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His touch is heavier now, falling to my waist to urge me to turn, and when I force myself to look at him—at this boy who became a man while I wasn’t looking but has always been larger than life in my eyes—I see everything I’ve ever wanted staring back at me in his warm, gray gaze.
“You know nothing has to happen here, right?” His hand lifts until his thumb strokes my jaw. “It won’t change anything. It won’t change a single thing about how I feel.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to come inside,” I tell him, meaning it.
His head cocks slightly. “You can talk to me.”
“I just—” I swallow, and his eyes track the movement, his palm becoming steadier as it cups my jaw. “I know that you know how long this has been a thing for me, but you don’t know, you know?”
His mouth quirks. “I’m not sure that I do, no.”
“I’ve just…Before I knew what it even was to feel something for somebody, I felt things for you. Whether it was just feeling safer when you’re around, or looking for you when I enter a room, or doing whatever I could to make you smile because it made me smile when you did…It’s always been you, Ian.”
“Lila,” he says, but words are falling out of my mouth before I can catch them now, and I hardly even know where they’re coming from, since this anxiety attack seems to be slamming into me all at once.
“And I realize that isn’t the case for you, and that this is all new where you’re concerned, but it’s not for me, you know? It’s been on a back burner somewhere, sure, but it’s never really been turned off. And what if we go there and you realize that you can’t feel those things for me? What if I finally have you, and then I don’t get to keep you? I just…I don’t know what that would do to me, or to you, or hell, even Jack, and I worry that it makes me…”
I press my lips together in a frown, tipping my head down to stare at my feet. I take a steadying breath, teetering between feeling like an idiot for ruining what might be my one chance to finally have him and also being completely terrified that I’m right somehow, but it’s his hands that draw me out of the maelstrom in my head. His calloused, rough hands that are so wide they almost cover both sides of my face completely when he cups my cheeks.
“That it makes you what?”
I gulp, my fingers reaching to grip his forearms as if that will somehow keep me steady when I feel so suddenly unsteady. “That it makes me selfish,” I whisper. “Because I still want it. I still want you.”
Ian’s eyes search mine, looking for my uncertainty, surely, and maybe even for reasons of his own as to why we shouldn’t—so it’s both a surprise and a relief when he leans in slowly, hovering by my mouth. “Do you trust me?”
“I—” It takes me a second to register the question, mostly because the answer is so obvious. “Yes.”
He lifts me in one fluid movement, his hands coming under my thighs as he pulls me up to his body and presses me against the wall by the door to my apartment, holding me steady. Making me feel just a bit more so. His eyes flick to my mouth, and then back to mine like a silent question, and all I can do is nod, because I’ll never say no to more of him.
Ian’s kiss is like everything else Ian does—unassuming, but with a quiet strength that makes you want to fall into him, just like I’ve been wanting to do for most of my life. It’s overwhelming that I’m getting to do so now.
“Lila,” he says again, and I don’t think I could ever get tired of him saying my name like that. Like it’s important. Like it’s his favorite word. “You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to want you that long. I’ve always loved you—”
He doesn’t mean it like that. You know he doesn’t.
“—and even if it wasn’t in the same way, you have always been a part of me. Maybe it looks different now than it did then, because who we were then couldn’t be what we could be now. It wouldn’t have worked. For all sorts of reasons. And maybe that’s the point, you know? Maybe we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be, because all I know is that while I may not have wanted you as long as you’ve wanted me, I can say with absolute certainty that I have wanted you as hard as a person can want another person. I don’t know when you went from the girl I adored to the woman I can’t stop thinking about, but you did. You’ve always been in my heart, but now you’re in my head too. You’re fucking everywhere, Lila. You’re in so deep that I don’t see how I could ever get you out.” I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until his soft mouth presses to mine again, only for a second before, “And I don’t want to. The way I feel right now…I don’t think I ever will.”
Okay, maybe he didn’t mean it that way, but that’s still really nice.
My voice sounds small, unlike me, when I answer, “Oh.”
“Just oh?”
My lips twitch. “I didn’t think ‘holy fucking shit’ was an appropriate response.”
“It could be,” he chuckles. “If it’s a good ‘holy fucking shit.’ ”
“The holiest fucking shit,” I say breathlessly.
“You’re so weird sometimes.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“How adorable I find it is.”
My brow quirks. “You didn’t find me adorable back then?”
“Sometimes,” he admits. “But most of the time you were a pain in my ass.”
