Chapter Eighteen
THERE'S NO SCRIPT THIS time. That's the whole difference, and it turns out to be the entire difference.
It's been a week since the fever. A week of him being in every room I'm in and none of the ones I'm actually standing in, polite as a hotel, careful as a bomb tech, pretending with his entire body that a girl didn't tell him she loved him with her guard on the floor.
Which is its own kind of tell, if you think about it.
You don't wall off a room nobody's trying to get into.
A smart girl would read all that careful distance as the no it's dressed up to be and let it lie.
But since the smartest thing about me has always been a heart that already made up its mind, here we are.
I'm done pretending back.
He's at the window with a glass he isn't drinking.
I cross the room. He hears me coming, I know he does, I watch his shoulders set for the incoming rule, and before he can reach for one, before either of us can hide behind a lesson or a script or a page number, I take his face in both hands and I kiss him.
For a moment he's stone. Every wall the man owns, holding.
Then he isn't.
The glass goes down on the sill, forgotten, and both his hands come up into my hair, and he kisses me back like the lessons were rationing and this is the famine breaking.
There's no careful press to it now. No counting.
No arm's length, no page number, nothing held anywhere in reserve.
He kisses me like he's furious about it, like it's a thing being taken from him instead of freely given.
And then, somewhere in the middle of it, the fury goes out of him all at once, and what comes in behind it is worse, something that shakes.
His hands gentle in my hair. He slows down.
He kisses me slow, and then slower, like he's decided to learn it by heart because he already knows he's going to make himself pay for every second of it later.
He makes a low sound against my mouth that I'll hear for the rest of my life, and for the whole length of that kiss the walls are simply gone, and it's only him, all the way here, all the way mine.
My heart's going off like it's trying to break out of my chest and take him with it, way too fast, way past anything my doctors would ever sign off on, and for once I don't tell it to slow down.
Let it race. Let it be bad for me. I kiss him back with everything I have and I don't do the math on the cost of a single thing.
I've never in my life been so sure of anything.
And that's exactly when he stops.
He pulls back. He sets me away from him, both hands, final, and his face has gone somewhere I can't follow, shut and gray and appalled, not at me, I'd swear it on the heart keeping me alive, but at himself.
"Maximo—"
He doesn't answer.
He just picks up his coat, and he walks out of his own home, and he leaves me standing in the middle of the living room with my mouth still warm and my heart still his and absolutely no idea what I did wrong.
The door closes.
I press two fingers to my lips, where the truth still is.
"That wasn't a lesson," I tell the door he just walked out of because someone in this apartment ought to be brave enough to say it.