Chapter Eleven #3
2) I was often pressed for time between teaching classes and testing patients, but too eager to hear your thoughts to wait until I was back at my office, so I disregarded common etiquette and just fired them out.
3) I’m a bit of a texting grump.
I’m sorry for the disrespect this may have caused and the impression this may have left.
Kind regards,
Theodore Lewis North, PhD
His email is silly, formatted like a response letter to a paper submission, yet something like excitement races across my chest as I reread his words about me.
“Better?” he asks from the other side of the table.
“Better,” I agree, bumping my knee into his leg. “Though if you compliment my brain one more time, it might go to my head.”
He catches my gaze for a second. “Good,” he says, and bumps back, causing sparks up my thigh and a sentence so nonsensical that I need to rewrite it for a third time before I send the email off to my student.
I lose complete track of what I was doing when Lewis’s knee brushes mine again, softer now, and then stays there.
But his face is impassive, fingers flying over his keyboard again.
“Seriously?” I grumble.
Lewis keeps typing. “What?”
“You were all against digging into each other’s current research when we made this pact, but then you resort to… cheap tactics of manipulation and distraction to keep me from doing my work?”
He peels his eyes away from his screen. “What?” he repeats, dumbfounded.
I draw back my leg, and as I knock it into his, he must finally understand, because he frowns and sits up.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize.” Seconds later, though, his face morphs into a smile, and he cocks up a brow. His sole taps against the side of my shoe. “So, you’re saying this distracts you?”
I glower at him over the edge of my laptop. His eyes dip, no doubt tracking the flush that climbs up my throat.
“Don’t be smug,” I bite out. “And don’t tell me you’re not doing it on purpose.”
“Doing what?” Eyes wide, he runs his fingers along his hairline, drawing my attention to another extremely attractive feature about him. At this point, I find everything about him attractive.
Physically, that is.
“This.” My voice echoes loudly in the silent library, and I quickly bend forward to mutter, “All this teasing you’re doing.”
He mirrors my posture, and although there’s still half of the table between us, he feels provokingly close.
“And why,” he wonders quietly, “would I be teasing you?”
Under the table, his knees slot around mine. The pressure triggers a flash of electricity deep in the pit of my belly.
“Explain it to me,” he insists as his hands spread wide over the surface of the table. The muscles in his forearms flex and shift, and when I look up again, I catch the glint in his eyes.
Playful. Challenging.
“You’re nervous,” I state. “About tonight. You’re nervous about seeing your family, about pretending in front of Ada, and lying to Alice, but you’re deflecting.”
His eyes are unwavering, but the air feels heavier now, as if my observation has pulled it tighter around us.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
He works his jaw.
“You know, you could just tell me that you’re nervous,” I say. “And we could take care of it. Prepare better for tonight, make up a secret code so I can drag you out of any inconvenient situation.”
His gaze slides to my mouth. “Yeah? How would you do that?”
I could kiss you.
The idea slams into my mind, unforeseen, but so blazingly clear that I have difficulty thinking of anything else.
I tug at my collar, my skin lit up by his attention.
It takes me a moment to realize that he is touching me, that he’s lengthened his finger to drag it from my wrist to the knuckle of my middle finger.
My eyes, hell-bent to lead this conversation without me, dip to his lips. God, the set of his mouth should be forbidden.
He smirks when he recognizes my intentions. “You wouldn’t dare,” he says in a deep rumble that prickles down my spine.
His challenge stokes the fire in me. I want to show him how much I would dare. I want to see how far he lets me go in our weird new ceasefire friendship.
My chair scrapes over the floor as I stand and round the table. Lewis catches my hand—to keep me away or to pull me closer, I don’t know.
“What are you doing?”
“You just dared me.”
A blush dusts his cheeks. “I meant later. At the party.”
I press my hip against the edge of the table, let the solid wood dig into my skin to yank me back to reality. “I’d do it if you want me to.”
“Okay,” Lewis says, voice grating over the word. He still hasn’t let go of my hand, and there’s that blond strand again, messing up the neat line of his forehead.
His hair—
My fingers tingle with the wish to touch it, tidy it, mess it up.
“But,” I hear myself say, “based on our past performances, I’m not sure that kissing you would be the best idea. We’re not very good actors, remember? What if you jump away once I get closer to you?”
“That’s true,” Lewis comments. “Although unlikely at this point,” he adds, quieter.
“Right. To avoid that from happening again, let’s consider what we’re both good at.”
He smirks. “Stomaching bad conference coffee?”
