Pictures of You

Chapter 64

64

Drew

Shit.

It’s like she’s cherry-picking every aspect of my past that I wanted to bury. Including that fucking kiss.

And now I’m sitting here, trying to come up with a story that paints Past Me as someone other than a grief-stricken, uncharacteristically drunk twenty-three-year-old who kissed his best friend when we were both at our lowest.

“It wasn’t like that,” I say, even though it was exactly like that. And, after all this time, I can’t go there again. Oliver hasn’t been gone two weeks. What kind of person am I, even fantasizing about it?

She looks like she’s mentally rehashing something she’s not equipped to handle, which means she’s shoveling in imagined details and coming up with some story that’s probably even worse than the truth.

“It was one kiss,” I explain. “It didn’t mean anything.”

Not to her.

Now she looks offended. And hurt. Instead of shocked, like she did when it happened.

Next thing, Evie loses the rest of her mind. Without any warning, she leans toward me, takes my face in her hands, and drops her eyes to my lips.

No.

No!

What is she doing?

She threads her fingers through my hair, one hand dropping to my neck. Closes in, and draws me slowly into what can only be described as the kiss of my life . Even the initial tentative brush of my lips with hers sparks fireworks of memories.

“Evie …”

But she doesn’t let me speak. And the taste of her lips assembles every thought I’ve ever had about her this way. Every one.

She pulls back. “This is …”

It’s me who won’t let her speak now. The gentleness gives way to something far more urgent that we fall into, our bodies angling to get closer as my hand slips under the hem of her pajama top, grasping her hip, pulling her toward me.

This is a New Year’s Eve kiss with a stranger and it’s a kiss with someone you’ve known several lifetimes. A thermal spring of brand-new passion colliding with recognition as it explodes to the surface.

Her fingers thread harder through my hair and her leg finds its way across my lap as she pushes me back against the end of the swing seat. She’s kissing me like it’s the key to getting her memory back. Like she’ll plug herself into me and I’ll transfer the missing knowledge. Like she’s hungry and I’m her life source.

And I kiss her like … I can’t think about how I’m kissing her, and what’s running through my mind, because with every passing second, it’s as though I’m losing more of myself to this woman who has already taken too much. I can’t get close enough.

It’s everything that first kiss could never have been.

This time she’s not tipsy. Not straight out of a breakup. Not torn. I’m not newly grief-stricken. She’s all in, without Oliver’s shadow over her life, pulling me over the edge of a cliff I’ve been dragging myself back from for years .

“Evie,” I say, pulling us apart, both of us breathless.

She’s looking at me the way I’ve imagined and hoped she would since we were teenagers, breathless and flushed, skin prickling with goose bumps as she props herself up against my chest and stares at me, bed hair tumbling across her face, dazed by what we’ve just done. I’ve lost all direction from here, completely disoriented in my own life.

“You said this was nothing,” she says quietly.

Silence hangs between us and I know my expression betrays me. If I could rearrange it into something resembling apathy, I would. But she’s drained all sense out of me and I can barely breathe. Years of longing for exactly this moment can’t match how it feels. And the dangerous realization crashes in that there’s so much she still can’t remember, and I am falling harder than I did the first time.