Chapter Seventeen #2
He glances up at me. “I’m glad it’s helping.
” His eyes scan over my face like they’ve been doing all morning, as if he can read the crevices of my skin and the tension patterns of my facial muscles.
It’s a ridiculous thought; Lewis knowing me this well after only one week, but if there’s one thing I’ve understood about him from the start of our tenuous relationship it is that he’s perceptive.
Caring, in all his quiet and hidden ways.
And that this tough week would’ve been a million times worse without him at my side.
“I’m also sorry for yesterday and, um…” I swirl my hand through the air.
“Springing that kiss on you when you clearly didn’t want to.
That’s not—part of our deal. Obviously. And I think pretending to be a couple and spending so much time with you this week got me a little confused.
It’s not… We can be…” I take a deep breath, focus on what I want him to understand.
“What I’m saying is, thank you for being my friend. ”
Friend. The word feels out of place after four years of rivalry.
It also feels like a lie after a long morning wanting to halt Lewis in his tracks, draw him in by the strap of his backpack, and get into his space.
But I know friends is really all we should be, given his rejection and my rule never to get involved with a colleague again.
Lewis looks back down at the map, where I can make out the blue ribbon of the Hudson River, and a furrow etches into the freckles splattered on his nose. I wait for him to respond, but his mouth stays shut.
We’ve managed to avoid any mention of my clumsy kiss this whole morning. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.
“Anyway.” I try to sound nonchalant, but the word comes out too high-pitched. “Should we get—”
“Frances, I don’t want to be just your friend,” Lewis cuts in, his gaze finally straying from where it’s been firmly fixed on the map. But instead of meeting my eyes, his skirt over the sun-dappled forest floor.
“Um?” I don’t know what to say.
His frown draws tighter. “And I didn’t reject you because I didn’t want to kiss you.”
“Then why…”
“I’ve been thinking about kissing you this whole time.” His eyes flick up to meet mine and stay, as if he’s drinking me in, all while heat spills through my body and drip drip drips into a simmering pool low in my belly. “You have no idea how much bandwidth you take up in my head.”
His confession short-circuits my mind, leaving it blank.
“But,” he continues, “I want to kiss you—want you to kiss me—for the right reasons. Not because I’m pretending to date you. Or because you’re angry and want to deflect. After the last time, I want to be clear that when I kiss you, we’re not hiding behind the roles we’re playing.”
My pulse starts sprinting and, up in my head, the power goes on again.
I take up bandwidth in his head?
Since when has he been wanting to kiss me?
I want to know everything. If he felt it, too, this connection that pulled me into his orbit and planted me there. If he can pinpoint the moment he started wanting me, or if it was a gradual shift, a sneaking suspicion.
Heart close to dancing out of my chest, I reach for his jaw. It scratches against my fingers, as though he’s skipped shaving this morning.
There’s one question rising above all the others that crowd my mind.
“What about now?” All I manage is a whisper. “Do you still want to kiss me?”
His throat bobs, and his darkened eyes dip to my mouth for a sliver of a second. “Yes.” His voice comes out a little ragged. I want him to say my name just like that.
I lean in, but he only narrows his eyes and shakes his head, his voice surprisingly firm when he says, “Talk to me, Frances.”
“I want to kiss you, too,” I whisper, dragging my thumb over the shadow of his beard, and watching how he leans into my touch.
I’ve always preferred charging ahead and showing my feelings rather than talking about them, but Lewis said he needed clarity and for him, this—us—I want to try.
“Not because I’m angry and not because of our deal.
I just really want to kiss you.” My last words come out a little desperate, and, under my finger, his jaw shifts as the traces of a smile curve around his mouth.
I struggle to outright ask him to kiss me now, so I settle for the comforting vocabulary of science instead. “So, um. How about we stop thinking and start executing?”
Lewis arches an eyebrow. “Executing? I’d planned…” He breaks off, fisting his hand into the map. The crisp sound of crinkling paper tapers into a heavy silence.
“You’d planned?”
But Lewis doesn’t tell me what he’d planned.
He stays still and keeps looking at me. His attention is like a caress on my skin, palpable and toe-curlingly physical.
It crosses my mind that a public hiking path might not be the best place to keep pushing this topic.
But we haven’t seen another soul in hours, and it’s been years since I’ve wanted something this much.
“You know what. Never mind,” he finally says, but I already forgot what we were talking about.
His hands come up to track the path his eyes took, over my temples and down my cheeks to the corner of my mouth. Inky eyes hook onto where he’s touching my lips, and it’s less conscious thought, more reflex that has my tongue dart to his thumb.
Lewis makes a throaty sound.