“The other thing.”
A wrinkle appears in his forehead. “Science?”
I nod and step closer, until my knees almost brush his. “We should approach this methodically. If we decompose romantic relationships into their building blocks, we have, among others, emotional and physical intimacy.”
“So?” Lewis asks. “I’m still not following.”
“So, that’s how we convince ourselves to make this relationship seem real. We’ve been telling each other about our lives all day, but that’s not so different from what friends would do, right?” I bite my lip, cringing at the eager lilt of my voice.
His fingers, locked around mine, tighten.
“What’s really missing is the body contact. The intimacy.”
That’s not quite the truth though. We’ve been touching for the better part of the day and are holding hands right as we speak, but somehow, it doesn’t feel like enough.
Somehow, I cannot stop thinking about the rough slide of his tongue against my thumb.
Somehow, I keep wondering how it would feel dipping into the corner of my mouth.
“So essentially, you’re hypothesizing that a kiss now…” he spells out my chain of logic, “would trick our bodies into the right mindset for later?”
“Precisely.” Holding his gaze, I bring our hands to my hip and when he spreads his fingers, his thumb drags over my hip bone.
His eyes follow the path of it. “Yeah? You think it’s that easy?”
“I’ve given you the hypothesis,” I inform him. “Maybe you should test it.”
One corner of his mouth ticks up. “Right. Any other steps you’ve thought about? The experimental procedure?”
With how tingly my entire body feels, I’m surprised I’m not visibly shaking from his touch at this point. “I’d say this is more of an exploratory study, though I know these don’t quite match your high scientific standards—”
Suddenly he’s up and crowds me against the lip of the table, arms bracketed around me.
“Will you shut up.” He cups my chin with one hand to tip up my face.
His gaze is dark and probing in a way that should make me feel vulnerable, but all I feel is the thrill of anticipation, a whisper of longing.
With the heel of his hand on the base of my throat, he keeps me at a narrow distance, sensing my racing pulse.
The air between us grows heavier with every passing breath, and I’m waiting, yearning for the tipping point.
“For practice?” he murmurs.
“For practice,” I breathe.
Lewis runs his hand up my throat, and when his thumb skims over my bottom lip, some sound must rip out of me, because he quickly moves in and catches my whimper with his mouth.
His lips against mine are coffee sweetened with a hint of mint, and I discover that Lewis kisses just like he does everything else.
Carefully, measured, and meticulous. I can’t decide if his languid pace is infuriating or deliciously right, and when his fingertips skid against that sensitive spot behind my ear, they tug the barest whisper of a sigh out of me.
The flutter behind my rib cage morphs into a heavy thud.
I rise to my tiptoes and brace myself against Lewis’s chest. My hands roam up over the nape of his neck, the corner of his jaw, the places that have been out of reach all this time, but that I’ve been dying to touch.
Desperate to get him closer, I hook my fingers through his belt loops, and then, finally, he brings his hips flush with mine.
His hands trace the outsides of my legs, where they hesitate for a breath.
I curve into him, frustrated by the last pockets of distance that remain between us, and he lifts me onto the table, bringing our heads to the same height and crowding into the space between my legs.
Satisfied with the new angle, Lewis coaxes my mouth open with the tip of his tongue. His teeth skid across my lip and—
More.
I want more.
It’s a singular thought flashing through my mind. Want claws its way down my body, and, hungry for the pressure, I tighten my thighs around his hips, sighing as I feel Lewis heavy with need against me. His next breath is audibly ragged, and it sends a pulse of heat low into my belly.
Before I can sink my hands into his hair and urge him to kiss me deeper, somewhere something heavy clangs to the floor.
The shrieking sound of laughter hits my ears, and then I remember—we’re in a library.
Behind those shelves that shield off our little alcove, there are students. There might be colleagues.
What were we thinking? What was I thinking?
Clearly, nothing at all.
I pull away, and under my mouth and fingertips, I can sense the awareness gradually returning to Lewis, too. A slow wave of stiffening limbs, a shuddering breath, a shift backward.
“I…” I falter, mortified at how breathy I sound. How turned on I am.
“Frances,” Lewis rasps, eyes blazing, lips bruised and raw. The gruff sound of my name and the disheveled sight of him make the desire spike up again, but it’s narrowly chased by a grounding realization.
I just kissed Dr. Theodore Lewis North.
And even though I try to convince myself that it was merely in preparation for tonight’s meeting of his family, the urge to get back to it tells me that it was more than practice. That, somehow, inexplicably, I liked it.