Chapter 19
Melly
His mouth is on mine before either of us can think about it.
And God — God — this kiss. This is our first kiss as boyfriend and girlfriend, and something inside me cracks wide open.
The flame that’s been smoldering in my chest for years catches and roars and floods every inch of me at once.
My hands are shaking. My whole body’s shaking.
I’ve kissed this mouth before, but not like this.
Not with my heart hammering against my ribs like it’s trying to get to him through bone.
Not with my stomach turning over and my thighs pressing together and every nerve in my body firing at once.
This is a tragedy. It’s outrageous. We should’ve been kissing all this time. His tongue flicks mine, and I make a small needy sound at the back of my throat. I push my tongue against his and take him deeper because I can’t — I literally cannot — get close enough to him.
He makes a sound at the back of his throat. It’s low and broken and so fucking hot.
I’ve never heard him make this sound before, and it lights up something low in my belly that I’m not ready for. My pulse in places it has no business being. I’m pressing my thighs together against the edge of his mattress, and I can feel my own heartbeat between them.
He pulls back a quarter-inch and looks at me.
His eyes are doing something I’ve never seen them do.
They’re entirely on me — not on the wall, not on the floor, not on his own hands, not in the distance.
Just me. His pupils are huge, black, blown out over blue, and his mouth is slightly open, and his breath’s coming fast, and the pad of his thumb is at the corner of my jaw, and I can feel it tremble.
He’s trembling.
Blue Golding is trembling.
The realization hits me, and tears prick at the corners of my eyes before I can stop them, because the boy who has always been the calm one, the unreadable one — the boy I’ve never seen flinch — is shaking against me because he wants me this much.
He kisses me again. The second kiss is longer, deeper.
The second kiss is the kiss of a man who’s tasted the first kiss and decided to take more, and I’m coming apart underneath it.
My hands find his wrists because my hands need somewhere to go, somewhere to anchor, because I’m dizzy.
I’m actually dizzy. The room is tilting, and the only thing holding me to the earth is Blue Golding’s mouth.
I’m kissing him the way I’ve always wanted to kiss him.
I’ve held onto the memory of what he tasted like and — God, it’s so much better than I remember. Underneath his toothpaste and mouthwash, it’s just him, just Blue. I close my eyes and breathe him in until my chest aches with it.
I kiss him harder.
He huffs into my mouth.
The huff’s half a laugh.
I’ve made Blue Golding laugh inside a kiss. My heart does a thing in my chest — a swooping, dropping thing.
He lifts his left hand off my face and slides it to the back of my neck under my hair, and his fingers spread against my scalp like he’s holding something precious, and I feel that touch in every single nerve I have.
Goosebumps race down my arms. The hair at the nape of my neck stands up.
His right hand goes to my waist over the dress and stays there.
He’s being careful without making a thing of it.
The geometry of his hands makes me melt into him, makes me go soft and pliant in a way I didn’t know my body could go.
I make a small sound I don’t mean to make, and he kisses me harder.
The kissing’s changed.
It’s no longer the slow, careful, welcoming-each-other kissing of the first two minutes.
Now we’re kissing like we’re making up for lost time, like we’re trying to swallow years of wanting in one breath, and I’m aware of his body.
I want to feel him flush against me, every inch, no air, no fabric, no years between us.
I lift my hand to his chest.
His t-shirt is soft. His heart is racing under my palm.
The thump of it through the cotton is faster than my own, and my chest squeezes so hard I almost can’t breathe, because Blue Golding is supposed to be the calm one in this room.
He’s the one who never lets you see anything.
He’s the boy who walks into the rink with his game face on and walks out of it with the same face, the boy I’ve watched bury feelings so deep I started to wonder if he had them, and his heart is going that fast under my hand. Because of me.
The boy who’s spent all these years pretending he could survive without me is as undone as I am.
My mind’s racing with all the things I want him to do to me, and I’m trembling against him.
I slide my hand up to the back of his neck. His hair is soft at the back. I press my hand flat against the back of his head and pull him closer to me, and he goes. He’s letting me move him. He’s letting me have him. The thought makes me whimper.
I kiss him deeper. Needing more. Needing all of him.
