Chapter 12
Seventeen years ago
Nick hurried through the freezing night, wondering what in the ever-loving fuck he’d been thinking.
The amount of real estate Aubrey MacLean had staked out in his head already tortured him, but this would burn him alive. Had
he really needed to know what the precious underside of her thigh looked like, or that she could lift her leg up beside her head with
no apparent effort? Had he absolutely had to memorize the dewdrop glisten of sweat on her neck, the way it made damp red tendrils out of her hair?
Ugh. Now he would never get her out of his thoughts.
He sucked in a breath so cold it stung his lungs, then upped his pace. Aubrey probably wouldn’t have left the game at halftime,
but on the off chance she’d followed, he needed to put as many frozen shadows between himself and the gym as possible.
How stupid that when she’d asked today in English, he’d thought he could face her.
One glimpse of that dance, and he’d known he couldn’t stand to let her end this .
. . whatever it was. Which was borderline hilarious, since he would gladly get into another fistfight with Gallant.
A hundred fistfights. A fucking thousand.
But let Aubrey tell him to stop writing to her, even once?
He’d rather die.
Still, it would happen, no matter what he did. He’d known it from the moment he’d shoved that first letter into her locker
and stared, wondering whether he had the means to punch through the flimsy metal and reclaim the paper before Aubrey could
see it. See him.
Except the look on her face while reading it had done something to him. Her eyes had deepened, her bottom lip folded between
her teeth, and some kind of detonation had taken place beneath his ribs. Now he couldn’t stop writing to her, and it made
him feel crazy. Like someone addicted to a drug they’d only done once.
“Nick!”
A sick jolt shot through him. Shit, had Aubrey followed him? She must be desperate to put a stop to the messed-up therapy sessions he was unilaterally conducting
with her locker.
“Nick,” she said, right behind him, now.
He stopped, shooting panicked glances left, then right, but the night offered no escape. Nothing but frosty brick walls and
darkness.
With no other options, he turned.
His insides twisted. She stood there in her cheerleading uniform, her hair like a flaming torch beneath the lights. Fuck,
but she was beautiful. Cruelly so.
“Why do you keep running from me?” she said.
A dead laugh needled at his throat. Why?
Gee, where to begin? Because he didn’t want to have to leave her be?
Because he needed to go on believing she actually valued his confessions?
Because he didn’t want confirmation that she’d never again look at him the way she had at her house, like she hoped to take him apart and cradle the pieces safely in her hands?
“I’m sorry about the letters,” he rushed out. “I got carried away, but I’ll stop.”
He made to flee, but she flung out a wait-a-minute hand. “Stop?” She sounded hoarse, her voice rubbed raw by the cold. “God, no, I don’t want you to stop.”
Nick hovered there, uncertain. He suddenly seemed to be anyplace and no place, floating in some nameless auburn darkness,
his only anchor the girl who gleamed before him like a freshly bloomed rose. “You . . . don’t?”
She drifted closer. “No. Of course not.”
He couldn’t move, couldn’t make himself back away.
She drew dizzyingly close. “Did you mean everything you wrote?”
He meant to say, no, not even a little. An easy out. But his stupid mouth betrayed him. “Of course. I meant every word.”
Her eyes shone. “Then you were right. About language. It’s magic. I had no idea.”
He shifted his weight. He had no clue how to stop the barrage of inhalations piledriving into him. He was freezing. Or melting,
he couldn’t fucking tell.
“And . . .” Her fingers twined at her waist. “I think about you, too, you know.”
He could hear himself breathing. Why the hell was it so loud? He sounded like a bull about to charge. “You think about getting
me to leave you alone, you mean.”
“No.” She hugged herself across the middle. “I think about you. About the things you’ve written. Especially the part about you wondering what it would be like to kiss me.”
He stared. That made no sense at all.
Her teeth dug into her bottom lip. “Say something. Please.”
He surveyed her, searching for the lie. But she looked sincere. More importantly, she looked cold. Goose bumps bristled as she rubbed her palms along her bare arms.
“You’re freezing,” he said. A true master of words, indeed.
“Yeah, a little. Can I use your coat?”
In nanoseconds, he’d unzipped the bomber jacket he’d “inherited” from a kid who’d picked a fight with him at lunch two years
ago. It was too small in the arms now, but would swallow her trim frame with room to spare.
