Page 99 of Only in Your Dreams

I back her into the side of her car, and we’re getting soaked fast, the rain really falling now. Her hands leave my hair, clutching my hips instead, pulling me closer, only to find her way up my shirt to graze her nails along my back. My fingers curl in the hair at the back of her head and she moans her approval against my mouth. This kiss is fuckingeverything. Better than it ever would have been ten years ago, if I hadn’t lost my head and left her behind.

Maybe we weren’t meant to be back then, meant to kiss back then. Maybe we were supposed to wait for these very raindrops in this very parking lot. Maybe she was supposed to be aching from a hard-fought game and I was supposed to have shattered my own heart just to appreciate how good it feels when it comes whole again.

A flash of lightning illuminates the world around us, and then a clap of thunder. We gasp apart, my fingers in her hair, hers under my soaked shirt.

“We should get out of this rain.” Melody’s fingers fall to my waistband. “Let me show you around my backseat. It’s surprisingly roomy. I promise, you’ll love it in there.”

I huff a laugh—a fucking painful laugh—and catch her hand as it drifts lower, over the front of my jeans where my dick begs for her touch. “Not yet, baby. God fucking knows I want to. But we can’t.”

“But you can kiss me all you want now.”

I slick back her soaked hair. “Melody, I can’t fuck you only to send you off to pretend-date my friend. It’s not gonna happen.”

Her eyes squeeze shut and she rests her head back on her car looking like she’s in agony. She fumbles for her car door, but I usher her into mine instead.

“I need to get to Parker’s. I need a shower,” Mel says. I lean over to buckle her into my passenger seat anyway. Plant another kiss on her as the rain pummels the parts of me hanging out of the door.

“Shower at my place.”

She threads her fingers through my hair. “I can’t shower there. I don’t have my stuff,” she argues between kisses. “And you’ve got man towels.”

“Man towels?”

“Too scratchy and manly for my delicate skin. Like your sheets.” She moans against my mouth when I get my fingers in her hair. Dig in because the alternative would be slipping them under her soaked clothes, right here in this parking lot.

“My sheets?”

“The whole house hasman lives herewritten all over it. It’s only furniture—like you live there but don’t actuallylivethere.”

“What else would you want there? Other than towels and sheets.”

“I don’t know… Curtains in your bedroom, maybe? Fluffier pillows. Artwork.”

I nip her lip. “Hold that thought.”

Melody gives an adorable grumble when I pull away, out of reach of her mouth. I round the car and hop into the driver’s seat, soaked but not at all uncomfortable as I pull the car out onto the street.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re getting curtains. And towels, and artwork. Fluffier pillows. Whatever means you’ll like it there.” Mel’s eyebrows inch up her forehead. Shocked, even though it’s as natural as it gets for me. I’ve been dying for her to make her mark on the place. “We’ll paint yellow polka dots all over the walls, if that’s what you want.”

Chapter 24

Melody

“If you had to choose between doing away with natural light at home or living with a possible mouse infestation, which would you pick?”

Zac pauses in the act of flipping through the playbook on the patio table in front of him. “Come again?”

Sticking a half-eaten waffle in my mouth, I nudge his laptop around and adjust the tilt on its screen so that he can get a look at it despite the beating morning sun.

“I’m looking at apartments in the city,” I explain, scrolling through a few photos in the listing on screen. “These two are most promising so far.”

Zac shuffles his chair closer, and though he leans forward to get a better look, there’s an unmistakable stiffness to his shoulders as he does. Maybe it wasn’t the best move, bringing up my moving away only a couple days after we veered intosleeping buddies who make out whenever our live-in college kid isn’t in the roomterritory. But I’ve been feeling so good about myself lately, I haven’t wanted to derail my momentum.

“Clover, why are your options a dilapidated basement or a mouse-infested apartment?”

I try to take a sip from my empty coffee mug, and Zac swaps it with his fresh one. He’s drinking out of my old polka-dotted mug this morning. “Thank you. They’re my options because I’m still waiting for inspiration to strike on the new career front. I was really hoping to afford something better, but I can’t keep leeching off Parker forever.”

---