Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(67)

We sat like that, my thumb over his finger, looking down at our hands. Then his other hand is under my jaw, and he tips my face up to look at him.

His big hand at my cheek, his thumb under my jaw—God. I let myself blink slowly, to recover, to enjoy the lush high coming over me.

“I really want to kiss you,” he says.

None of the kisses in my experience have enjoyed so much premeditation, and I think all this talking about almost kisses and wanting to kiss someone has made everything completely unbearable, in a way that feels like nothing, nothing he could do to me could relieve the ache.

He’ll try and try and I’ll just ache more.

I can’t help looking at his mouth, which is in one of those almost smiles, but now I can see the curve under his lower lip and the patch of bristles there and God, that would feel so amazing against my tongue if I just licked right over that lip, halfway into those bristles with one of those kisses that’s about tasting and trying not to bite and biting a little, anyway.

“I want to kiss you more, when you look like that,” he whispers.

“You have this great mouth,” my horniness says.

“You almost killed me in your lab locker room.”

“Yeah? Was it my clogs? The safety goggles?”

“Yes.”

I laugh, and so he looks at my mouth, again, and then he leans the rest of the way over and I was wrong about his mouth, because it doesn’t feel amazing, it feels like I’m being rubbed with heat from something deeply radiant, magnetized.

The physical yearning is intense, wrong, almost, if wrong is exactly what you want to be doing, all the time.

His hand on my jaw is holding tight, hard, and it’s insane because the way he touches me usually are these light touches, these directive touches to politely guide me through a door or an activity, or get my attention.

But his hand is honestly holding on to me, his fingertips are into my hair, almost pulling it, his thumb is pressing under my chin, and he knows where he wants me, which is close, and at an angle so he can get his mouth over mine, and then I finally breathe, I think, because it’s his tongue I feel next on the inside of my lower lip and then I need to reach up and hold on to him, too.

“Jenny,” he whispers, when my hand is around his nape, but that’s all he says before he kisses me again, and you know how tongue kissing is sometimes all you can think about with a guy, but then you’re kissing and can’t work out how to get it started?

With Evan, I don’t even realize how deep we’re kissing, it’s just simple and hungry and dirty because it’s Evan.

It’s Evan with both his hands bracketing my face.

It’s Evan whose mouth is a little rough with mine, and like he wants to be rougher, like he wants to hold me a little too tight, and I want him to, with one of my hands over his on my face, and my other tangled in his messy hair, and let myself get soft and pull him closer.

I feel his grunt in my mouth, and f*ck, f*ck he rakes his hand into my hair all the way and he pulls it, hard, I think he’s fisting it, and he sucks in my lip and bites it while he pulls, greedy for me, hot for me, and I feel another sound in his throat, so low I can’t hear it, and every time he comes for my mouth between breaths he gets me where he wants me by that fist in my hair, the sting washing tight, icy-hot goose bumps over my spine, into the crease of my ass, my God, and then pulsing with dark, dark pins and needles all through the slick swollen mess of myself, my clit.

It’s a kiss that isn’t supposed to happen and he isn’t supposed to take, and so it tastes so good, it’s spiked, it’s drugged, and I’m messed up, I’m so messed up, I want to bite, too, but it’s better just to get f*cked on this burn, this shot of something so ill-advised that it doesn’t let you breathe until it’s soaked through your middle, hot.

He pulls away to pant against my mouth, his forehead against mine, and I realize he’s squeezing my nape, keeping me right where I am.

“Let’s go somewhere,” he says.

“My house,” I tell him. “Come home with me.”

*

We’re walking along the sidewalk with all the shoppers, kind of fast, and he’s got all of my bags hung on one arm so his other hand is free to lace through mine.

It’s unreal. This is unreal, the cold and the shoppers walking all around us, and the glittery window displays, and his big hand all through mine, his arm pressed into my side, his glances in my direction that make his almost smile look completely different. Because it is promising something, to me, Jenny Wright.

And I think that smile always has been promising me something, but I was too wrapped up in my own sadness to see it.

So it makes sense, I think, that seeing this promise cracks through my sadness, and it makes sense that I feel like I am in the middle of some kind of unreality, because my entire reality lately has been to be sad. Ohio, for me, has been a sad place. Even with my lab and ESEM—because of my diagnosis, maybe especially with my lab and ESEM. I finally achieved what might get taken away.

This doesn’t feel sad. His kiss didn’t feel sad. The way we’re walking, breathless, the taste of our kiss still in our mouths, is not sad.

It’s not because I need Evan, either.

I need myself.

Kissing Evan is an entirely unexpected bonus: in fact, Evan is an entirely unexpected bonus. The fact of his enjoyment of so many ordinary-life things—a woman who could laugh off dumping a smoothie in a man’s lap, pratfalls, simple science, snow.