Page 68 of Night Shift

“You’re scary smart,” he says, “and you’re so fucking pretty it hurts to look at you sometimes. I’m just—I’m fucked. I want to text you every time I see something funny, and I want to get coffee with you between classes so we can complain to each other. And I want you to know all my friends, and I want to know yours, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I feel like you want—like you deserve more than, I don’t know, getting coffee on campus and hanging out at house parties and driving around in my car. That’s so boring compared to the shit you read.”

“You don’t even know what I read,” I protest half-heartedly.

Vincent shakes his head.

“I’ve gone through, like, ten of these this week,” he admits, gesturing to the shelf of romance novels next to us. “I know I gave you a lot of shit, but I’m trying to work on unpacking that, so . . . Look, I still have my complaints. But I get it. I get why you like them. And I was wrong to say that your expectations are too high. They’re not. You deserve to have this.”

My eyes sting all over again.

I don’t know if he’ll ever understand how much those words mean to me.

“Well, you haven’t dated anyone before, and I am”—I snort—“obviously not good at this either. So maybe we should just figure it out together.”

Vincent nods.

And then he takes my hands in his and brings them up to his lips, one at a time, to press two soft kisses to my knuckles. It feels so utterly Jane Austen that I think I might cry.

“Your fingers,” he says very seriously, “are fucking freezing.”

“It’s raining. I walked here. Sue me.”

Vincent laughs a little too loudly. I can tell he’s nervous—that he’s trying to push through it, for my sake—so I squeeze his hands in encouragement.

“I want you so bad it hurts sometimes,” he admits quietly, a little wrinkle between his brows as he stares down at my hands around his, one of his thumbs tracing laps back and forth across my knuckles. “I don’t know if I like feeling this way. I don’t want to be one of those guys who goes all caveman on the girl he likes, but I feel . . . greedy with you.”

And there it is. My own feelings in his words.

“Be greedy, then.”

Vincent blinks at me like he doesn’t understand.

I shrug. “If you feel the same way I do, then I don’t get what the problem is. I’ve been greedy. You can be greedy too. Ask for what you want.”

He clears his throat and says, “I want to kiss you.”

My heart hiccups.

I whisper, “Prove it.”

Twenty-seven

The first time I kissed Vincent, I acted on instinct.

This feels a lot like that first kiss.

And maybe it’s the fact that we already know how good it feels to have our mouths on each other, or maybe we’re just too relieved and too excited to be patient any longer. Because one moment, Vincent is holding my hands in his with tender reverence, and the next, he’s crushing me to his chest with one arm wrapped around my waist. I grab two fistfuls of his black Clement Athletics jacket and arch up onto my toes, determined to meet him halfway. He returns the favor by twisting his hand into my rain-damp hair and giving it a tug—too gentle to really hurt, but firm enough that I gasp as my chin tips back.

He kisses me. Hard.

Like he means it.

Like he’s starving.

I kiss him back and hope he doesn’t mind that my eyes are wet again.

All week, I’ve been shaken up like champagne. Now Vincent’s uncorked me, and all the feelings I bottled up are bubbling to the surface so fast that there’s no way for me to stop the messy overflow.

I really fucking missed him. His smile. His voice. The heat of his body, so big and solid against mine. The soft scrape of his barely there stubble against my skin. The way he smells—laundry detergent and that familiar undercurrent of something warm and spiced that makes me dizzy. The way he grasps at my head and my hips like he won’t be satisfied until he feels every inch of my body against his. We’re kissing like we’re lovers reunited after one of them returned from war or something, which is probably overkill considering we’re just a pair of students standing in the romance aisle of our college town’s local bookstore.

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