Page 49 of Sounds Like Love
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Then … may I kiss you?”
The question didn’t sound mocking, or insincere. My mouth went dry. Oh. Ohno.
It was the kind of question that felt slippery as ice and sticky as glue all at once.
“It can’t be that simple, can it?” I asked, heart climbing up my throat, beating like a rabbit’s. “A kiss and we’re suddenly out of each other’s heads?”
He hummed in thought, and then closed the space between us until it was just me, and him, and this strange, charged air between us. I wasn’t sure if it was from our telepathic connection, or if this was just the normal energy of being around someone like Sebastian Fell. Dideveryonefeel like this around him, a quick heart, tingly stomach, hating that you lingered a little too long on the slight curve of his mouth?
He bent his head toward mine and murmured, “What if it is? One kiss, and that’s it. What could be more simple?”
A hundred other things—IKEA instructions, sourdough starters, the Pythagorean theorem, to name a few.
He placed a hand beside my head, palm flat against the pier leg. It was dark enough that I couldn’t see his face, but even if I could, the wind had picked at his hair enough for it to come loose from its half-up ponytail, obscuring part of his face. “Haven’t you at least wondered what it’d be like?”
I tried to sound nonchalant as I said, “I already know what it’s like kissing you.”
He shook his head. “But not like this. While in each other’s heads. All my thoughts, all of yours.” He sounded like he kissed people a lot, as if it was as natural to him as breathing. It made me wonder how often he found himself worried about what the other person thought of the kiss. What did he have to be worried about? Even though he was fifteen years retired from that boy band life, he was still tragically handsome in that Hozier sort of way, sharp cheekbones and deep eyes and expressive eyebrows that were almost symmetrical, but not quite, and his soft, slightly crooked mouth.
I imagined that in the Yelp reviews of kissing, he got awarded perfect stars.
“It sounds frightening,” I admitted.
That, at least, I could say with certainty.
It was impossibly tempting to erase the space between us. I liked kissing him the first time, and Ididwonder if the second time would be better. I wondered, if I kissed him, if I would peel back the bits of him and find the man I saw for a moment in that private balcony, and the one I’d told soft secrets to for the better part of a week, or if I’d just find all the thoughts I dreaded finding.
Thoughts that told me that I was beautiful, but that makeup couldn’t cover all my acne scars.That I kissed like someone who hadn’t been kissed nearly enough in her life. That I was mouthy, and that for a songwriter I wasn’t very romantic, and that I was bad at letting go. Thoughts that highlighted all the silly human parts of me I took care to hide out in LA. The parts of me that I didn’t even like in myself.
And I wondered what parts of him he hid, too.
So I leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek.
His fingers brushed across my face, swiping away the wild hairs that had escaped my braid. My heart beat riotously in my chest as his eyes traveled up to mine again, bright in the slant of silvery moonlight, and then his voice said in my head,“I think you need to do it again, to make sure it didn’t work.”
So I kissed his other cheek. “How about now?”
This close, his eyes almost glowed with how blue they were, like a summer sky. His eyelashes were long and dark, the color of his eyebrows.“Maybe try once more? Between the two?”
His mouth.
Cupping his face with my hands, I gently placed a kiss on his lips. It was light and brief. I studied his gaze as he studied mine. There were no thoughts. Nothing at all in our heads. And then he leaned forward, and in the shadows of the pier he pressed his lips against mine. The kiss was timid, a quick brush at first, like dipping a foot in the pool to test the water. He sighed out in hesitation, his eyes searching across my face, waiting for me to change my mind. Was all that talk bravado? How … alarmingly charming. If I’d known he was half as unsure as I felt, I would have kissed him sooner.
I brought my hands up to cradle his face and pulled him into a deeper kiss. He tasted like Diet Coke and breath mints, his mouth soft and tender,until he went rigid with surprise. Had he never let someone take control before? Or maybe he had, but it’d been so long that he’d forgotten what it felt like to not just want butbe wanted, to be wanted for who he could be and not who he was, and that he could be good and kind, too.
I curled my fingers up into his hair, and he relaxed into me. The hand he’d planted on the pillar fell against my shoulder, and then inched up to hold the side of my neck. There was nothing in my head, and nothing in his. Static and silence and thundering hearts—
And then his voice leaked in. Not just his thoughts—his feelings, his memories, hiseverything.
I wasn’t sure which were my feelings, and which were his.
Sebastian was right—kissing him now wasmore. It was like touching a live wire.
There was just so much in his head. The way it felt to weave his fingers through my hair, the way I smelled like coconut shampoo, the way he felt solid and warm and safe with me, the way I tasted like Cheerwine, if I liked his kiss, what I liked least, how he could do better, how he felt he wasn’t enough—
So much uncertainty. So much worry. And so much love for something distant and sweet and gone. It danced across the edges of his tongue, almost incomprehensible. I wanted to chase after those thoughts, I wanted to catch them and crack them open like eggs and let all the mysteries spill out. So I did.
I took hold of his shirt. His emotions tasted like butterscotch. They were sweet and sticky, slow and strong. And in that amber sweetness, as I sank into it, his thoughts built into images behind my eyelids. The silhouette of a woman in a doorway, saying something I couldn’t make out. Her face was shadowed, but it felt like she was smiling as she closed the door—
