Despite his denials, he was shortly eliminated and stood with the other losers to watch Bodie and Raven battle for first.
Raven looked incredible tonight, and Silas had to focus on the trajectory of the balls she struck instead of how her short dress would inch up her thigh when she bent over the table with her cue.
In the days following the moment in Raven’s car at the Crawleys’, Silas had concluded it was understandable he’d want to kiss a beautiful woman he’d built some rapport with. It didn’t mean anything, and it wouldn’t go further than his thoughts. It could simply exist as one of the millions of facts about life.
“No!” Raven shouted when Bodie pocketed her final ball, winning the game.
It had grown late, so when the team got back to their table, Halo said, “All right, kids, I’ve gotta pick up Libby from her friend’s.”
Doc and Bodie similarly made their exits, and Silas left with Raven once she’d returned from the restroom.
“I’m still hung up on the fact you’re a secret Olympian,” Raven said as they stepped out of the still-lively bar into the warm evening that smelled of cigarettes and weed.
“There’s no secret,” he said. “I qualified for 2012 and won two silver medals. I then qualified for Rio but fucked up my arm in an ATV accident a year before and had to drop out.”
“Whoa,” Raven said, stopping in her tracks, forcing him to as well.
He didn’t usually talk about his Olympics journey so transparently. He hated to, in fact. But seeing as Raven appeared curious enough to Google him later, he was trying to fast-track the questions and sympathy he often received afterward.
“I’m so sorry,” she said earnestly. “You could’ve told me to shut up when I was harping on about it all night. I wouldn’t have blamed you.”
Suddenly needing to allay her embarrassment, he said, “I would have, but we did agree to be cordial and friendly.”
She smiled. “We did. And now I’ll never bring it up again.”
“It’s not taboo. It’s just a tired topic around here,” Silas said as a gust of wind blew the light, wispy ends of Raven’s braids into her face. Without thinking, he brushed them away.
It was such an intimate gesture that it froze them both.
During those suspended seconds, tension pulled taut like a rubber band stretched to its limits, and all possibilities—to apologize, to walk away, to shrug—were dismissed for one.
They reached for each other, their lips meeting, and the earth seemed to crack open on contact. A moan sprung from his throat at the feeling of her soft body, her hips shifting towards him.
Their tongues teased as their lips parted, drawing the heat stoking in his body to the surface of his skin. She smelled wonderful, like clean linen dried out in the sun, and he cupped one side of her face to deepen the kiss and somehow capture her essence, intensify it.
He knew he should’ve pulled away, ended it while he still could play off the moment as trivial. But she pressed close, and he pulled her even closer—sinking into the fevered kisses that tasted faintly of pineapple.
Her fingertips skated across his neck and head before gently closing her hand around his coiled hair. The light tug had his dick agonizingly pressed against the front of his pants.
Physical space stopped meaning much beyond how it facilitated the heated breaths they shared. He’d have stayed there for eternity, nourishing himself only on the lustful sounds that spilled from her beautiful mouth.
But the proverb about all good things coming to an end remained true because a car’s obnoxious horn brought the edges of the world back in, ripping them away from bliss.
His body continued to hum as he and Raven stood apart, looking at one other. Her lids were heavy, and her chest dramatically rose and fell; God only knew what she could see in him.
“All right, good night,” she said, still breathless, still fucking kissable. The smile she gave him as she turned pinned him in place, and he watched her walk to her car and drive off.
It was several minutes before his hands stopped shaking and he did the same.
ChapterThirteen
“The bathroom was retiledwhen the new sink was installed late last year,” the realtor, Vivian, said to Raven. “You can see it has the same pinwheel lay pattern the kitchen tiles have.”
It was the second house she’d toured that day, and she knew she’d love it when she saw the bright blue front door.
“It’s beautiful,” Raven said before asking her mom who was on video call, “What do you think?”
“I still can’t believe you can afford this,” her mom said.
