop looking at me when I’m with Jean-Pierre.”
“Stop staring at me every time you see me.”
“Stop being so freaking hot.”
“Right back at ya.”
“I mean it.” I let out a tiny moan. His lips were so, so soft, even as they crashed against mine, even when the words that came out of them were meant to challenge me. We were inhaling each other, consuming each other, in the most desperate PG-13 way that two fully-clothed teenagers could consume one another in public—because we knew that even thoughthismight not be the last kiss, there would be a last kiss eventually.
“I’m going to leave Belford.” I peppered kisses all over his terrible amazing face in a way that would have made more sense if I had been saying “I will come back to Belford for you.”
“I know.” His hands were all over me, somehow respectful and daring at the same time.
“I have to.”
“I know.”
“And you will never leave your dad.”
“No, I won’t.”
I finally pushed him away and insisted that it would really never ever happen again, and he said cockily, as he wiped my lip gloss from his mouth, “Keep telling yourself that.”
* * *
I had. I’d kept telling myself that. But it hadn’t helped.
I don’t think either of us went out on any actual dates again after that while I was still in Belford.
I hated the way I’d acted with Wes in his office today. I never know how to act with him, have always felt the need to act around him more than anyone else I’ve ever met, and never wanted so badly to just bare my soul to someone. Forcing myself to deny my feelings for Wes Carver has been like willing myself to have an auto-immune disease. It has been eating away at everything that should be giving me life. But like everything else I set my mind to, I intend to get better at it, no matter what it takes.
I feel like a new woman, now that I’ve had a chance to bathe, quietly get off, and change into something a little more comfortable before my dad gets home.
I feel like an adult woman who can handle being back here, in the first place I lived, the first place I loved, the first place where I realized it wouldn’t kill me to not have what I thought I wanted. It was the perfect upbringing for an actress. The perfect upbringing for the daughter of Jasper Barnes. The perfect upbringing for the new assistant to Wes Carver.
My room is on the second floor, at the end of the hall from the room my parents used to share. After my mother passed away, my father started sleeping in what used to be a guest room downstairs. He just couldn’t stand to be in that bedroom without my mom. That made me sad but also relieved. It was one of only a few hints I’d ever gotten from him that he actually had a broken heart—or rather, that he had a heart that could be broken. I knew that he’d loved her very much. I still know it, even though he never talks about it. I guess some people are only capable of ever loving one person.
I plan to get my own apartment as soon as I can afford to. Being here in the bedroom that I grew up in is strange. Vicky has clearly been dusting and airing the room out over the years. Nothing has changed, not even the way I feel when I’m in it. Torn by the desire to curl up and get comfortable and be myself and the restless need to leave in search of a place where I can be someone else. Or is it the other way around?
I really thought I’d know by the time I was twenty-three.
I go over to the chest of drawers to pick up the framed photograph of me with my best friend from school, Alecia. We are thirteen in this picture, faces smashed together, arms wrapped around each other like we couldn’t live without each other, and at that point it felt like we couldn’t. I both look forward to and dread the moment when I reach out to her to let her know I’m in town. But one thing at a time.
