on the wall, and I couldn’t help but stare at the strip of skin at his waistband that appeared when he raised his arms.
“Listen, Heath, I—”
“Dante, I wanted to—”
Our eyes met briefly, sending a nervous thrill down my spine, and then Dante looked away and rubbed the back of his neck.
I didn’t know what he had to say, but I was the one who’d shown up at Stella’s, so I figured I should at least say what I came to say first. “I’m sorry.”
Dante’s sharp eyes jumped back to meet mine, this time with a small furrow of confusion in his brow.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said. I felt my cheeks grow hot, and I looked down at my feet instead of meeting Dante’s eyes—confident enough to say the words, but not enough to see Dante react to them. “Kiss you, I mean. We’re supposed to be working together, and that’s not how I should be behaving as a chaperone, especially when we’d gotten off to such a rocky start as it is. It was unprofessional of me, and I’m sorry for… For putting you in that position.”
After a few seconds of silence, I dared a glance up at Dante’s face. Dante blinked at me, still looking confused.
“I just want to be able to work together,” I said. “That’s all.”
“No, no, I—I’m the one who should be apologizing to you,” Dante said. “I moved way too fast.”
“What?” I asked. That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear at all.
“I just… Lost my head a little bit after you kissed me,” Dante said, cringing in embarrassment. “But I shouldn’t have been so forward. I pressured you into taking it further, and didn’t even talk to you about it first.”
“You didn’t pressure me,” I said. Dante looked so unusually unsure of himself, and I found myself wanting to soothe him. I took a step forward, close enough to touch, but I couldn’t make myself close the distance entirely. “I… I wanted that.”
Dante’s eyes leaped to mine, suddenly burning with renewed interest.
Encouraged by his reaction, I forced myself to continue. “I thought you didn’t want to continue because—because I’m so inexperienced.”
“Oh,” Dante said in a small voice. He frowned, and then drew his lower lip in between his teeth thoughtfully, looking at me with a different kind of regret. “Oh, Heath.”
Shame and embarrassment rushed through me, turning my blood to ice in my veins. I hated the distressed look in his eyes—the last thing I wanted was for Dante to pity me.
Had it sounded like I was whining? Fuck, I hadn’t meant it that way—I’d just wanted to be straightforward and mature—but I probably sounded like a child. I wasn’t the Kid, I was just… some kid. Some pathetic nobody who couldn’t even manage to get laid well into his twenties.
I grimaced. I couldn’t bear to just stand here under that sympathetic gaze. Better to just head back to Elkin Lake before I made even more of a fool of myself and suck up the awkwardness the few times a week I had to act as his chaperone. I turned to leave, but before I could so much as take a step toward the door, Dante’s flour-covered hand folded over my shoulder.
“Wait.”
I swallowed hard, but didn’t turn back around to face him. “I should go.”
“That’s not what I thought,” Dante said, with an edge of frantic desperation in his voice. “That’s not why I stopped yesterday.”
What? Before I could talk myself out of it, I asked, “Then what was it?”
Dante kept his hand on my shoulder, but his touch was light as he stepped a little closer. He was telegraphing his movements, I realized—giving me plenty of time to move or pull away if I wanted to. But I found I didn’t want to, so I held my ground.
His other hand fell to my hip, his touch so light it barely counted as a touch. But there was still space between us, a space so small I thought I could feel the heat radiating from Dante’s body.
“I got a little—overexcited,” he said in a low voice, close to my ear. “It’s not that I wanted to stop. It’s that I wanted to keep going too badly.”
My breath caught in my throat. That couldn’t be right.
And yet here Dante was, curling his fingers into the curve of my hip—like maybe he still wanted.
I took a careful step back, closing the distance between us, my back pressed to his stomach and chest. Dante exhaled