On His Face - Tabatha Kiss Page 0,32
lips together. “I don’t know about you, Drew, but this doesn’t happen to me very… ever. I’m not usually the girl people chase after, so… yeah. Overwhelmed is how I feel.”
I stare at her. I must stare for too long because she leans back slightly and shifts on her seat.
“What?” she asks.
“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m just surprised.”
“Surprised?”
“You know what I thought the first time I saw you?”
“What?” she groans, dreading the answer.
“Wow,” I say. “She’s really pretty.”
She scoffs. “You did not!”
I raise a Scout’s Honor. “It was about a week before we met. I was checking the bulletin board in Ramsey Hall for quick beer money when I saw you waiting outside of a classroom with Jenna. Your hair was up in a messy bun. You wore a pair of overalls and a striped t-shirt and your red sneakers.” I bend my left elbow and draw a line along the back of my forearm. “And you had this long, granite mark on your hand like you’d been working on something all day but you didn’t care to clean it off. Almost like you were proud of it. Jenna said something, and you started laughing so hard and I just remember thinking… wow…” I smile. “She’s really pretty.”
She sits stunned, barely blinking. “You remember what I was wearing?”
“I looked away for a second to answer a text and you were gone,” I say. “I wasn’t sure I’d find you again, but then I walked into Professor Wilson’s class a few nights later and there you were. I thought, excellent, I have something to look at for the next ninety minutes. I didn’t get bored once.”
“Is that true?” she asks, still doubtful.
“I couldn’t keep my eyes off you the whole night. And then you were in my car and my heart was pounding. And then I was in your house and my heart was still pounding. Everything about you was just… perfect.”
“Okay, but…”
“But what?”
She lowers her voice. “I sneezed on your face.”
I laugh. Honestly, I’d forgotten all about that. “Okay. Flawed. You were intensely flawed, and I had to fix you.”
“That’s more like it,” she says, amused.
I pause, admiring her golden eyes. “I like you, Heidi Newbury. I like you a lot… and I would really like it if you’d let me take you to dinner tonight.”
Heidi blushes. Her chest rises and falls with a heavy breath. Then another one. And another one.
“There you go again,” she finally says. “Saying cute things.”
I grin. “What do you say?”
She inhales. “I say… that I like you, too.”
It feels nice. Really nice.
“But,” she continues, “I think we should address the brother-shaped elephant in the room.”
I sit back and nod. “Seth.”
“To be honest, you know him better than I do right now.” She shrugs a shoulder. “How do you think he’ll react to this?”
“Not well,” I answer.
“At all?”
“He’s more or less already addressed the possibility with me… and the entire Delta Xi house.”
Heidi squints. “How so?”
“He made us all pledge that we’d never touch you.”
She sits back, offended. “He did?”
“You are strictly off-limits to everyone in the house, basically.”
Her face screws up as she looks into the opposite corner. “What a dick,” she mutters.
“It’s not that uncommon, to be fair,” I say, feeling the urge to defend my friend. “No girlfriends, no sisters, no mothers. It’s kind of a bro code thing.”
She studies me for a moment. “So, what are you doing here, then?” she asks.
Fair question.
“Breaking the rules,” I answer.
“Why?”
I smile. “Because I think it might be worth it.”
“But when we tell him—”
“We won’t.”
Heidi pauses, her brows rising. “We won’t?”
I take a deep breath, quietly realizing the full reality of what I’m suggesting.
I will date my best friend’s little sister behind his back.
“We won’t,” I say it again, letting it sink in. “We’ll go on a few dates first. If it doesn’t work out, then it’ll be like it never happened. He doesn’t have to know.”
Heidi nods slowly. “And if it works out?”
Then, I’ll be the happiest man alive.
“Then we’ll figure something out,” I say. “Either way, I don’t want to give up without knowing for sure. Do you?”
She hesitates, taking her time. My gut tightens as I wait, wondering if this really was over before it ever began.
“No,” she answers. “I want to know for sure, too.”
I exhale, relieved. “Good.”
We gaze at each other. The cafe buzzes around us, but it’s easy to ignore. It’s easy to get lost in those big, golden eyes of hers and forget about all the