“I meant with you still in it,” Aubrey said.
He paused with the collar down around his elbows. “What?”
“Like this.” She sidled closer, hesitant. When he didn’t move, she pulled his jacket back into place and slipped her arms
underneath, around his waist.
At the contact, his heart ballooned to block his throat. His mind fuzzed out. Yet somehow, his body responded, his arms folding
open to cocoon her into the jacket. Into himself.
Aubrey burrowed against his shoulder and sighed, her breath a molten caress that seeped through his shirt. “That’s better.”
Seconds whirled past, each one tightening confusion’s hold on him. What? Just . . . what? One minute he’d been running from
her, and now he was holding her, and the interval separating the two was a dissonant blur, like a needle-skip over a scratched
record.
And Aubrey was trembling. Why was she trembling? She hadn’t been, a moment ago.
She lifted her head. She was tall for a girl, just an inch or two shy of his five foot ten, and her breath feathered against
his mouth. Her pupils expanded, their swell visible even in the orangey sheen of the lights.
His lungs kept exploding, over and over.
This wasn’t happening. Aubrey MacLean couldn’t possibly be pressed to his body, her heartbeat battering at his sternum like a thrashing bird.
Her face couldn’t be inches from his, or her cheeks so flushed, or her green eyes heated and expectant, as if she really had thought about him kissing her.
But oh god, what if he did it? What if he just did the same thing he’d done at her locker that day, and silently screamed all the doubts into shutting
the fuck up for once, because couldn’t he just pay for his idiocy later?
His body ran away with that line of thinking, because somehow he was easing her backward, maneuvering her until her ponytail
hit the nearest wall. His hand landed beside her head, the brick an icy sizzle against his palm.
Aubrey reached up. He braced for her to shove him away, but her fingertips landed on his cheek, gentle. Heat blazed wherever
she touched. An involuntary sound worked free of him, a wispy kind of moan.
She didn’t seem to want to talk. Thank fuck, because he wouldn’t have had any idea what to say. It was enough of a challenge
trying to figure out how to keep himself upright, especially when she insisted on staring at his mouth like that.
“Well?” she finally whispered.
“Well, what?”
“Do you still want to find out?”
Jesus, he was shaking. She was, too. His attention strayed to the side of her neck, where her pulse beat recklessly fast,
a hummingbird flutter in the darkness.
None of this made any sense. But god, yes, of course he wanted to find out. He wanted it more than anything, ever. Some circuit
clicked off in his brain, a whole bank of neurons going dark. Probably the ones responsible for self-discipline, or self-doubt,
because when she tipped her chin up, he didn’t think. He just dipped his head and slanted his mouth across hers.
Her lips molded to his, and it was everything he’d wanted and more, a shot of liquid heaven, a lightning infusion to the nervous system.
Desperately, he wondered if he was doing it right, but the noises she whimpered into his mouth, her whispered oh, thank god, the way her fingers scrabbled at his chest—it intoxicated him.
Emboldened him. Instead of pulling away, Aubrey pulled him
closer, and he couldn’t help but part her lips with his tongue. She tasted like honey and vanilla, like lip gloss, maybe, or some
kind of fancy-ass toothpaste. Whatever the source, it made him feel drunker and dizzier than if he’d stumbled off a carnival
ride after a thousand spins.
He tried going further, twining his tongue with hers.
She made a new noise, this one even more encouraging, and it exploded warmth into the pit of his stomach. Without consciously
deciding to, he palmed the back of her head, his hips tilting against hers. She must have felt him pressed up against her
belly, but she didn’t recoil, just kept clutching at him as if she wanted to meld her body with his.
He realized, then, that this whole thing was a dream. It had to be. But he didn’t want it to end. He just kept kissing her,
kept abandoning himself to her softness and her hot wet tongue, and decided this wasn’t at all something a person needed to
learn, just something they needed to surrender to, because some feral, ancient part of him knew exactly what to do. How to
possess her mouth with his, and oh fuck, he wanted more, so much more, and if he woke up now it would crush him, just please
don’t wake up, please don’t wake up, please don’t—
“Oh. Ahem. Whoops. Didn’t see you guys there.”
Nick lurched back, opening a foot of space. Off to the side stood a girl. He had a vague impression of pale hair, flat blue
eyes, and combat boots, but aside from that, he couldn’t process. Nothing existed between his ears but a splatter of heat
and color.
