Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle (i am malala young readers edition .TXT) 📗

the roof of the car. There isn’t enough room for us to sit like this comfortably with the door shut, so we leave it hanging open, cold rain streaming in.

My hand lingers at his throat, and the close touch seems to steal something from him. He lets his head fall back, Adam’s apple bobbing up the arched column. I kiss that, too. His breathing comes shallower, shallower. The red blooms on his cheeks are roses, his eyes hooded and glassy.

I like it here, his hand decides, spanning broad fingers across my hip, pressing into a sensitive divot where muscles join. I make a soft sound in his mouth, involuntary; his palm flattens, pressing more, more. I move against him just right, feeling a hard ridge in his jeans. My skin sears even as goose bumps radiate, awareness never this heightened, and I feel the full vibrancy of it as I burn and burn and burn.

“I’m rusty,” he admits, clearing his throat. “I’ve never slept with anyone, but I’ve kissed. It’s been a long time, though.”

“You’re perfect,” I tell him. He doesn’t kiss like an expert, like a Casanova who’s smooth and sure of his every practiced move. He kisses like Wesley. That’s the new standard.

We kiss and touch and taste, until the rain abates, until my mouth feels bruised and my body is dying for more. But we taper to a natural close, both somehow knowing that this is a kiss, only a kiss. Whether he wants a dynamic with me in which we’ll ever go further than this, I can only guess. As for me, I’m still trying to remember why this was a bad idea. Right now, it feels like there are no bad ideas.

Eventually, I slide off his lap and we emerge in a different world from the one we last stood in, both a little disoriented. When he’s back in the driver’s seat, he sits up straighter than usual. His gaze flicks to the upper-right corner of the windshield, to something in the sky that’s caught his attention, but I can’t remove mine from his face. He looks utterly wrecked in the most wonderful way.

I am under Wesley Koehler’s skin. I don’t know how deep, but I’m there, and I am not imagining it.

Chapter 16

MY FLIMSY, DESPERATE PLAN to hide out from Wesley until my feelings for him have ceased to exist has a toolbox full of wrenches in it. For one, it’s hard to do what’s best for you when what you want isn’t what’s best for you. And what I want is to make out with Wesley again. If we’re going to coexist as platonic pals for the foreseeable ever, putting our tongues in each other’s mouths is not the way to achieve that. I need distance. I need space. I need to eat oversized bowls of tasteless, hearty moral fiber for breakfast.

Once we’re inside the house, I croak that I need a shower, to which he responds that he does as well, leading my mind down a sordid path. A path with cozy alcoves where lovers can rip each other’s clothes off. Falling Stars has such alcoves in abundance. I start dreaming of Wesley under a waterfall resembling the one in our mural; I don’t know what he looks like in the nude, so I conjure up Michelangelo’s David for a baseline, southern region hidden by a grape cluster of bath bubbles popping one by one. I smack face-first into a closed door before the last bubble pops, smarting my nose.

It’s all on him now. I’m counting on Wesley to shut down and be all brooding and tight-lipped again. It wouldn’t hurt for him to be a little bit awful, too. Maybe he’ll insult something I dearly love, like the plastic flowers I’ve stuck into every crack and crevice, and I’ll stop spending my unconscious hours from midnight through eight a.m. in the red-light district of my brain, lying on a chaise longue as he paints me like one of his French girls. We’ve got to vaporize our attraction. It’s the only way to save this relationship.

Wesley has no regard for crafting a professional relationship or successfully living together in harmony. He’s ruthless sabotage, strolling into the living room just as I’m stretching out with hot chocolate and the remote, The Great British Bake Off queued up to be my date for the evening. He’s designed to test my restraint in a cream cable-knit cardigan and charcoal wool trousers that I doubt he’s worn more than once. Freshly shaven. Faint traces of cologne, which he never wears, waft toward me. He’s taken special care to smooth his hair, too. I’m dressed in a hot-pink romper and a sparkly wrap like the fun nanny who’s going to entertain his two children while he goes on a sophisticated date with the governor of Vermont.

“Hi. Hello,” he says to me without any guile whatsoever, raking a hand through his smooth hair to undo all that hard work. Goddamn it, it’s even sexier disheveled.

This isn’t fair.

Wesley saunters closer, clueless to the danger we’re both in. I gaze back at him from the red velvet couch with narrowed eyes. “Hello.”

“How’s it going? Are you, uh . . .” He pivots to glance at the TV, picking at a stack of Violet’s books on the shelf. “Watching Netflix?” He straightens the books’ spines. Let Love Find You. How to Forget a Duke. The Incurable Matchmaker.

“Yes,” I reply guardedly.

He nods, distracted, and toys with a fake sunflower I’ve jammed into a crack in the wall. Fake flowers are a personal affront to him. “I’ll grow you some real ones, if you like.”

This is where I must ruin myself. Whatever it was that Wesley saw in me this afternoon that provoked him to put the car in park and ravish my mouth cannot be permitted to stay here between us. Goodbye, deepest connection I’ve ever had. Goodbye, adorable bear who cleans off my