Chapter 26
Miller
I didn’t think she was trying to hug me.
I thought, for one stupid second, that she might want to kiss me.
I want to kiss her.
Have for a while, actually.
Probably always will.
But when her lips met mine, I felt her freeze, and all that tightness in my chest came back. The kind that has nothing to do with Matty and everything to do with falling for someone who’s so far above you in the stratosphere you’d choke on the lack of oxygen while you tried to get to them.
The entire flight, I stare out the window, thumb pressed to the corner of my mouth—forever changed because Ren Jacobs accidentally touched her lips to mine.
I make lists about her. All the things I like.
The way she talks faster and faster when the conversation turns to dinosaurs and fossils.
How she leans forward and speeds up even more when she’s talking about the ones she likes best—the bird fossil and raptors.
How she really is constantly leaving her shit everywhere.
Her purse is a mess, it takes her forever to dig something out of there, and she’s always apologizing but I really, really don’t mind waiting.
The way her hair spills perfectly down her back, right between her shoulder blades.
The things I wish she knew about herself. She’s at her best when she’s exactly who she is—silly and goofy and sunlight spilling into every room she enters. She could do anything if she wanted. Take over the whole world the way she took over mine.
The list of things I want to do with her?
Wake her up every morning the way she woke me up and make her coffee and put on her heels before she leaves for work, so she’s not inconvenienced for a single second of the rest of her life.
Use all the stupid money I have and buy her an aquarium or her own museum that she could fill with whatever the fuck she wants.
Build her a house like the one she built in me.
Retire early and raise kids that look like her so she can chase dinosaurs through the Badlands or whatever she wants to do.
Be good to them, the way my mom wasn’t good to me and her dad wasn’t good to her.
Hope they get everything from her and nothing from me.
Except, maybe, something that’s part of Matty. I’d love a kid like him.
The things I want to do to her? Endless, inappropriate things that have me shifting in my seat, pinching my eyes closed, and trying to breathe through the thought of her touching me and me touching her.
And when we land, and that tiny, little corner of my mouth still feels like her, I realize I’m entirely fucked.