I lick him again, slower this time, savoring the rough pad of his skin, the salty taste.
His control slips as he finally lifts to his knees and braces his elbows onto the fallen tree at my back, bracketing me in. The scraggly bark digs through my shirt, a forceful contrast to the featherlight tug in my stomach when he lowers his mouth to mine.
His lips are warm, and he tastes like sugar. Like the sports drink we shared on the crest of the hill, but so much better. I want to consume all of him.
For maybe a second, he kisses me slowly, hesitantly.
But then I shift my hands into his hair, pulling lightly at the strands, and his caution gives way.
Each time he draws in, he shows his need in different ways.
A nip at my lower lip, fingers twisting into my shirt, the tip of his tongue coaxing my mouth open.
I feel all of his movements right down to my core, but when his tongue slides into the corner of my mouth, a molten, lush heat bursts between my legs.
It drums a lazy rhythm as I pull his face closer and deepens when I trace my teeth along the contour of his jaw.
I’d be embarrassed about how much I want him, how a flick of his tongue and a drag of his fingers can undo me, but the heavy shape of his own desire against my abdomen tells me it’s no different for him.
“Frances,” Lewis rasps out, and my name on his lips is more exquisite than I’d ever imagined it could sound. I lift my hips, chasing the friction, chasing that choking sound he just made, and he reads my intention, sliding his thigh between my legs.
My sharp exhale comes dangerously close to a moan. “Those thoughts about me,” I breathe out. “Did they involve anything other than kissing?”
Lewis pulls back his head, but with his body still pressed against mine, the heavy thump of his heart reverberates against my chest.
His lips tick into a grin. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I’m pretty much dying to.” I scrape my fingers through his hair, noting the catch in his inhale.
“So greedy,” he growls.
“So meticulous,” I counter.
A pensive expression crosses his face before his mouth hones in on the hinge of my jaw, and the hitch in my breath seems to confirm whatever he was looking for, because he hums in satisfaction.
“Still feel like complaining?” he exhales against my skin.
“Shut— Ah.” I whimper as he probes the sensitive spot with the tip of his tongue, and I realize that as much as I love to bicker with Lewis, it’s even better when we do it without words.
As I bite the tip of his ear, he groans softly.
He responds by twisting his hand into the hem of my cutoffs, palm hot on my thigh and thumbnail scraping over the denim inches from where I yearn for him.
His languid pace makes me impatient and needy, and I try to shift under him, but he just smiles against my jaw.
I’m plotting my next move—his lips back on mine, or should I get us to turn around altogether so I can straddle him? —when I hear a gasp.
High pitched. Distant. Too much of either, to belong to Lewis.
My head snaps up. Lewis sits back onto his heels. A heartbeat and we’re untangled from each other, staring into the shocked face of a middle-aged woman clad in khaki hiking gear. Wide-eyed and mouth agape, she’s halted in her steps, one hiking pole poised midair, the other one slack at her side.
“Ronald,” she calls tightly without turning her head.
“Jodie?” There’s a rustle of approaching steps and then a man her age comes up behind her. He’s wearing one of those beige safari-style bucket hats with a cord fastened below his chin. “What is it, honey?”
Jodie’s eyes narrow into slits as she continues to glare at us. “This is a state park,” she says sharply, her hiking pole stabbing into the air in emphasis of her words. “This is public property of the state of New York. It’s to be used for recreation—not for this.”
Her tone is indignant, the slant of her brows scandalized. Who can blame her? She just stumbled upon a pair of thirtysomethings making out like lovestruck teenagers in the middle of nowhere.
A giggle bubbles up my throat. I bite my lips to keep it in, and a glance at Lewis, who’s still angled toward me, tells me it’s down to me to pacify Jodie. I swallow thickly, hoping my voice won’t betray me. “We’re so sorry,” I manage.
“Recreation,” Lewis echoes, dead serious, catching my gaze with a twinkle in his eyes. “That’s what we were doing.”
I yelp out a fraction of my pent-up laughter, as Jodie presses her lips together. “Unbelievable,” she hisses. Ronald, meanwhile, has turned red, his eyes gaping. “This is punishable under the law for public nuisance.”
“So sorry,” I insist and jump up to stuff Lewis’s towel into my backpack, then snatch up his map, but the intricate folding pattern is too complicated for my flustered state. “We’ll be on our way.”
Lewis rises slowly, and under Jodie’s watchful eyes, we vacate our spot, the large map fluttering behind me.
Only after we’ve rounded a bend in the path and are hidden behind a massive boulder overgrown with moss does Lewis pause and take the map from me. “Here, let me,” he says. And with Jodie still ranting in the distance, we both burst into laughter.