Chapter 26 #2
The cold has made my limbs numb. I plod back inside to find Harper.
I am so shocked that it feels like the ground beneath my feet is shifting.
Strangely, though, I don’t feel hurt. Not a stab of pain in my heart.
Not even close to what I felt when I saw Wyatt and Gwendolyn together, not at all; I am just perplexed.
But I’m angry, really angry! Harp, where are you?
I make my way around the edge of the dance floor—a.k.a.
the air-hockey playing field—to avoid becoming a living puck again.
I walk straight into a wardrobe, hard as a rock.
It’s broad and… Wow, does it smell good!
I press my nose deeper into the warm fabric and…
Wait a sec. Since when have wardrobes smelled of fresh pine, mint, and lemon?
They don’t.
There’s only one person who smells like that.
“Wyatt.”
“Look alive, Aria.” He’s staring down at me. His hands are on my upper arm, probably to keep me from falling. “Everything okay?”
I nod. “Yeah. I was just on my way out.”
He looks at me. His eyes wander down my body, stop for a moment on the soft curve of my breasts beneath my sweater, move on to my hips, my skirt, and my bare legs.
I am really close to him; when he swallows I can count the dark hairs on his face, the somewhat darker line of his lower lip standing out from the rest of the pale red.
“Listen.” The bass is thumping, the electro sounds are echoing throughout the house, but Wyatt’s voice rings clear, just as deep and husky as when I fell in love with it way back when.
“What happened recently…” He bites his lower lip, pulls it in, and lets it back out.
The sight of it makes my nerves start to tingle.
Just a minute ago I was out in the cold, freezing, and now I’m starting to get hot, so hot that I feel like I’m standing in the middle of a flame. “That was stupid of me.”
I swallow. “What do you mean exactly?”
Wyatt’s eyes hurry to his finger that suddenly grows a bit too bold and traces a soft line across my shoulder. I hold my breath.
“Playing that song. In front of everybody else. That was too much.”
“True.” My throat feels scratchy. Maybe I was outside too long and am getting the flu already. I should go home. Right away.
Almost starting to panic, I start looking around for Harper. I look toward the DJ, toward the crowd, and toward the snowman outside blowing back and forth in the wind and knocking against the window. I look everywhere just so I don’t have to look Wyatt in the face.
“Aria,” his finger reaches the bare skin of my collarbone. “Aria, look at me.”
I take a deep breath and do as he says. Why am I still standing here?
Why don’t I just go? I should just turn around and leave him behind.
And I even try, but it’s as if my feet were sticking to the floor.
My God, how he’s looking at me, with his backward baseball hat and those ripped black jeans.
How he’s looking at me, the colored lights spinning across his body, his nose red, his hoodie green…
Something’s happening. Suddenly I’m fourteen again, back in math class with old Ms. Clearwater, Wyatt directly to my left.
He’s tilting his chair, all relaxed and natural, though it had to be tough for him to keep his balance.
I can still remember looking at him and thinking that he had talent.
And so I tried to mimic him. He’d drawn his brows together and was chewing on his pencil.
Ms. Clearwater was saying something about pi, and then it happened; he gave that deep laugh, and my heart immediately responded.
I really thought something was wrong with me, maybe my circulation, maybe something worse, but it was simply Wyatt.
How deep, how magical that sound was. And then he made a joke, something corny about pirates and pi and laughed, and I fell off my chair.
Wyatt jumped up—a few others did, too—and ran over to me. But only Wyatt asked if I was okay. He looked at me, so close, just like now, with the exact same look on his face, and that’s when it happened. At that very second, I fell in love with Wyatt Lopez. I fell in love—and I got lost.
And now it’s happening again. I’m falling in love again, although I never stopped loving him, and that’s unreal. I mean, how does that even work? Were the last two years just some kind of warm-up for something even more intense?
Wyatt runs his thumb down my jaw. I gasp.
“Let’s go for a walk, Ari.”
“A walk?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “That means, use our legs.” While his fingers continue to inflame every single one of my nerves, he moves the index and middle fingers of his other hand so that they look like two little legs.
“I can’t walk.”
“It’s not that tough, you know?”
“No, I mean…” I look around for Harper one more time, hoping she’ll finally show up. “I’ve got to go.”
Wyatt bends down toward me. My pulse begins to pound as his nose brushes my cheek and then shoots up to a hundred and eighty when his breath brushes my ear.
“It’s just a little walk.”
“I can’t,” I repeat, wondering how it is I can even speak anymore, for his fingers have reached the soft skin along my temples before he tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear. “My legs… My legs are bare.”
Oops. That word out of my mouth, bare, is the socket, and Wyatt is the cord.
His entire body lights up when I say it, but can something like that really happen, or is it just the strobes?
He’s glowing. And all I can think is how fine he looks in this light.
Suddenly I start to become afraid that it could stop, and I don’t want it to, not at all, and so I say it again.
“Bare. My legs are bare. And because they’re bare, I can’t go outside. I mean, all that cold and snow and bare legs? No, that won’t work, so…”
“If you say that one more time, I’m going to throw you over my shoulder and disappear with you, Moore.
Right upstairs.” He moves closer. Tilts his head.
His forehead is almost touching mine, and we are both radiating a heat that has nothing to do with the stuffy air.
