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She breathed out a laugh. “I do. But I like it even more when you say it like that.”
“Like what?” I teased.
She gave me a knowing glare, unable to keep her smile tucked away any longer. “Breathy,” she said, her voice lowering. “Sounds like you’re moaning it.”
“Oh, like this?” I grinned, pulling her closer as I stopped just short of the bagel stand. I leaned down, bringing my lips against the shell of her ear. “Ava.”
I cupped the side of her face, feeling the little shiver she did in response. “You can’t just…”
“Ava,” I said again, forcing my breath to catch at the very end of it, putting just a little more emphasis on her name.
She cackled with awareness of me. Her head tipped back, her auburn hair shining in the light from the street, and my fucking God, she was beautiful. Paint-stained and makeup-less and not a fucking care in the world, she looked like something straight from the goddamn heavens, distracting enough to make Orpheus turn to look and magnetic enough to tempt Icarus.
Everything about her was just…everything.
“That one was bad,” she laughed. “You can’t convincingly moan on command.”
It didn’t matter that it was a thinly veiled, joking insult, just as it didn’t matter that she was twenty years my junior or David’s daughter or a light in the dark that I’d desperately wanted to ignore, just as it didn’t matter what had happened today or what could happen tomorrow. “I don’t care,” I said.
I kissed her, and she sunk into me, her hands resting gently on the sides of my neck. I hadn’t felt like this with anyonein years, and even then, there was always a stiffness to it, a hesitance that I couldn’t quite break through. Even with Jan.
It was terrifying, and yet, it was okay.
“Can I be honest for a moment?” I breathed, keeping her lips not an inch from mine as we huddled in the vague warmth that emanated from the bagel cart. I dragged my thumb across her cheek, feeling the little shift she did as she nodded. “I want this. For real.”
Her breath caught, and unfocused eyes searched mine as she pulled back enough to look up at me. It hit me, then, what I’d said, what it meant, what I’d admitted—and for once, it didn’t make me panic. I was just…calm. “You don’t mean a bagel, right?” she whispered.
I snorted. “No, I don’t mean a fucking bagel, Ava. I meanyou, and the thing I’ve been trying so desperately to avoid.”
“I thought you didn’t want that,” she said. Her throat moved on a swallow, and that little shiver was back, her lower lip bouncing ever so slightly. “Yousaidyou didn’t want that.”
“I didn’t think I did,” I admitted. “But then there was you.”
“But Lucas…”
“I’m willing to figure that out.” The wind kicked up, her hair blowing forward into both of our faces. I fought to push it back behind her ears. “Are you?”
Her mouth popped open, closed, open, closed, open. I couldn’t help but hyper-focus on how little the risk of her presence in my life scared me—my only worry was that she would say no, that she wouldn’t feel ready to explore something real with me, consequences be damned. I would find a way to be okay with it if that were the case. I’d buried heartbreak before, and I could do it again.
It might just take me another two years.
“I am. I want that,” she said, her voice so soft it was nearly lost in the noise of the city. “I just don’t know what to do about my dad.”
Relief washed over me, but if I was honest, it felt like a wash ofher, like the air in my lungs was her, like she’d personally lifted the weight from my shoulders, like she alone held the earth in her hands and kept it afloat. It was absurd, it was psychotic, even, that she’d forced a one-eighty from me by being nothing but a breath of fresh air. And I didn’t want to lose that feeling.
“We’ll have to tell him,” I said. I pressed a kiss against her cheek, letting myself linger. “If he can handle what happened today, then he can handle this. Hopefully.”
“He’ll lose his mind.”
“I know.”
“If we do that, we have to do it right,” she said, but her teeth were chattering harder, and the chill was sinking in despite the little bubble of heat we’d found and the warmth I was trying to give her.
I tucked her into my shoulder with one hand around the back of her neck. “We’ll figure out the best way to do it. And I’ll shoulder the consequences of it.”
The sliver of warmth I found in my pocket as I grabbed my phone out wasn’t enough to shake the bitter cold that was overwhelming both of us. I shot a quick text to Oliver with a link to our location, and in the spare few minutes I had left before the car would whisk us away to privacy, I ordered Ava the best hot chocolate in the world.
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