Page 67 of Fate, Interrupted

The kiss starts soft.

Warm. A choice rather than an accident. Not the loading dock, which was urgent and charged and half surprised—this is open-eyed and tastes like an afternoon that mattered. His hand comes up to the side of my face, careful and steady, and the warmth of it moves through me, arriving exactly where it is needed.

I lean into it.

It deepens slowly, not rushing. His hand moves from my jaw to the back of my neck, and I stop thinking about the truck or the street or that we are parked in front of my building where anyone could walk past and see us through the windshield.

I stop thinking about most things.

His other hand finds my waist and pulls me closer, and I go, and the warmth of him is everywhere now, that heat that has nothing to do with the July evening, and I make a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed about if I had any remaining capacity for embarrassment, which I currently don’t.

My hand is in his hair.

I don’t remember putting it there.

His mouth moves to my jaw and then my neck. I tip my head back and decide this is going to be a problem, although not one I’m interested in solving.

I become aware of several things simultaneously.

The steering wheel. The console between us. The neighbor who has been walking her terrier past this block every evening for three years and who is, at this exact moment, approximately twelve feet away and pretending very hard to be interested in something on the other side of the street.

I pull back.

Silas follows where I’m looking.

The neighbor does not look over. She is a woman of extraordinary discretion, and I am going to leave her a very nice holiday card this year.

We sit there for a moment, both slightly breathless, the truck cab holding us in its small, ordinary privacy.

“Well,” I say softly.

“Well,” he says.

I laugh—slightly breathless, the laugh of someone who has remembered that the world exists and is mildly surprised by it. “We are terrible at this.”

“At what?”

“At being in public.”

He looks at me with those unreasonable green eyes. “We’re not in public.”

“We’re on a public street.”

“In a truck.”

“With windows,” I say.

The corner of his mouth moves. “The neighbor looked away.”

“She is a saint,” I say. “An absolute saint and I will not hear otherwise.”

Then there’s one thing I want to say before I get out of this truck and walk up those steps and go back into my regular life, which is going to feel different than it did this morning, and I already know it.

I look back at him.

“For what it’s worth,” I say, “the poetry was the right call.”

He looks at me for a long moment.