Made You Up(69)

“Stop for a minute,” I said, turning around to look at the store.

“What?”

“We need to go to Meijer.”

“Why?”

“Trust me, we need to go to Meijer. Pull in and park.”

He swung into the parking lot and drove as close as he could get to the doors. I almost had to drag him out of the cab and into the store.

“I work here all the time,” he whined, yawning. “Why did we have to stop?”

“You’re a baby when you’re tired, you know that?”

I pulled him toward the deli counter. His coworkers gave us odd looks as we passed by. Miles waved them off. The main aisle was empty.

Miles nearly crashed into the lobster tank when I stopped in front of it. He blinked once, stared down at it, then looked at me.

“It’s a lobster tank,” he said.

I took a deep breath. Now or never.

“It’s the lobster tank,” I said. “Your mom told me you remembered.”

Miles looked back at the tank, the water reflected in his glasses. At first I thought I’d been wrong, that the odds had been too high, that maybe my mother had been right this whole time and I had made the whole thing up. But then he said, “Do you do this all the time?”

“No,” I replied. “Just today.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You smell like lemons.”

I rose up on my toes.

He turned, his hands finding my waist, his lips finding mine like he’d been preparing himself for this moment.

Saying I wasn’t ready for it was an understatement.

I wasn’t ready for the emotion, and I wasn’t ready for the way his long, chilly fingers worked their way under my jacket and sweatshirt and shirt and pressed into my hips, raising goose bumps on my skin. Everything around us drifted away. Miles groaned. The vibration rippled through my lips.

The heat. How did I not notice the heat? There was a furnace between the layers of clothing that separated us.

I pushed away. He breathed heavily, watching me with alert, hungry eyes.

“Miles.”

“Sorry.” His huskier-than-usual voice didn’t sound sorry.

“No—I—do you want to come back to my house?”

He hesitated for a moment; in his eyes, I saw him working out the meaning of my words. It took him so much longer to figure it out than a math problem or a word puzzle. Those he got immediately. This took all his brain power.

I had to believe he’d been born with this confusion, this inability to understand people, because the alternative was that he’d been conditioned to think no one would ever suggest something like this to him, and he simply couldn’t process it when someone did. And that was too sad to believe.

“You . . . you mean . . . ?” His eyebrows creased.

“Yes.”

His breath hitched. “Are you sure?”

I let my fingers wander to the waistband of his jeans. “Yes.”





Chapter Thirty-four




We didn’t talk on the way to my house. Miles’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel, and he kept glancing over at me every few seconds. I knew this because I kept glancing over at him, too. Something wiggling and strange tunneled through my stomach, half excitement, half terror. When he pulled up the driveway and reached over to unbuckle his seatbelt, I held him back.

“Wait. Let me go in first. Drive down the street some, then walk back. You know which window is my room?”

“No.”

I showed him. “Come to the window. I’ll let you in.”

I marched up to the front door, perimeter checking the yard as I went, trying to be as casual as possible when I stepped into the house and flipped the bolt behind me. I kicked my shoes off in the hallway and tiptoed past the family room.

“Alex?”

My mother.

“Hey, Mom.”

“I’m glad you’re home.” She stood from the couch and held out her hand. “I didn’t realize you’d be out so late— you need to take this.”

She gave me a pill. I swallowed it dry. “We stopped for dinner.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Um, yeah, I guess.” I wanted to be in my bedroom. Wanted to be shut in, safe, away from prying eyes. With Miles.

“How was Miles?”

“Good? I don’t know what you mean.”