time.” In all the time we’ve known each other and although I’ve known he’s had them, Andrew has never talked about a girlfriend near me. “And then you . . .” He lets the sentence hang, and I worry if I try to speak, my voice won’t work. “It threw me. Not in a bad way. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
“Not really.” I hear the way my words come out wavy.
I mean, I think I know where he’s going with this, but I need him to articulate it carefully. He could mean a lot of things. Like, this year is different because Theo and I aren’t super close. Or this year is different because I finally told Andrew how I feel about him. Or, for example, this year is different because I’ve traveled through time, and he has no idea.
“Remember how I said I was at a party a couple months back,” he whispers, “and a friend of a friend was reading tarot cards?”
“Yeah.”
“I was teasing her about it, I guess, and she made me sit down. Put these cards in front of me and was like, ‘I’ll do your reading.’ What do I have to lose? She doesn’t know me. So I told her, ‘Sure.’ She looked down at the cards and said I could be happy being second at work. Told me I didn’t need a big life, didn’t need to set the world on fire. She’s right—I don’t. But then she told me I’d already met the love of my life, I just wasn’t listening.” He laughs. “And all I do is listen.”
There is a swarm of dragonflies inside me, colorful and bright and taking up too much space. It’s hard to breathe, because I feel this weight of all the things that he might mean by this.
“I still can’t believe I didn’t ever know,” he says, and turns his head down. “How you felt about me.”
I gnaw on my lip. “I can’t figure out if you’ve been put off by that,” I whisper. It feels like a decade passes before I decide to push the next words out: “Or turned on by it.”
He shifts beside me, angling his body into mine. When I realize what’s about to happen, my heart is no longer a heart, it’s a gloved fist, punching the wall of my ribs again and again. Andrew lifts a hand, so unhurried, and rests it on the side of my neck.
His breath shakes when he exhales. “Turned on.”
And just like that, Andrew’s lips are on mine. Again, he breaks it too soon, but even in that single, perfect second, his touch was hungrier, playful. It was nothing like the public moment under the mistletoe.
And even though our lips are no longer touching, the intensity continues to ratchet higher because he stays right there, maybe only an inch from me, and he’s struggling to breathe just like I am. It’s dark in here, compressed and warm. A few of his shirts are on hangers—slid to the side so they bracket us—and they smell like him. Those same shirts have been on his skin when he’s worked and sweated, napped and played cards with me in the basement, and now they’re brushing against my back just after he kissed me.
“Is this okay?”
“It’s better than fine,” I whisper.
He laughs, breathlessly, and this here—breathing with him, deliciously anticipating what comes next—is easily the most erotic moment of my life.
I stretch forward just as he bends again, and his mouth is there, lips parting. When his arms come around my waist, pulling me into him, I moan and he takes the opportunity to sweep his tongue across mine.
That’s it.
I get it. I will no longer snort derisively at descriptions of women in novels falling to pieces with barely a touch. I can’t imagine what kinds of noises I’d make if I ever managed to get this man naked.
Heat blazes a path from my mouth down my throat, across my pounding chest, and down the center of my stomach. A million times I imagined this, but my brain is an uncreative disappointment in hindsight, because this is beyond anything I’ve conjured. Andrew tastes like peppermint and chocolate, smells like the smoke from the wood in the fireplace, and feels like sunshine. If you put all my favorite things in a Willy Wonka machine, I’m pretty sure Andrew Hollis is the candy that would come out. It’s all I can do not to press my hips against his