His hand at my waist slides down to my hip.
The dress has ridden up at the hem from how we’re sitting on the edge of the bed, and his palm is now half on the silk of the dress and half on the warm fabric of my tights, and even through two layers, I can feel the heat of him, and my hips shift toward him without me telling them to.
He’s holding himself back. I can feel how tense he is in his shoulders, in the set of his jaw against mine, in the way his fingers are pressing too carefully into my hip like he’s afraid.
I don’t want him to hold himself back.
I want all of him.
I push my tongue against his again. He huffs again into my mouth. The huff this time isn’t a laugh.
He pulls back and rests his forehead against mine. He’s breathing through his nose in slow, controlled draws like he’s counting them, like he’s trying to slow his own heart down, and I can feel his whole body fighting itself.
“Mel.”
“Yeah.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It comes out cracked, low, breathless.
“I need to —”
“Yes.”
“Mel, you don’t even know what I’m —”
“Blue.”
A beat.
“Yes.”
He opens his eyes. He pulls back another half-inch.
His hand is still at the back of my neck.
The other’s still at my hip. He looks at me with the careful Blue face he gets when he’s worried, and my stomach twists, because I know that face.
I’ve watched that face in high school. That’s the face he made when he first kissed me all those years, when he cuddled me.
That’s the face of a boy who has secretly loved me for a very long time and is holding back.
I don’t want him to worry.
“Are you sure?”
“Blue.” I search his face. My hands are still shaking against his neck.
“I have to ask, Mel.”
“I’ve been sure…since high school.”
He almost laughs, and the almost-laugh becomes a small, sharp exhale through his nose.
He leans his forehead back against mine for half a beat — and in that half-beat I feel him let go of something, feel the tension drain out of his shoulders by a fraction — and then he tilts my chin up with the heel of his hand and he kisses me again.
The kiss this time is the gate opening.
Everything he’s been holding back comes through it at once.
His mouth’s harder on mine. His tongue’s hungrier.
His hand at the back of my neck slides into my hair and grips, just a little, just enough to make me gasp into his mouth, and his hand at my hip pulls me closer to the edge of the bed.
My knees go around his thigh. The dress rides up further.
He’s leaning into me, and I’m leaning back into him.
I can tell by his body language that the decision’s been made, and it makes me lean into him more.
I can feel him through his sweats against the inside of my thigh.
I make a small, embarrassing sound in his mouth. He groans, pressing against me for a second. My skin crawls with sensation. I need him right now.
He pulls back and stands up. He pulls me up with him by both hands, and my legs almost don’t hold me.
I’m shaking so hard my knees are loose. My dress is rumpled.
His t-shirt is creased where my hand was on his chest. His hair’s sticking up in the back where my hand was.
My lipstick’s half on my mouth and half on his.
I did that.
I did that to him.
The thought puts a fierce hot pride in my chest that I don’t even feel guilty for.
He turns me around gently with his hand at my hip, and he finds the small zipper at the back of my dress with his other hand and pulls it down.
His knuckle brushes the bare skin of my back as the zipper goes down, and a shiver chases it the entire way, every vertebra lighting up one after the other, my whole spine is on fire by the time he reaches the bottom.
He huffs into the back of my hair, and the warmth of his breath at the nape of my neck makes me clench my thighs together.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and slides the dress off them. The silk drops past my elbows and falls past my hips. It pools at my feet on his hardwood floor. I step out of it.
I’m in my bra, tights, and boots in the middle of his bedroom.
His hands have come around to my front and are flat against my stomach.
My body jumps under his palms. His skin’s warm.
The pads of his fingers are calloused from hockey, and they catch a little on my skin, and I feel that catch low in my belly.
His mouth is at the top of my shoulder where the strap of my bra meets my skin, and he’s making a low sound at the base of his throat.
He turns me around again and looks at me for one full second longer than I’m prepared for.
His eyes go down. His eyes come back up.
“Fuck.”
It’s the most articulate thing he’s said in three minutes, and my heart explodes. Just — detonates. Goes off in my chest like a flare. There were so many times I dreamed of this moment, but none of it felt real, and even as it’s happening, it doesn’t feel real.