RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)(23)

We still hadn’t said much as we sat on the bench. Eli laid his hand on my leg, and we sat in silence listening to the wood’s noises. And then Eli yawned and stretched his arms, turned, smiled at me. The smile was casual, the kind of smile a longtime lover gives to his girlfriend, and I couldn’t help but smile back. The woods, Eli, the atmosphere . . . all of it combined to make me calm. I hungered for calm, and here it was. For now, thoughts of the consequences were banished. I pushed Dad and Annabelle from my mind almost violently; they weren’t welcome here, not right now.

“I’ve realized something,” Eli said.

“Hmm?” I replied. I was watching a blue-colored bird hop from branch to branch.

“We’ve skipped the first date. It was that first night which did it. When we met, we already felt close to each other. We’d already tasted each other. I know that sounds odd, but do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” I said. I knew exactly what he meant. When I first saw him—the dagger-tattooed man—I had been immediately attracted to him. He was right. We’d skipped the first date entirely. “Do you regret it?” I asked, turning away from the bird to look at him.

“Not at all,” he said, smiling that contented smile. “It’s just—” He laughed, and then leaned forward and kissed my cheek, just under my eye. “Let’s talk. God, I sound like a cliché. But we should talk, don’t you think?”

I laughed. He did sound like a cliché. He also looked embarrassed. His cheeks bloomed red. But the smile didn’t leave his lips. “Okay, Eli,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

Anyone who has ever been asked to talk will know how difficult it is to magic a topic out of thin air. All the topics that would have come to you easily, only moments ago, are suddenly hard to find. This resulted in Eli and I gazing at the woods around us as we struggled to find a topic of conversation. Finally, Eli brushed the hair from my face.

“Why English literature?” he asked, with all the nervousness of a man of the first date. It was a strange contradiction. We had shared each other’s bodies, had been close, intimate—and yet a simple conversation turned us into nervous children.

“Books,” I said. “Good idea.”

He nodded. “I thought so. Are you going to answer my question, missy?”

He laid his hand casually on my knee. “I’ll answer,” I said. “But you first.”

“I hope you’re not going to steal my answer,” he said, squeezing my knee playfully.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “Go on.”

“Have you heard of Darren Shan?” he asked.

I shook my head. My reading habits were mostly reserved for authors who had died over a hundred years ago. I realize how pretentious that sounds, but when it comes down to books, I’m a pretty pretentious person. I can’t make any apologies for that, when for the longest time (before I met Eli, before he cast this spell on me) books were the only place where I felt calm.

“He’s a children’s horror author,” Eli went on. He looked into the distance, and I knew what he was seeing as easily as a ten-year wife would know what her husband saw when he stared off into the distance like that. Our connection allowed me to see what he was seeing. He wasn’t looking at trees. He was looking through the trees, and into his own memory. He saw a young boy, hunched over a book, reading until his eyes ached. “I had a series of his when I was quite young. It was about vampires. And, man . . . From the age of ten until I was about fourteen they were the only books I read. There were twelve in the series, and I must have read all of them, from start to finish, about five times. I remember looking forward to bedtime, when I should have been wanting to stay up late, just so I could disappear into that world. It didn’t matter that I knew what was going to happen. It was just that—”

“Disappearing into the story was what mattered,” I finished for him. “It was like you were returning to old friends.”

“Exactly!” he exclaimed, as though he had never heard the idea before. He laughed, and touched my cheek softly. “Normally when I tell people about that, they ask me why I didn’t read any other books, or why—as a fourteen-year-old boy—I would want to spend my time at night reading.”

“That seems like a strange question, to me,” I said.

“It always has to me, too,” he said. “But it hasn’t stopped people from asking.”

I felt instantly closer to him when he told me about this. I saw myself in him, and that invariably makes people closer. But it was more than that. I found myself respecting this boy who had stayed up late to read the same book series he’d already completed. I always like people better when they tell me about their love of reading. I loved Eli better for it, as much as I would like a friend better for it. But he was more than a friend, after all. He was my lover, my—can I say it? yes!—my life partner.

“Now it’s your turn,” he said, nudging my shoulder. “What made you fall in love with literature?”

I had never properly discussed this, even with my favorite English literature teachers. I had always thought it sounded silly, or like I was trying to come across as poetic and profound. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t poetic or profound in the slightest; these were the sort of social fears that made my heart beat like crazy, and made me doubt every move I made when around people. I was the meek woman in class who never raised her hand, let alone shared something intimate about myself that people might laugh at. But I knew Eli wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t hurt me. Something I was starting to see (and it was never clearer than that day in the lush woods, with nature teeming around us, and civilization only evident in the distance sound of cars) was that Eli would never hurt me. Maybe I was overly optimistic, maybe I had unrealistic expectations, but that, I thought, only prove that I really loved him.