Page 200 of Across His Line

His arms come around me, all the way around, and he lifts me. Just like that. Off the floor, like I weigh nothing, and I gasp against his mouth and then laugh, and he walks us backward across the room in four steps, past the couch, to the bed.

He sets me down on it. Not carefully, this time. He drops me, the last few inches, and I land on my back on the dark comforter with a bounce and a sound that’s half a laugh and half something else, and my hair goes everywhere.

He stands over me at the edge of the bed, breathing hard, with his hair a mess from my hands and his hoodie pulled crooked at the neck from where I was holding it. Looking down at me. At my hair spread across his pillow. At my mouth.

And I look up at him and realize this is different. This isn’t a girl in a stairwell looking up at a boy two steps above her. This isn’t anything I’ve ever been. I’m on my back on his bed because I want to be, and he’s standing over me because I pulled him here, and the only thing in his face is wanting.

And maybe waiting because he doesn’t move. He’ll stand there all afternoon if I need him to.

I look up at him for a long second.

Then I smile.

“Come here,” I whisper.

30

Research Project

Rafe

“Come here,” she says.

I take one step and stop at the edge of the mattress with my knees against it, and she’s right there below me with her hair spread out on my pillow, her mouth red, and her chest going up and down under the sweater.

She reaches up off the comforter toward me and holds her hand there in the air.

I look at it for a second, then I take it, and she pulls me. I sit down on the edge of the bed next to her instead of on top of her. I know how this goes. I know what I’ve been to her, and the last thing I want to do is take more.

She looks up at me from the pillow. Her eyebrows come together.

“You’re still doing it,” she says.

“Doing what?”

“Thinking too much.”

Me? Thinking too much? Four years of doing whatever I wanted the second I wanted it, and Tessa Canten is lying on my bed telling me I’m overthinking.

“You told me yesterday you’d never kissed anyone,” I say.

“I’ve kissed someone now.”

She says it like it settles something. Like it’s a line on a spreadsheet she can check off. And then she sits up on her elbow and puts her hand on my jaw and pulls my face down to hers and kisses me before I can think of anything to say to that.

And I realize I’ve been treating her like something that’s going to break.

I didn’t decide to. It just happened. I know what I did to her. I know what happened on that couch at her grandma’s. I felt her shake under my hand last night, and some part of me has been holding my breath ever since.

She isn’t shaking now. She’s pulling. She’s got one hand on my jaw and the other one on the back of my neck, and she’s kissing me like she’s annoyed about having to do all the work, and when I hesitate, when I pull back half an inch to check her face, she makes a small impatient sound against my mouth and follows me.

She laughs at me right into my mouth because I stopped again.

I don’t stop checking. I don’t think I could. But somewhere in there, I figure out the difference. Careful isn’t the same as being afraid of her. I can keep reading her face without acting like she’s made of glass. She hasn’t been made of glass this whole time.

I kiss her back like I mean it.

She makes a sound against my mouth, surprised, like she wasn’t sure I had that in me, and then she laughs, and I feel the laugh on my lips before I hear it. Her hand comes off my jaw and goes up into my hair, and she pulls my head down the half inch she wants it, and I let her. I’d let her move me anywhere right now.