“Don’t say that word. Or do, yeah, say it.
” He moves even closer. His lower lip brushes my top lip, just a delicate touch, barely perceptible, but it’s the spark in gasoline-soaked wood setting off an explosion in my body.
Without being able to control it, I gasp and stretch my arms out toward him, clawing at his hoodie, one hand in the fabric under his chest, the other on his hip.
His muscles tighten under my touch, and I hear him draw a sharp breath.
I have to stop this. It’s all too much. My feelings, my emotions, Wyatt, right in front of me, the two of us tearing our clothes off right here in front of everyone in this bass-filled, stinking, pulsating party cave.
I don’t trust myself not to do it, because the word is just waiting for me to nudge it so that it can roll off my lips.
I want him to touch me, want him to do things the way he did back in my room, even though it went against all my principles.
I keep thinking that we don’t work, that it just can’t be, not after what happened—but I want him so badly.
Every spare second I think about him there between my legs and how everything felt like it used to feel.
My mind screams NO. My heart says YES. WHAT SHOULD I DO?
My fingers rebel; they are stiff and clumsy as I let go of him.
It’s an immense effort. In my head sirens are going off: ERROR, ERROR, ERROR.
I have to struggle not to immediately throw all self-respect overboard and jump on top of him, place my center on his crotch, and allow myself to do what my body has been craving for years.
Even more so since that kiss in the rink.
The kiss behind the bell tower. The thing in my room.
I want to distance myself so, so badly, but instead I’m drawn to him again and again and can’t resist.
“I can’t,” I say, meaning the walk but obviously something completely different, too. My breath is trembling as I take a step back.
Wyatt’s hand, which had gotten lost in my hair, sinks back down.
“It’s too cold.”
He knows that that’s not why. He knows that I would have made my way through the snow in a bathing suit for him once upon a time. But now it’s because of what he did. He shudders but, instead of stepping away, instead of giving up, says, “Then tomorrow.”
That’s Wyatt. He never gives up. He’s a hockey player. They fight for their passion, even if it’s the last thing they do.
“Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”
“Then afterward.”
“Why are you doing this?” I raise my arms in the air only to let them fall back down. “Why won’t you let us go?”
Wyatt jerks as if I had hit him. This guy can withstand huge bodies throwing themselves at him to knock him to the ground and can withstand a puck hitting his helmet at full speed, but these words, just these six words, are too much.
One of the blond puck bunnies walks over to us from the dance floor with a toothy smile and a delicate film of sweat across her skin.
“Wyatt Lopez,” she says, placing her long fingers around his biceps and snuggling up to him.
Watching her do that, listening to the way she says his name, my Lopez, and not being able to do anything about it is bad.
It hurts. She blinks up at him from below, her sticky eyelashes touching the brow bone above her eyelid. “You want to get a drink?”
He slowly turns to look at her, as if he has just been woken up and needs to understand what is happening.
My stomach rebels. I can’t look at the way the woman is glued to him as if he belongs to her.
She has the right to do it, sure. He’s a free man, but…
Wow. This just won’t do. It’s not just bad; it hurts like hell.
I gather up the last of my strength to put on a shaky smile. “From what I can gather, you’re needed here.”
The groupie shoots me a grin as if I were her accomplice and had just wished her a lot of fun with him.
“And how,” she says, winking at me. The feeling of wanting to grab her by the hair and tear her away is powerful. “And how he’s needed.”
“Okay, that’s enough. I’m out of here.”
“Wha…?” Only now does Wyatt seem to realize what’s going on. “Wait, Aria, no.”
I turn around and push through all the guests. I can feel an enormous pressure building behind my eyes, but I don’t want to cry, not here. Heading for the door, I quicken my pace. Wherever Harper is, she’ll just have to deal with the fact that I’ve taken off.
My fingers are pulling open the front door when I feel a hand on my waist, spinning me around. Wyatt’s eyes are boring into mine. He flares his nostrils and puts his other hand on the door to push it shut.
“I’m not letting us go because I want us to work again.
If not together, then as people who have accepted what once was.
Because I know it’s over. I know it.” He turns his head and scans the room as if he were looking for words before turning back to me with a haunted look.
“We need to look forward but don’t kid yourself, we can’t. Neither you nor me.”
He is saying exactly what everyone else is saying—Mom, Paxton, Harper, Knox—and I know he’s right. So I nod. Maybe that’s mature, or maybe it’s just a desperate gesture because I’m not ready to let him go. I don’t know. But I really, really want to find out.
“Okay. We’ll go for a walk, Wyatt. Tomorrow evening, after Thanksgiving.”
And there it is again, that glow in his face.
I’m still admiring the deep dimple in his cheek when I feel a vibration go through my thigh.
At first I think, That’s it, now my body does its own shit, until I realize that it’s my phone.
I reach into my pocket and look. Harper.
I slide the green receiver icon to the right, stick a finger into my left ear, and the phone to the other.
“The missing princess. How lovely.”
“Get up here, Aria.” Her voice is anything but relaxed. She sounds panicked. “Right now. Something really bad is going down.”
“What do you mean?”
A brief pause. There’s a clanging sound in the background. She gasps for breath. “Camila.”
Then she hangs up.