Chapter 7
She raises her hand and touches my jaw. My breath hitches as she runs her thumb across the light bristles. I’m keenly aware of every second that passes, one ticking into the next as she touches me, stroking my jawline like she’s mesmerized by the texture.
“Soft,” she whispers, almost in wonder as she stares at my chin.
My heart starts hammering, and I fight to stay still.
When she says, “But kind of hard, too,” I swear, I don’t know how I manage not to cup her cheeks, back her up against the stone wall, and just kiss the hell out of her.
Kiss, touch, grind, and then some. I want to yank that lush body against mine, let her feel how much she turns me on, and find out if I do the same thing to her.
The way her breath barely catches sends my mind spinning and lust spiraling tight in me.
I can’t help but hope she wants what I do, and it feels like she could, going by the way she touches my face.
It truly fucking does, and maybe that’s why her name takes shape in my throat like a warning.
So she knows she’s playing with fire if she touches me like this again.
Then I remember. This is Harper, and she probably has no idea of the effect she has on me. I’ve never known someone like her. Here she is saying all these sweet, sexy things, and probably not even realizing what it can do to a man.
Makes it hard to resist, and right now I don’t want to.
Fuck resistance. Let her play with me for a few minutes.
“Anything else you want to feel up?” I ask, hoping she’ll take me up on my extremely generous offer to be her test subject.
“The arms are available. The chest is on duty, too. Even the hair is fair game.” I tip my forehead toward her, inviting.
In a second, her hand is in my hair. She’s slow and measured, and takes her time running her fingers through the strands.
My mind goes haywire, picturing every other kind of scenario where her hands might thread through my hair, pulling me close.
Ones where she kisses me hungrily, consuming my lips with the kind of greedy touch that leads to clothes yanked halfway off in a fevered frenzy.
That turns into slammed doors and hot up-against-the-wall sex, her panties falling to her knees.
Or to one of my favorites, one of my fallbacks, one of my simplest and yet hottest fantasies—her legs wrapped tight around my head as I taste her on my lips. As I send her soaring with my tongue.
The next day, I’d walk past her, brush a strand of hair away from her ear and whisper I can still taste you. She’d shudder, then run her hands through my hair again, needing more.
Like she’s doing on the street right now. For a sliver of a second, her hand stops and rests against me. I can feel her soft breath on my face. I meet her eyes, and try to read her, to find that flicker in her blue irises that would match the flame inside me.
“Kiss the girl, Mister Orgasm!”
I jerk my head at the same time Harper does. The two guys are now across the street, cheering me on from the edge of the sidewalk. They probably think we’re together.
“Do it!” the other one chimes in. “Like the Kissing Virus episode.”
Harper turns back to me, her lips curving up in a playful grin. “He had to kiss her to cure her,” she whispers, as if I could forget that little element in the storyline. “Can’t disappoint the fans.”
I barely have time to register how the hell this is happening, but she’s swaying closer. My brain is full of noise and static, and I don’t know if this is a double-dog-dare until she mouths, For the fan-boys right?
And hell, if the fan-boys make this possible, I should send them a signed collector’s edition of every panel. “Let’s give them a show,” I say, my throat dry as it becomes clear that she’s not messing around.
“Hurry! Or the virus will spread!” one of the guys shouts, and Harper shudders, clasping her hand to her chest as she whispers, “You’re the only one who can save me.”
The very line the damsel in distress uttered in that episode.
She’s letting them egg us on. Harper loves games. She loves entertainment; she loves performing. This is the magician in her, taking the trick from its setup through to the payoff.
She runs her thumb along my jawline, and my breath hitches.
There’s no time to process, no time to analyze. And since she just had her hands all over me, it’s only fair that I get to return the favor.
Possibility hums in me. I slide my right hand into her hair, letting the soft strands fall through my fingers, nice and slow, as I watch her expression flip from that daring playfulness to something entirely new.
Something unguarded.
It’s so enticing. That look makes me long for her even more.
Up close, her blue eyes are even brighter, like island waters, and I can smell the hint of something like oranges from her shampoo. It’s heady, and my mouth waters, wanting to taste her, inhale her.
I bring my right hand to her chin, gently tipping her face up toward me.
My heart rate quickens, and I lick my lips as our gazes lock.
Her eyes shimmer with desire that looks so damn authentic.
I tug her close, and her lips part, a soft breath escaping as our eyes close.
Judging from her reaction, it sure as hell feels like she wants this in a way that goes well beyond the reason we’re play acting.
But then I stop thinking of reasons at all, as I slant my mouth to hers.
The world slows, and I kiss Harper as the pair of fans across the street hoot and holler, shouting “woohoo” and “hell, yeah” and finally a victorious, “She’s saved! ”
This is the payoff, and what a payoff it is.
I want to high-five them for goading her, or goading me, or whatever happened to make this moment possible.
Because this is exhilarating.
Our lips graze. There’s a hint of lip gloss, and the faintest taste of the Long-Distance Lover she drank at the bar. I brush my lips across hers, a barely-there caress that’s full of promise, a hint of what it could become if it were real, without the audience.
Whatever this kiss is, it possesses its own pulse, its own frequency, as if the air around us is charged and vibrating with sensual energy.
