Page 24 of Don't Call Me Sweetheart

She broke the kiss, pulling back slightly, but I wasn’t having it. I took her mouth again, pressed my body against hers, all that delicious softness yielding against me, and propelled her backward until she hit the wall.

Her head tilted back, and she laughed breathlessly, delightedly, as though she was completely unaware that my self-control was hanging on by a mere thread. What was wrong with me? I never lost control like this. Never.

It was the hug. That’s what had done it. Or maybe it had started even earlier. At the bar, when she put her hand on my knee.

In my experience, kissing came from desire. Lust. Just good ol’ run-of-the-mill horniness. Lust was something I understood. Horniness, I could handle.

But this kiss.

This kiss was different.

Because, sure, lust had been simmering beneath my skin since I’d seen her at Goat’s Tavern, wearing a shirt that slipped off her shoulder in a way that drove my imagination wild. If that’s all this was, a buildup of horniness colliding with a dry spell, fine. I could control that. I was a full-grown man, not a barely pubescent boy with wet dreams.

But this kiss wasn’t about simple lust. This kiss was lust and.

It was lust and desire and some emotion I didn’t have a word for, but I instinctively knew it was tied up in that hug, and that touch on my knee, in that feeling of being cared for, of mattering, that had knocked me on my ass and left me raw and vulnerable.

I didn’t know why that made such a difference, only that it did. It amplified everything in one brilliant explosion of need, like a lit match on kerosene. I was totally unprepared for the ensuing inferno. I had kissed women before—hell, I had kissed Kate before, although that was when I thought she was Rose. It had been good. Enjoyable.

But it hadn’t been like this.

Damn the woman and her hugs.

I needed to slow things down. Regroup. Wrest control back from the woman who had unfairly stolen it with her warmth and kindness and wicked mouth.

“I forgot how much fun kissing is.” Her voice was full of breathless, laughing wonder. “I feel like a teenager again.”

A teenager again. My muscles tensed at her words, once again preparing for fight-or-flight, whichever got me out of there fastest. I remembered my teen years all too well. The first all-consuming pull of attraction. The string of bad choices that inevitably followed.

For me, it had been Cara, when I was fifteen. She had been a year older, and her homelife situation had been no better than mine. I could help her, I had thought, and I had damn well tried, to my detriment. Instead of studying, we had cut classes and partied. I had watched my grades slip from As to Cs.

In the rush of first love, I would have done anything for her, but in the end, none of it mattered. Our relationship combusted the way most high school romances ended. She broke up with me for a senior with a car, and I was left with the lesson that the only relationship that lasts forever is the one you have with yourself.

It was a lesson I never forgot.

Cara had dropped out of school soon after that, which shredded me with guilt. But what could I have done? Even at the time, I had been aware—because well-meaning teachers would shake their heads pityingly and tell me all about it—of the statistics for kids like Cara. Like me.

Fifty percent.

That was the number that came up again and again. Fifty percent of foster kids would drop out of school. Fifty percent of foster kids would enter the juvenile justice system, either through an arrest or a detention facility.

Fifty percent was a coin toss.

I had never won a coin toss.

But somehow, I had won at life. I had beaten the odds, graduated high school at the top of my class, gotten a full scholarship to a good college, landed a job that would never make me rich but paid the bills and gave me a sense of purpose.

And I had done that by keeping my focus squarely on myself and not getting sidetracked by relationships that would only hold me back.

Because that was the other lesson I had learned. With Cara, I had let my heart and dick do the thinking instead of my head, same as any other teenager. But I wasn’t the same as any other teenager; that was the hard truth of the matter. Foster kids didn’t have a safety net. The line between a close call and calamity was frayed and prone to snapping completely with one bad step. I couldn’t afford to pretend I was the same as any other teenager.

I couldn’t afford to love.

Years of therapy had taught me that, as much as those old instincts had served their purpose of surviving the foster care system, they would now only hold me back from what I wanted. I knew that, logically, pushing people away would not help me build relationships or family. Just the opposite, in fact. I knew all this, in theory.

But in practice? In practice, it didn’t matter what I knew. What I felt was all that reckless urgency, that consuming need to be close to someone, and it scared the shit out of me. I wanted to push away, hard, and run as fast as my legs could carry me.

“Are you okay?” Kate let her hands drop to my elbows, holding me close while she leaned back to scan my face.

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