Bliss and the Art of Forever - Alison Kent Page 0,108

digging into her jeans pocket for her phone.

His mouth quirked. “You’re going to take my picture.”

“Why not?” She centered him on the screen, then took a step to the right, taking her time setting up the shot. She wanted it to be perfect, though seriously, with her subject matter, how could it be anything else?

“Weren’t we just talking about creepy?” he asked, one brow going up, one dimple deepening. The light from the front window lit his hair until the hint of auburn was no longer a coal but a flame.

She took a shot and said, “This is not creepy. This is me commemorating the moment I realized you and I are kindred bibliophilic spirits.”

“Thought you might’ve realized that when I showed you the Nietzsche and the Tennyson.” He started to pull his fists from his pockets; she stopped him with a sharp shake of her head. “Or when you saw the Frank Herbert. Though, really, Pooh should’ve clinched it.”

“I didn’t know you as well then,” she said, wanting to get closer, to photograph the words on his wrist, the ones on his neck. “I thought you might’ve just pulled quotes out of the air. Or off the Internet.”

“Not to burst your bubble, but a couple of them, I did.”

“What?” She looked away from his framed image to the man in front of her. “Say it isn’t so.”

He shrugged. “Can’t keep it all in my brain. No matter how big my head is.”

She centered him again and touched the button. She wanted to capture all of him: his boots, his jeans bunched around them and hanging low on his hips from the weight of his fists. The strip of his abdomen and the text from Dune that showed above his jeans’ copper buttons.

She took another shot. She wanted every wrinkle of his shirt. She loved his wrinkles. This shirt was a faded-to-white pink; she liked that he’d owned it in its original color. The collar was twisted, the sleeves cuffed up his forearms; both allowed for more of his tattoos to show.

She lined him up once more. She wanted his dimples and his grin and the scruff on his face. His sharp cheekbones. His blade of a nose. His green eyes and long lashes and his brow that even when frowning wasn’t heavy.

But mostly she wanted his hair, every ginger-brown strand. The ones wound into the knot he always wore, the ones sticking out, the ones hanging in twists that made her think of his daughter’s corkscrew pigtails.

She didn’t want to forget anything about him, or lose a single memory of their time together, or get to Italy and wonder if she’d made the right choice for fear of losing what she’d had with her first love.

“Got it,” she said at last, because she couldn’t stare at him forever. At least not the him across the room in the flesh. “And your head’s not that big. So I forgive you for having to cheat.”

“Like you had that Jane Austen bit memorized.”

“Actually, I did,” she said. The quote had stuck with her for a very long time. The idea of hope being equated with patience . . . funny that patience was a concrete emotion within her control while hope seemed so ethereal, yet they were so closely related as she looked ahead.

“How’s it healing? The tat?” he asked, walking toward her.

“It’s good,” she said, tucking her phone into her pocket.

“Show me.”

She brought her gaze up slowly, her pulse quickening, the look in his eyes bringing to mind the first time he’d kissed her, the second time he’d kissed her, the third time . . . and how none of them had been kisses between friends.

“Now?” she asked, because to show him she’d have to lift her shirt to reveal her back and her shoulder, and it seemed too much a tempting of fate with his daughter liable to run into the room.

“It’s just your shoulder,” he said, stopping in front of her, one brow going up, his tongue in his cheek as he tried not to grin.

“This isn’t funny. Me baring skin in front of you is not a good idea. Addy could come in at the worst possible time.”

“That being me looking at your tattoo? It’s not like I haven’t seen—”

“Don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t. We can’t. Not now.”

“Hey, Brooklyn.” He frowned as he said her name. “I’m teasing. If you don’t want me to see—”

“Oh, Callum. It’s not that,” she said, but she didn’t say