“Sorry,” the newcomer said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“We weren’t kissing,” Nick said inanely.
“Oh.” The girl cocked her head. “Really? ’Cause it kinda looked like you had your tongues shoved down each other’s throats.”
Her frankness unnerved him, and he scrabbled for a rebuttal, some way to give Aubrey plausible deniability. She wouldn’t want
to be seen with him, not when he’d made sure the whole school would—
“We were definitely kissing,” Aubrey said.
Nick looked to her wildly.
“Okay, cool, well . . .” The girl scuffed a sole against the asphalt. “Carry on, I guess.” She walked off.
He groped for something to fill the silence. “Who the hell was that?”
“Tansy Burroughs.”
He shook his head. Why had he even asked? He didn’t recognize the girl’s name any more than her face. “Okay. I don’t . . .
She’s not going to tell anyone, is she?”
Aubrey’s brow knitted. “Um, probably. Is that going to bother you?”
“No, I just . . . Won’t it bother you?”
She studied him. “No.”
“Oh.” He wondered where all his words had gone, how he could possibly boil over with them in private, yet not have the faintest
clue of how to talk to her in person.
She cocked her head. “Why would you even think that?”
“Because.” Wasn’t it obvious? “You’re a cheerleader. Who likes math and safety and lives in a mansion. And I’m . . .”
When he didn’t continue, her expression softened into quiet understanding. “You’re . . . what?”
“No one. Just a guy who likes words.”
Silence pulsed between them. At last, she blew out a breath. “Can I tell you a secret? Since you’ve told me so many of yours?”
He couldn’t help it. He drifted closer.
“I’m just a girl.” She held his eyes. “Who likes numbers. And you.”
His mental gears ground. “Me?”
“Yeah. Now will you come share your jacket again? I’m cold.”
He stood there for half a second, his brain a melted lump of candle wax. But he couldn’t have denied her anything, so he wrapped
her up again, then buried his face against her neck when she nestled into him. The clean tang of her sweat rushed in, a rising
brightness inside his head.
She liked him. Aubrey MacLean liked him. Even though he’d shoved enough letters into her locker to decimate a small forest. Or . . . he dared imagine . . . maybe
because of that.
She pressed herself even closer.
“My god,” he groaned in her ear. “A cheerleader who likes math and safety and lives in a mansion and can touch her ankle to
her ear and smells like fucking paradise. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
He was drunk on her, clearly. Or maybe still dreaming, because when she made a hungry sound, he cupped her jaw and nipped
at her bottom lip. He didn’t know if he’d thought of that himself or seen it in a movie somewhere, but the way she shivered
in response made him marvel.
“I have a favor to ask,” she said, breathy. “I have to go back inside soon, but—”
“You want my jacket?” he murmured against her lips.
“No. I want you to sit next to me. In English. Tomorrow.”
He pulled back. Her eyes were wide and intensely green, a breadth of springtime on this frigid night.
“And talk to me in the hall,” she continued.
“You mean . . . in front of people?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s two favors,” he said, for lack of anything else.
A shy smile slid across her mouth. “Yeah. Actually, can we make it three?”
He dared to settle his fingers against the pulse in her neck. It felt like touching something holy, and he already knew he
would do whatever she asked. He’d go find a fucking dragon to slay, if she wanted. “What?”
“Don’t stop writing to me.”
A searing hope lit his chest.
She reached up to brush his hair from his eyes. “And maybe kiss me again, if you don’t mind. That was . . . incredible, and
I’d really like to do it some more.”
“That’s four favors.” He limited himself to three words, because if he didn’t, too many would emerge. A cyclone would pour
out. He’d never stop.
“So is that a yes, then? Or . . . four yeses?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes. Anything.”
She leaned up and kissed him, or maybe he kissed her. He didn’t know, only that she tasted even better, felt even headier
against him, the second time. She finally broke away and left him leaning against the frosty wall, panting.
“I have to go, but . . . see you tomorrow, Nick?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t recognize his own voice. “See you tomorrow, Aubs.”
He couldn’t have said where the nickname came from, but her eyes crinkled in pleasure, so he committed it to memory as she
melted into the darkness.
He stood there for a few thousand years, trying to get his brain to work again, but it refused, so he eventually gave up and
went home.
Only when he was halfway asleep did he finally realize the dream still hadn’t ended.