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Nothing like it, because we’re seven years older and wiser, and as his lips part mine and deepen the kiss, and as he moves his hand from my chin to grip the back of my neck, I realize that he was a boy back then, but no longer. The way he positions my head, controlling the kiss just so, is all man.
But it’s also everything like I remember, sparks shooting through my body right down to my toes, and soft and wonderful and open. Kissing Carter back then was always feeling Carter open for me, and now is no exception to that. Tasting him again reminds me of all that he is: weird and wild and smart and passionate.
His lips are soft and gentle against mine, kissing me almost tenderly, while the hand on my neck remains firm. I open more for him, allowing him to swoop his tongue through my mouth, and I bite back a moan.
But he must hear it, or feel it, because the next second, he’s hauling me to my feet, and pressing my back into the tree.
And thenI’mtugging him closer, falling back through the years into wanting him, aligning my body with his. His thigh between mine, his chest pressed against me. And his hands, grabbing my hips firmly.
“Fuck, Angel.”
He leans in and kisses me again, but I can tell that something is holding him back.
“What is it,” I whisper. “Is this—am I?—
“You’re perfect. But I don’t want to end up ravishing you against a tree trunk.”
“Oh,” is all I can say again.
“You deserve better,” he says, leaning his forehead against mine briefly.
I don’t know what to say to that. Because yes, I do deserve better. Better than him—or at least better than how he treated me before. But now I’m not so sure. And being ravished against a tree trunk was starting to look pretty good three seconds ago.
But instead of saying any of this, what flies out of my mouth is, “I haven’t had sex in two years.”
“Neither have I,” he says, taking a step back from me and shrugging.
“Really?”
“Haven’t met anyone I like enough,” he says. “And I’ve been busy with my degree. Despite what crops up in fanfiction, academia isn’t all that sexy. It’s mostly long hours spent bent over a desk, or in my case, crouching on a freezing cliffsidewaiting for a puffin to come out of its burrow, only to then have it bite the shit out of me.”
I laugh, imagining the proud Carter Steel being taken down by a tiny bird. He starts to laugh too, the sounds twining together, filling the woods. I focus on that, how nice it feels to laugh with him, and not on how my heart soared when he said he hadn’t been with anyone in two years. That doesn’t need to mean anything.
And the kiss—the kiss was us letting off steam. At least that’s what it was for me.
“So, we clearly are both just, you know, horny,” I say, bringing us back to the matter at hand. “Being cooped up in a cabin must have done something to our brains.”
“Oh, you have no idea, Angel. No fucking idea.”
His voice is hoarse, rough even, and I can’t help but dip my gaze lower, to below his belt.
“I’d tell you eyes up here again,” he says, “but that clearly doesn’t work.”
“Shut up,” I say, and then I head off into the trees.
“Wrong direction, Angela,” he calls after me.
I hear him coming up behind me and then he grabs my hand and tugs me along with him, until we’re on track again, winding our way through the trees. After another ten minutes or so, we find the trail that will take us back to town, and things start to look more familiar to me.
We spend the next few hours of hiking in relative silence, just enjoying the landscape around us and the peace of the forest. And I think we’re both unsure of how to talk to one another, now.
At least I am.
Carter has redefined the unspoken rules of engagement between us with just one kiss. For years, I’ve tried my best to ignore him, and he’s tried his best—in the moments when Iwasn’t hiding from him—to get a rise out of me, to get me to play with him. I’ve always chalked it up to him just not really caring about what happened between the two of us. It didn’t matter that much to him, so he didn’t need to change how he treated me—I stayed Angela Burns, the girl he’d known since he was eleven, the girl who he fooled around with a few times, but nothing more.
There was never any space in that relationship for a kiss. And I’ve spent so long trying to ignore him that my instinct is to ignore this as well: push it down, compartmentalize, lock it away. But the truth is, no matter how much I’ve tried to ignore him, I never really got over him.
He left me raw and vulnerable, half still in love with him and half heart broken, and revealed to me a most basic fact about my own character, one I didn’t know yet: that I felt and loved too deeply, that not caring, not investing, just wasn’t in me.
