Beast(63)

I miss her hands. “Do me next,” I say.

“Are you serious?” She smiles. Then she pounces. Her fingertips caress my face, rubbing my skin flat, exploring. “What do you want? A smoky eye?”

I don’t care as long as she’s touching me. “Whatever you want.”

“Let’s do swarthy pirate,” she declares.

She’s up close, her face near mine, and I write a last-ditch letter.

Dad—Let me know this is okay. Give me a sign, because I can’t take it anymore. It’s one thing for me and Jamie to talk until we’re blue, but I don’t want to talk anymore and this girl is centimeters away and soft. I can smell her. Vanilla and honey. I could tilt my head and brush her chest with my mouth. Please tell me this is okay, because I want to. Tell me I’m normal and this is something that can happen and you’ll still be my dad.



My eyes get gently contorted like clay, but I don’t care. Her fingers are warm. I follow all the commands—Blink. Look up. All the way up. Blink. Look down. Look left. Look right—and I want her. I want to grip her hips and pull her down onto me, tear off her shirt and find my mouth on her skin, but I wait. I need my sign. I lick my lips. She licks hers.

“Okay, look,” she says.

I swivel my head and burst out laughing. “Oh man…” I laugh more. There’s black lining my eyes, and mascara, and my eyebrows are all combed and pressed into place. I smolder. My cheeks are dewy and I’ve even got lip gloss on. It’s pineapple.

“You like?” she asks.

I nod. “It’s something else.”

Jamie takes a step back. “I mean, woof, Dylan. This is a surprise. You are no longer that hulking beast in a wheelchair, no sir.”

There is no sign, there may never be one, but I can’t wait anymore. I stand up and hold my nose to hers. She holds a hand on my chest. “What are you doing?”

I slide a hand up her spine. “Is this okay?”

“Yes. It is. A lot.” Jamie bites her lip. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up.”

“I kind of always liked you.”

“I kind of never stopped.” Her hands creep across my bare skin. They settle on the small of my back and lock like magnets. All the atoms fly from the drawer and sink deep inside my chest where they belong as I stare into her eyes.

We kiss.

We kiss and stop, our noses a paper’s width apart. Barely a touch, but I want more and I dive into her neck. She gasps, fighting my lips up toward hers. This is the only sign I need. We crash like waves.

There’s everything else and then there’s Jamie.





TWENTY-SIX


A race. That’s the best way I can put it, we’re both in a crazed race and I have no idea what the finish line looks like. My hands are all over her, hers are up and down my front and my back and when she skims the sides of my ribs, it tickles and I laugh.

“Sorry,” she whispers, a grin inside her kiss.

“Don’t be.” I kiss her back. And again and again and one more time before I wrap my arms around her and lift her high. We’re still in my crappy bathroom. We can’t jet off to Tahiti or Paris, but I can whisk her up to my room. She weighs nothing. Either that, or I can’t tell what she weighs because I’m so light-headed.

We launch into my blankets. Jamie kicks and giggles as I pile on top of her. My shirt’s long gone and now hers is too. The lights are off and the only way we can see each other is with the dim glow from the streetlamp flickering through my threadbare curtains. I look down. Jamie’s skin looks like colors of the fading day. She reaches up and touches my cheek, her palm warming me to my bones.

She is beautiful.

I don’t want to stop kissing her, so I won’t. This is how we’ll be forever, tangled up in lips with long kisses and short kisses. Chaste ones you’d do in front of a librarian. Deep, punishing ones you save for when he’s off restocking the shelves. Like now.

We’re alone. The night is ours. There’s no stopping us.

All this amazing skin we have, brushing and colliding together, hot fingertips and sweaty tips of our toes, it’s like unlocking a hidden door you never knew existed and finding a path littered with bread crumbs. Once you taste one, there is no way back. You can’t forget this. We’re never coming home.

In the midst of making out and gripping our shoulders, arms, backs, we go further. Like, further south. Jamie’s thumb peeks below the waistband of my boxers. Her painted nails dip inside. She finds me and with one touch, it’s like being hooked up to a car battery. I explode.

I’m mortified that it took so little, but Jamie kisses me. Her teeth tweak my bottom lip with a wink. “That was hot,” she murmurs.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yes.”

We shift in the bed. Now she’s on top, her hair spilling down across my chest as she kisses my neck. It’s something I never knew I needed. It’s especially incredible now that my entire system overloaded, burst into flames, and is being rebuilt one caress at a time.

As Jamie starts to rub against me, everything of mine is still raw nerves. Her skirt shifts up. I see our matching equipment and I jerk back. Jamie panics a little, tugging down her skirt. “I’m sorry, I was afraid this was a bad idea, it’s just, I don’t want you to think—”