Chapter Twenty-Two
Those two words struck Lucas like a lightning bolt again. He leaned in to kiss her and was lost. She tasted sweet like Coke, hot like the Texas sun, but her skin was cool like air conditioning. What was it about this girl? He could barely rein in his need to feel every part of her against every part of him. Her kiss made him feel unanchored to anything. Like he was free, but flying without a safety net.
She pulled him closer to her, and his control over his…bodily functions just about flew out of the window. Her swimsuit was slick, but holy hell—with his eyes closed, it seemed as if she was totally naked. This was everything he wanted, everything his soul had been screaming for since the time he kissed her in the hospital and saw the expression on her face.
He tried not to think about what she’d said about only kissing her when someone might see them. He’d never consciously thought about it, but he wondered if it was his subconscious guilt trying to get him kicked off the team—either by Colin or Coach, who’d told him that he wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend.
“No, no, wait,” she said, pulling back slightly but still kissing his face. He was confused but took a step back, though not so far back that she had to stop kissing him.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered, eyes still closed against her lips pressing into his neck.
Avery took a shaky breath and stood back.
He opened his eyes. She was flushed, but her eyes shone in the light leaking from the bathroom.
“I want to know stuff about you,” she said.
He cleared his throat and adjusted to the 180-degree course correction. “055 34 7012, 3.15 GPA, O positive, yes to episodes four through nine, no to episodes one through three, no to ice hockey, no to tequila unless it’s the end of the season, yes to football, obviously, no to hot coffee, yes to iced coffee. No to country music. That’s a hard nope; the rest I can be persuaded on, I guess. I can’t imagine anything else you would want to know about me. Your turn.”
She looked taken aback, and he grinned.
“Well—obviously, I have questions about some of that, which I’m totally going to circle back to, but I meant, I want to talk. I don’t know you, like at all. I feel like I can’t…” She looked like she was searching for the words. “I don’t know if I’m making the right decisions about you because I feel like I don’t know you.”
Well, shit. She had a point, but this was not the direction he wanted to go in.
“Okay. That’s fair. And I want you to make only the best decisions when it comes to me.” He grinned again and pointed at the bed that had Lexi’s overnight bag on it. “Can I sit?”
There was a second of hesitation. “Okay. I’m going to sit here.” He pointed at the desk chair across from the two beds. “And you can sit here.” He took her by the shoulders and nudged her back toward the bed that was obviously hers. She sat. So did he. “I’ll do you a deal: for every question you ask, I get to ask one back.”
“How many girls have you kissed?” she asked, pulling the comforter around her. She looked chilly.
“Do you want to get dressed? It’s cold in here. Did I interrupt your shower?” He nodded toward the still-running water in the bathroom.
“Yes, and yes, but now I just feel like you’re avoiding the question,” she said, getting up.
He frowned at himself. He could honestly say, hand on heart, that he’d never, ever asked a girl to put more clothes on in his life before, but he swore her teeth were almost chattering.
The water turned off, and she came out in baggy sweatpants and a huge sweatshirt. His lips twitched. Yeah, he was off his game for sure.
“So, how many girls have you kissed?” she repeated, sitting back on the bed but this time on top of the comforter.
“Let’s get into that. Do you mean, how many girls have I kissed in total, or how many girls have I kissed, like as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or how many girls have I kissed for fun, or how many girls have I kissed like my very existence would crumble into nothing if I didn’t kiss them again?”
“Dude. You can’t answer my question with, like, five questions,” she said, grabbing her soda and taking a sip. She held it up toward him, and he nodded in return. She screwed the cap on and threw him the bottle.
He grabbed it and took a gulp and sent it back to her. “It’s not my fault if your questions are hopelessly nonspecific.” Okay, he had this. He could be honest without being candid. “But in answer to your wildly general question: I have never counted—it never occurred to me to—and now, I couldn’t count. I’ve kissed a lot of girls. How about you?”
She grinned. “Only one.”
What? He shook his head. “You’ve only kissed one guy? Wait, you can’t have.” She definitely said that the Sonic guy had dated her.
“Oh, no, sorry,” she said with a blank face. “You asked how many girls I’d kissed.”
His face must have been a picture, because she burst out laughing and threw a pillow at his head.
“So predictable,” she said, shaking her head.
“Oh, come on. Shit. Now I have to ask about that,” he said, wondering if it was a good idea to ask but concluding almost immediately that if he didn’t know, that was all he’d think about. “Who, what, how?”
“Lexi and I used to practice kissing when we were younger. No big deal. Now it’s my question again.”
“I feel like I’ve been had,” Lucas said, smiling. He shrugged. “I don’t mind, though.”
“Why did you leave your old school?” she asked.
And boom. There it was. And here was his first fudge. “My mom lost her job, and we just packed everything up and moved somewhere for a fresh start.” The air seemed to leave the room, and the extreme lack of fun lying to Avery brought a heaviness between them. He hated that shit. He wanted to be honest. “It’s been difficult. I didn’t want to leave, but it was clear that we didn’t have a choice.” He waited for her million back-up questions, but instead she just tipped her head to one side and said nothing. He fought every urge to say anything that would lead to more lies. “My turn,” he said. And then he was so tense from hiding the truth from Avery that he literally said the first thing in his mind. The thing that had been in his mind for weeks. “Will you hang out with me sometime?”
…
Avery’s heart flipped. But immediately, she pushed down the elation and dealt with it with suspicion. “We are hanging out right now.” She tried to casually take a sip of her soda but fumbled the bottle top, and it rolled off the comforter to the floor.
