24. Chase
Chase hadn’t been kidding when he told Zak about all the donuts he had given up over the years. He had also passed up all his other favorite sweets, which wasn’t easy after growing up in a house filled with desserts.
He had adhered to a strict bedtime and morning routine. He had pushed through aching feet from breaking in skates. He had done glute exercises until his butt cheeks were so sore he could barely drive himself home from the gym.
Apparently, all that willpower fled his system as soon as hockey ended. Because he had lasted only twenty-eight hours as Zak’s friend before he had her pinned between a brick wall and his body.
“Stop me,” he told her. “Before I kiss you again.”
Her hand was still on his bare stomach, the other one curled around his neck, and he could predict Zak with very little accuracy, but he knew for a fact the next word out of her mouth was not going to be “stop.”
In fact, there were no words. And then her lips were on his again, making his legs so weak he was glad he had a solid surface to keep himself upright. He had imagined kissing her countless times, but kissing was only an action. A fantasy.
Nothing could have prepared him for what it would be like to feel the way she wanted him. The way the corners of her mouth curled into a smile whenever his shaking hands betrayed how mind-fucked he was to be touching her. The way she bit his bottom lip, then ran her tongue over the faint grooves left by her teeth. The way she moaned into his mouth when he matched her pace and kissed her harder. Grabbed her harder.
God, he was hard, and she probably felt it between their two layers of thick blue jeans as her knee moved to the side and she beckoned him closer.
“This is bad,” she said, but her mouth was on his neck now, and her thumb rested on his belt buckle. “So bad.”
There was no thinking straight. There was no thinking at all. And all he could muster was a guttural nuh-uh noise, followed by, “So good. Kiss me again, angel.”
The endearment slipped out without consciousness. She had him thinking about that song, that band, the moment that had brought them together at the beginning of summer and all the little ones over the years—together and apart—that led to now. She had him thinking about how that harsh, foul, sarcastic mouth of hers could be so saccharine when they were alone.
Hand framing her jaw, he brought her in once more to feel her lips move against his like they should have been there all along. Like every time he had ever wondered what-if wasn’t ponderance, but a cosmic hint.
Like it was a good thing he hadn’t kissed her when they were sixteen, because that would have been it. No multi-million-dollar contract in the world would have been worth leaving her, but he wouldn’t have been the person she wanted now if he hadn’t left.
She had been right. Heaven was something created on Earth. It was skating on that pond in Wisconsin as a kid. It was sitting at the back of the blues bar between two strangers, finding a familiar face on stage. It was music flowing through his veins, using him.
Heaven was leaning against a brick wall in a Brooklyn alley. It was her, showing him what it felt like to be alive.
“We have to stop,” she protested, still holding him close as she pressed one long, final kiss to his lips. “We have to. I have to.”
She shuffled to the side and stared at him, and she was breathing heavily, just like him.
Her hair was messy from his hands. Her lipstick was smudged from the way he had kissed her, the way she had kissed him back. Her bra strap was loose around her shoulder, which he didn’t remember doing. And it made it a million times worse to let her back away, knowing he had been the one to make her look flushed and disheveled.
“This can’t happen again.”
There was zero conviction in her voice. And not even the loudest skeptic within Chase believed she didn’t feel what he was feeling.
“You’re positive about that? ‘Cause I really, really want it to happen again.”
“The band…” The blissed-out haze in her eyes succumbed to stress. Panic. He could practically hear her internally beating the shit out of herself for having human emotions.
“Zak, I know. It’s okay.” He reached out to touch her, but she shook her head. “You don’t have to explain. This doesn’t have to ruin anything for the band.”
“But it could,” she said. “It could ruin everything, and I didn’t even think. I didn’t think about anything except this”—she gestured ambiguously at the open night air—“and you. And now I don’t know what to do with this and you because I’m not used to wanting something without throwing myself at it. Shit, this was such a mistake.”
He smiled. Because even though she was attempting to forge another barrier between them, there was something about hearing her freely admit it. She wanted him. And Zak felt everything hard—anger, joy, sadness, desire. “Which one was a mistake? The first one, the second one, the third one…”
“Fuck you,” she lashed out half-heartedly, eyes narrowed. “Are you smiling? I’m serious. So serious.”
Of course, that only made him smile more. “I know you are.”
“You know what?” She thumbed her bra strap back over her shoulder and placed a fist on her hip. “We’re done talking about this because we’re friends. That’s what we agreed to.”
“Alright, buddy.” He reached to fix her lipstick with his thumb. “In that case, let me get that for you. Platonically. It must have gotten messed up when you had your tongue in my mouth. Platonically, apparently.”
Zak sighed like she was annoyed, but the way she leaned into his touch told an entirely different story. Chase knew what a last kiss felt like. That wasn’t it.