the rearview mirror more than was necessary. I couldn’t help twisting in my seat.
“Are we being followed?” I asked.
“No. This isn’t an Ian Fleming novel, as much as you keep making it out to be. No one watches anyone that closely. But if we were, you would’ve just given us away.” His lips were quirking.
I punched him on the shoulder. “Don’t make fun of me. This has all been pretty unbelievable. It does feel like I’m in a spy movie.”
He caught my hand, twisting it so that our fingers were locked, and settled them on his thigh. I swallowed hard as the heat of his body invaded my hand and sent waves of sensations up my arm to my heart.
“I’m sorry you’re involved in this. More sorry than even that godawful night when I called you to come and get me, and you showed up in Jersey’s car by yourself.” His voice was deep with emotions. The same emotions I’d heard in Jada’s earlier. Regret and recrimination.
My brain flashed back to the night five years before. The joy I’d felt when he’d called me for help. The stupidity of thinking I could drive the car after only half a dozen attempts.
“If I’d woken Jersey or Jada, nothing would have happened. That night was on me, not you,” I said quietly, hands going to the end of my hair, twisting it in my fingers as my own regrets flew through me.
“But I still let you drive when I shouldn’t have. Just like now. I not only let you go into the snake’s pit, I asked you to, and it’s put you at an even bigger risk.” He was angry with himself.
I squeezed his hand, pulling it to me and kissing the jagged scar he’d gotten from saving my life. I set our joined hands on my thigh instead of his. He glanced over, dragging his eyes down the length of me to where our hands rested before darting them back to the road.
“Can I tell you a secret?” I asked quietly.
He smiled. “I think you know you can.”
“As terrifying as it’s all been, it’s actually the first time I’ve really felt alive in a long time.”
We pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, he turned the engine off, and then turned to me. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. This. I feel alive here. With you. Back in Palo Alto, I was just going through the motions, checking the boxes, doing what I knew everyone expected of me.”
He untangled his hand from mine and brushed his fingers across a curl of hair that had escaped the loose braid I’d wrapped my hair into that morning. He tucked the tendril behind my ear and then slid his hand over my jaw, landing at my neck, a motion that was somehow becoming our thing. Sweet and full of affection.
“I don’t know what I hate more,” he said. “You feeling that way or this being the reason you don’t.”
“Why would you hate making me feel alive?”
“You know why. I’m too old, too screwed up, too entrenched in a dangerous life to even risk letting you into it,” he said softly, his eyes closing and then opening again to take me in as if it were painful to look at me.
“First, six years isn’t really all that much. You’re absolutely not any more screwed up than I am, and it seems like the danger is almost over, right?” I refused to let him off the hook that easily. Not now. Not when we’d kissed and talked about celebrating with our bodies.
His index finger caressed my jawline, lingering at the soft spot below my ear, almost like he was kissing it with his lips instead of a hand. My body was slowly combusting.
I reached out, twisted my hand into his sweatshirt, and pulled so our faces were inches apart. “If you leave me hanging, after days of imagining this—us, kisses, hands on skin—I’m going to give you to the Kyōdaina myself.”
Then, I pushed our lips together, and it was an explosion of light and smells that dimmed everything else in the world but us. My soft lips pressed against his chapped ones from days of fighting the wind and the waves. I pushed my tongue against them, begging entrance, begging for him to just give in to what our bodies had felt for so long it was as if it was the only memory I had.
He groaned, opening his mouth and letting me explore