Before she could position herself to fish under the bed for it, Lucas was up and had found it. He presented it to her.
She went to grab it, but he held on to it. “Are you holding my bottle top hostage? Because I think you may have grossly overestimated my attachment to it.”
He looked at the cap and nodded like he just realized she was right and handed it back. “So you’ll hang out with me again?”
Ahhhhhhh! He’s impossible. “I’m happy to text you—now I have your number—when we’re all hanging out. No problem.” She put the soda on the bedside table and crossed her arms. And then realized that she looked defensive and dropped them to her side again—which also felt awkward. “Maybe we could hang out after the next game on Friday?”
He sat on Lexi’s bed. “Yeah, about that.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I was thinking about sitting that one out. Maybe quitting the team altogether.”
Her stomach clenched. “What? You can’t do that! I’m…the guys are relying on you.” Shit. She’d been so selfish, just thinking about kissing Lucas and—she took a deep breath—other things. The only reason they were talking was that she needed him to help her dad save his job. That was the only reason she’d helped him.
“I’ve literally played one and a half games. The guys can manage without me,” he said with a wry smile.
“They can’t. We have to make it to the playoffs this year.” She felt panicked but was trying really hard not to show it. “Where’s your school spirit?”
“My school spirit? My school spirit disappeared when I left Henderson. I’ve been here, like, a month. What’s wrong with you? You care about the team that much?” He looked odd.
She took a breath. “I do. But I also love seeing you play.” That was true at least. “We didn’t make it to the playoffs last year…because—” Her brain stuttered over mentioning her mother. It was true, but she didn’t want to use her mother’s death to guilt trip him.
“Yeah, I got it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s just that since you turned up, everyone’s been playing better. It’s like you’ve given them all a taste of hope.” Okay, that was pure ass-kissing, but she was desperate.
He sighed. “It’s okay—you had me when you said you loved seeing me play.”
She threw both arms in the air as if she’d just watched a final-second touchdown. “Yippeeee!”
“Why do I feel like I just got played?” he said with a laugh.
She was so excited that she’d gotten him to stay that she jumped up on the bed, arms still in the air, and bounced up and down. “And the crowd goes wiiiiild!” she whisper-screamed as the bed squeaked loudly beneath her.
She wanted to jump on him. Jump him?
“Oh my God, you’re going to hurt yourself!” He laughed. “Get down before someone below complains that the people in room 409 are making loud sex noises.”
The thought made her giggle, but she dropped her arms and jumped at Lucas, still exhilarated. He caught her, and they both tumbled onto Lexi’s bed. She landed on top of him. As soon as they stopped laughing and kind of realized where there were, she should have gotten off.
But she didn’t.
His arms wrapped around her. “So how much do you love seeing me play? Is it this much?” He kissed her cheek. “Or this much?” He kissed her lips gently.
Her breath stuttered. “Like, maybe, this much,” she said. She planted her mouth on his and kissed him. Instantly, heat flushed through her as she tried to get closer to him. She should be embarrassed, right? About how bad she wanted to kiss him. But she wasn’t. Maybe she would be next time she saw him. But right then and there, she wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed or anything other than totally and 100 percent hot for him. He was like sugar-rush personified.
He rolled her over so that she was underneath him, and his hand ran up and down her side as if he were memorizing her form. She could feel his excitement, and it made her feel sexy. Was this how it was supposed to be? A sudden and willful disregard of anything except a deep ache of wanting everything to go much, much further?
He pulled away from her mouth, took a deep breath, and rolled off her. He grabbed her hand to his chest, and she felt the pounding of his heart. She didn’t understand. Didn’t he want to…?
He rolled toward her, so they were facing one another. “I really like you, Avery. And there’s nothing I want more than to continue this.” He groaned in what sounded like frustration. “And I mean there is literally nothing in the world I want more.”
A little relieved, she smiled. “Super Bowl?”
He opened his mouth to object but then had a second thought. “Okay, maybe that. But nothing else.” He paused again, searching her face for a reaction. “But I want to be with you, if we ever…” He motioned with his eyes to the bed.
She furrowed her brow for a second. “With me? As opposed to being by yourself?” She bit her lip, realized what she just said.
He rolled his eyes at her. “Dating. I want to be with you. I don’t want ‘this’”—again, he motioned to the bed—“to be an accident. Or a one-night-thing. Or ‘something that happened that one time.’ I want us to be together—dating together,” he clarified. “God, I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud.”
She giggled.
“But that’s another reason I wanted off the team. Aside from the fact that your father warned me off all girls—and boys, come to that—your brother also said that he’d have me dropped from the team if I ever laid a finger on you. And I think we can admit that I’ve already laid quite a lot more than a finger on you.” He ran his hand down her side again.
“He did what?” Avery started to get up, but Lucas pulled her back down so her head was on his chest. Her outrage dissipated almost instantly. “He doesn’t have the power to do that. Dad wouldn’t listen to him about who to play. Besides which who else is he going to play in your position?”
“I didn’t know that when I kind of agreed not to even look at you,” he said.
“You did what?” She made to be outraged again but couldn’t even fake it. She was way too comfortable lying on Lucas with his arms around her. “Seriously,” she mumbled into his chest. “Don’t listen to anything Colin says.”
His arm tightened around her, and she heard him flick off a light switch. For a second, she tensed up at the darkness, which she often did. But she felt Lucas kiss her forehead and squeeze her, and as she drifted off, she was momentarily aware that there was no anxiety in her body. None at all.