We’re barely moving forwards at all anymore. He’s so close that the sleeves of our shirts are almost brushing against each other.
“Oh,je m’excuse,” I reply, “I didn’t know you got to decide what my favourite colour is.”
He lets out a heavy exhale that I recognize as a laugh.
“What?” I prompt. “You’re not going to enlighten me about my own colour preferences?”
We’re just about to enter the circle of illumination cast by a floodlight at the edge of the bus lot. For some reason, we both hesitate, hovering together in the shadows.
“I know you better than you think,” Cole mutters, just loud enough for me to hear.
“Then you should have played the game,” I tell him. My voice comes out even raspier than usual. “You could have shown off.”
He squares himself off right in front of me, blocking out the glare of the light. “It’s not a game to me.”
My breath catches. The familiar smell of him mixes with the scent of the wild night. It’s thrilling and comforting all at once. All I can do is stand there as he leans closer and lets his fingers brush the back of my hand.
“You tell people your favourite colour is black, even though it’s actually gold.”
I don’t know if it’s his words or his touch that makes me shiver. His fingers start to trace circles on my wrist.
“Specifically, it’s the gold of the sunrise,” he continues. “Your birthday is August 17th. Baguettes are your favourite food, and whenever you buy one, you always eat way too much. If you could go anywhere in the world, it would be Paris, but you never tell anyone that because you think it’s too cliché.”
He twines our hands together and starts to stroke my thumb.
“You have a stick poke tattoo of a smiley face on your ankle that you got in someone’s basement when you were fifteen. Your favourite band is The Killers. Your favourite song changes too much for you to pick one. You prefer coffee to tea. If you had to read one book for the rest of your life, it would beValiantby Holly Black.”
We’re so close all I’d have to do is tilt my head back and he could kiss me.
“When you were a kid and people asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, you just said you wanted to make a lot of money so you could live in a big house all by yourself. You love the smell of candles right after they get blown out. Your favourite sound is the open G note on a violin. Sometimes cathedrals make you cry. You...You love to be kissed on the skin just below your ear.”
His voice gets deeper, more of a command than a caress now. I feel my bottom lip drop open. He’s right; knows me too well.
It’s as if the weight of the past few weeks is pressing in on us now—every time we’ve looked at each other too long or felt our skin spark when we’ve gotten too close. It’s too much to take. I need some kind of release or it’s going to crush me, and that release is standing right here.
His face is all shadows in front of me. I tilt my own upwards, and he dips his head toward me. His breath is hot on my neck. I feel him exhale one, two, three times, and each one makes my whole body clench up even tighter. My hand is squeezing his so tightly it’s even starting to hurt me.
His lips hover over that inch of skin he knows I go crazy for, and when he finally presses them to me, I can’t help it. I gasp his name.
The effect is immediate. The hand that’s not being crushed by my grip clamps down on my waist, and he tugs me flush against him. I don’t have time to catch my breath before he’s kissing down the length of my neck, over my collarbone, and back up my throat with a passion that makes it feel like this is the first time he’s ever gotten a taste of my skin. I feel his tongue dart out between his lips, and the sound that escapes me is close to a moan.
“Roxy...”
He hesitates for a fraction of a second before he captures my mouth with his.
Kissing Cole Byrne is like riding your favourite rollercoaster; no matter how many times you strap yourself in, that first drop always rips a scream from your lungs and has you holding on for dear life. You think you know every turn, but they still take you by surprise. The thrill never goes away; you just learn to crave it more.
In our first years of knowing each other, I imagined kissing him so many times that when I finally did it, it almost felt like déjà vu.
That kiss had been hanging in the air all night. It drifted in the smoke clouds of our cigarettes. It dripped down the sides of our beer bottles like condensation in the summer heat. It flickered in the bar lights that pulsed in time with the city’s heartbeat.
We were at some pub downtown, only a few months after I’d come back from Quebec City. We bumped into each other at Taverne Toulouse a month after I’d been back in town, and we couldn’t walk away. We stood frozen in place, the pain and elation of seeing each other after a year apart filling us both up until we were too weighted down to move.
I should have made myself keep walking, but I didn’t.
We spent the rest of the day together. He was still living with Nadia. As far as I could tell, they were both miserable about it, but she wanted him to stay, and he didn’t know how to leave her. I always hated the way she played on his weaknesses. When I left Montreal, I hoped things would get better for them. With me gone, I thought they’d find a way to be happy.
The problem was that Cole still seemed so happy withme.I wanted to be there for him. For a few months, we did our best to be ‘friends’ again, only it wasn’t the same as before. Things that we’d always kept hidden refused to be locked away.