Or maybe it’s just me, because my body is humming. My skin tingles, and this whisper of a kiss lights me up all over, making my mind gallop far beyond the payoff.
“Your lips are so soft,” I whisper against her, and she gasps in response, then presses her mouth to me once more, murmuring, “Yours, too.”
We’ve pulled off the ruse with aplomb, but when her lips sweep across mine one more time, it feels way more than necessary for the kiss-the-girl dare to be authentic.
It feels like it’s slipped into more.
But just as the lingering build becomes almost unbearable and I’m ready to slide my tongue between her lips, the guys shout and clap, beginning a chorus of “Mister O!” that kills the mood.
We snap apart.
Harper blinks, stares down, then slides her gaze back up. The look in her eyes is guilty, like she feels bad that we locked lips. “Well,” she says brightly, as if she’s trying to smooth over an awkward moment, “good thing Mister O gave the girl the right dosage for the kissing virus.”
I clear my throat, trying to make sense of what she just said. Of what just happened. Of how we basically reenacted a scene from my show. How I’m the hero, and she’s the girl I rescued from doom.
“I mean, they totally expected you to do that,” she adds, like she needs to justify our kiss.
“Yeah, definitely,” I say, going along with her, because my brain is swimming in a sea of endorphins, and agreeing is way easier than anything else. I glance across the street and give the duo a quick thumbs up.
“She’s all good,” I tell them, as Mister O said in the show.
Harper joins in, waving, too. She turns back to me and parks her hand on my shoulder. “Those guys worship you and the ladies’ man character you created.”
I scrunch my brow, wishing we weren’t talking about fictional shit right now, because that felt really fucking real to me. But I have no idea if she liked that kiss as much as I did.
“I’m all about the show,” I say, seconding her.
She laughs, then her expression shifts, and it’s earnest again, like when she first opened up at the bar.
“I really appreciate your help with this whole dating thing,” she says, and the kiss has vanished into the night.
The trick is over, and the magician and the show creator have left the stage.
We’re just Harper and Nick now, buddies with a secret project.
“Of course. I’m happy to do it. And, like I told you, Jason is really into you,” I say, since it’s so much easier for me to make sense of the other dude right now than to sort out the tangled mess in my head.
She shrugs and quirks up the corner of her lips. “Yeah?”
“Absolutely. You should go for it with him,” I say, mustering false enthusiasm as I try to return to being her dating tutor, even though I might be a candidate for a split personality study since we just kissed, and now I’m telling her to go all-out for another guy.
Maybe I caught some new strain of her babble-around-someone-I’m-into virus with that kiss.
“You think so?” she asks, with an inquisitive tilt of her head.
“Definitely. He might be the man of your dreams.” Yup. A full-blown case of it.
She shoots me a skeptical look, then shrugs. “Would you meet me after I go out with him, so I can tell you everything while it’s fresh in my mind?” she asks, placing her palms together. I’m about to say no, when she adds, “After all, I did 1919 White Sox for you.”
“Then you made me look like a rock star in front of my fans just now,” I say, still on autopilot. But even though I’m reluctant, I did sign up to help her, so this is, evidently, the drill. “Let me know where and when.”
“I’ll text you,” she says, then heads up the steps, and I watch as she unlocks the door to her building, turns around, and waves to me through the glass.
Then she’s gone, taking with her the best and strangest first kiss I’ve ever had.
I return to my home on Seventy-Third, a fourth-floor apartment with exposed brick walls and a huge window sporting a view of the park. As the door shuts behind me with a faint click, I ask myself if it even counts as a first kiss if you don’t know if it was real or just a dare?
I don’t think it lasted more than fifteen seconds, but those fifteen seconds echo inside me, and I can still feel the imprint of her lips on mine. I can still smell her sweet scent when I breathe in. I can still hear her soft gasp in my ears.
I wish I knew if she was in her apartment, lingering on those fifteen seconds, too.
But I can’t know, and I won’t know.
I do the one thing that’s been a constant my whole life.
The one thing that never frustrates me, and that always centers me.
I toe off my shoes, flop down on my cushy gray couch by the big bay window, and grab my notebook.
I have another episode to work on, and even though I don’t do all the writing and animating anymore, the ideas and the storylines are mine.
But as I put the pencil to paper, I find I’m not in the mood to problem-solve for a cartoon hero. Instead, I just draw. Freestyle. Whatever comes to mind.
The trouble is when I finish, it’s a caricature of a certain redhead in Daisy Dukes and high heels, working under the hood of a car. I give the drawing the evil eye, and toss it on the coffee table. Me and my fucking imagination, getting away from me once again.
A text arrives from her a minute later, and I wish I didn’t feel a spark of possibility when I see her name.
The spark is doused coldly as I read the message.
Coffee with Jason Saturday afternoon. Meet afterward?
It’s official. It was a kiss on a dare, and it absolutely doesn't count. In fact, it’s as if it never happened, so I file it away in the not-gonna-happen-again drawer, then I tell her yes.
After that, I finally write back to Spencer, making plans to see him this weekend.
Perfect. That’ll knock his sister right out of my solar system.