“Maybe it was a test to see if you really cared.” I smiled, lazy and full. But when I noticed he wasn't smiling with me, I added in a whisper, “It was just a little fall, Connor. I'm alright.”
He breathed out heavily and before I knew what was happening, he was leaning into me. His forehead falling to my shoulder and settling there with a deep, deep sigh. “You are a tyrant when you don’t get what you want. Know that?”
I hummed again. Did he want me to say sorry? I wasn’t going to.
He peeked up at me from the side of his eyes, his head turned so that his face was suddenly in the crook of my neck. The sensation was novel and familiar at the same time. Pulling me back to how I felt with his mouth on me against the wall of his bathroom. My skin buzzed and if the shoulder massage hadn’t already gone straight between my legs, the feeling of his soft mouth on my skin picked up the slack.
He kept on speaking into my skin as if it wasn’t melting me right there on the spot. Whispering as if he didn’t want anyone else to know. No one but me. “But I will beg at your feet, if that’s what it takes to make you happy again.”
I swallowed, “What?”
Pulling up, so that we were face to face, his not even a handful of inches away from mine, he said in a low voice. “Icannot standthat you’ve been mad at me.”
“You asked me to get mad.”
“I thought it would make it better, not worse,” he said. “Now I know that you mad at me is way, way worse.”
Reaching my free hand up, I chanced a touch to his face. Squishing the tips of my fingers into his cheek. It was a playful touch, but I couldn’t deny the heat of it. There was something about Connor’s touch that I’d never quite realized before. That every time his skin was on my skin, it was like a battery charging me up, making me strong, making meme. He was my charge and right then, I needed him.
I pressed my palm into his cheek next, soaking up that charge. Then I sighed with obvious content. “You made it better, Con. I’m okay now.”
He turned his face into my hand, his lips doing more than just touching my skin, but kissing it gently. Purposefully. I shivered, and he flicked his eyes up to watch the reaction. I couldn’t tell by his face, but his eyes looked hot and heavy with…something. That kiss trailed up the palm of my hand to my inner wrist and from there to my forearm. He flicked another glance at me. “Better?”
Gulping, I nodded my head and he raised his. Bringing our faces nose to nose, breath to breath. “How’s your head, baby?”
“It’s fine,” I said, dazed and dopey. My heart had started fluttering. Seizing my once steady heartbeat and making it erratic.
Leaning in, his lips grazed a hair’s breadth in front of mine. “I think you’re kind of out of it, honey.”
“Why?” I asked, and I know Isoundedout of it. But I was too busy pulling myself against the sudden urge to close the tiny, tiny distance between mine and Connor’s lips and finally feel what it would be like. I blamed the head injury for my loose thoughts and even looser inhibitions. But really, Connor was the only drug in sight. His smell, sandalwood and…shea butter today, wrapped around me like a warm blanket. Making me miss the mornings when I woke up in his bed with his big arm wrapped around me. His touch—hot and familiar and somehow knowing of each tender, sensitive part of my body, was melting me.
And he knew it. I could damn nearfeelthe movement of his smile, just a breath away from my lips. His nose moving forward to touch my own gently, sweetly. An Eskimo kiss! Connor Ferguson was giving me soft, sweet Eskimo kisses. The same guy who slapped my ass and told me he had to play “hard ball” to get me to listen. The same guy who yanked me off the ground and pressed me against the hard wall of his fucking bathroom. The same guy who threatened to kick my ass in every game we played, without mercy. He was being so sweet and soft, even when he knew I wasn’t either of those things and it was making my already fuzzy brain even fuzzier.
“You aren’t fighting me—this,” he said, in a voice that was low enough it was almost like he spoke it into my mind. “That’s how I know you’re broken.”
It was my turn to smile. “I don’talwaysfight you.”
His laugh was just a breath. “You don't make it easy either.”
“What do you mean?”
He paused and sighed. “You’re pulling me apart, Cee. And you don’t even know it.”
“My head’s okay, I promise,” I said, trying to ease his worries.
“I’m not talking about your head, baby.”Baby. There went that word again. And why did it feel like a warm blanket falling over me?
“Then what?”
Another pause, followed by him pulling back just enough so he could flutter slow eyes over my face. Then he said, voice still low and still for me. “Don’t get mad, okay? I need this right now.”
“Need what—”
I did not get to finish that sentence. Not because someone interrupted me. Not because I coughed or choked or anything normal or within the realm of possibility. But because Connor kissed me.
Kissed didn’t even begin to describe it.
The way he leaned forward and pressed soft closed lips to mine once before flicking his eyes open to see my reaction. Then how he moved again to press a firmer caress over me was otherworldly. I hardly breathed as I registered that these were Con’s lips, full and warm from the sun and belonging to my best friend, that were moving along mine in a slow languid caress that said many, many things.
