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“Sure. How about one where the entire plot is to kill as many people as possible before the credits roll? Maybe with a few explosions thrown in for good measure.”
“I can see what’s streaming—oh, you’re kidding.”
“Yes,” he says, that ghost of a smile playing over his lips.
“Well, come in,” I say, stepping into the room. “Don’t worry about my sister, she could sleep through an actual shootout, and probably a bombing.”
He glances doubtfully at her, then nods and steps into the room, taking a seat on the edge of the bed furthest from my sister’s curled form. We could have gone to her room, but everything except the cartoon channels are blocked on her TV, and I don’t really want to get it on in a kid’s bed. Though it’s probably just as weird to do stuff with her sleeping ten feet away. Still, she’ll never know. It’s not like we’re hooking up in front of her. She couldn’t even see us on the bed if we were lying down.
“You drink?” I ask, handing the unopened bottle back to Oliver.
“Oh, yeah. I drink,” he says, twisting off the cap. “You smoke?”
The last thing I need is something to make me more jittery. “No. You?”
“I don’t smoke cigarettes,” he says, smiling with that adorable dimple. “Do you need a glass? Ice? Americans love their ice.”
Feeling daring, I take the bottle and drink straight from it. I’m rewarded with a smile that shows a flash of teeth, something I haven’t gotten from him before.
“A girl after my own heart,” he says, accepting the bottle from me.
I fight the urge to giggle over the cuteness of his accent, settling back on the pillows on one side of the bed while he does the same on the other.
We watchPulp Fictionfor a while in silence, passing the whiskey back and forth, the awkwardness having cleared like the fog over the lake in the mornings that burns away by midday. At first I’m paranoid that my parents will come back, in whichcase I would probably be murdered, or that Lily will wake up and later tell Mom, in which case I would still be murdered. But Lily doesn’t stir, and after a while I start to feel warm waves spreading the alcohol through my body.
Oliver sets the bottle on the bedside table eventually, when there’s barely an inch left in it. While he’s getting situated on the pillows again, I scoot over next to him and lay my head on his arm. He doesn’t move or stroke me like Chase did when I lay beside him, but he doesn’t pull away either, so I take that as a good sign. Time to gather my courage again. It takes a while.
I give myself the world’s longest pep talk. If I wrote it down, it would be legendary. Movies would be made. Coaches should take a page from teenage girls trying to make the first move when they motivate their players. Then again, maybe not.
When I’ve talked myself up at last and convinced myself to do it, I push up on my elbow. Oliver looks up at me with those clear eyes of the palest lavender, and then looks at my lips. It’s now or never. Too late to go back without looking like a coward.
So, I lean down and kiss him.
For a second, he doesn’t respond. I instantly start to panic. Am I doing something wrong? I’m drunk and I haven’t kissed more than two guys before, and they always made the first move. Was I supposed to wait for him to kiss me?
I’m about to pull away when he rolls toward me and kisses me gently. His arm goes around me, his palm pressed to my lower back, and he lays me on my back without breaking our kiss.
This is it,my mind shrieks in an absolute spiral of giddiness and terror.
At least he’s being gentle. Not that I have much of a basis for comparison, but no one has ever kissed me sweetly before. When I kiss Todd, he goes zero to sixty in about three seconds, cramming his tongue down my throat while I try to keep upor fight back his tongue as it invades my mouth. Eventually he wins, and I give up and hold on and wait for it to be over.
When I kissed Chase, it was reckless and passionate, filled with need and animal hunger. Every kiss is like being struck by lightning. My body becomes so alive it’s almost painful when he touches me, and instead of fighting him off my body is desperately trying to override my mind and claw its way closer, for more.
Oliver isn’t nothing like either of them. He’s slow and tender. He doesn’t use any tongue at all, just teases and caresses my lips with his, giving me plenty of time to relax and crave more. I open my lips for him, but he only nips at my lower lip, tugging it gently between his teeth before he goes back to kissing it.
After what feels like forever, his tongue pulses gently against my hungry lips. I nearly moan in relief, opening for him and sliding a hand behind his neck to drag him closer. He makes a soft sound into my mouth that electrifies me, and then his tongue moves against mine in a slow, sensual stroke.
“Whoa,” I say, breaking the kiss at last. “Do you have a tongue piercing?”
Then he says something that makes me absolutely expire. “Aye.”
“Oh,” I breathe, wondering how a perfect stranger can leave me speechless with a single word.
He looks down, his impossibly long lashes casting shadows on his cheeks in the near darkness of the room. I’ve never seen that look on a guy’s face before, and it takes me a minute to realize it’s embarrassment. All the guys I know are so completely confident all the time, I’d kind of figured only girls were capable of that particular emotion.
“My brother and I got it done one night when we’d been drinking a bit,” he says. “I can take it out if it bothers you. I sortof forget it’s there.” He sticks out his tongue out and starts to unfasten it, but I grab his wrist.
“No, it’s fine,” I say quickly. “I just didn’t expect it. I’ve never kissed anyone with a tongue ring.”
