sigh. “Seriously, Amy? Do I need to draw you a map?” He grabbed the waistband of my jeans and slid me across the tailgate, closing the space between us. I fell against his chest and he wrapped his arms around me. My squeak of surprise was colored with approval, but it still made him pause, holding me against him, his gaze roaming my face, lingering on my mouth before coming back to meet my eye.
“This would be the time to tell me if you still hate me,” he said.
“I don’t hate you, you moron.” He didn’t even waste time laughing. All my kisses so far had started tentative, inquiring, diffident. Ben had gotten the inquiry out of the way, and captured my mouth with his in a kiss that took permission as given. Which it was. Totally. Even if I’d called him a moron.
His hand slid up to the back of my head, and he kissed me more deeply. I cupped his face with my hands and answered some questions of my own. He had a rough chin this late at night. He tasted like chocolate and coffee.
When he pulled back, he was gloriously out of breath, and so was I. “You still want to go inside the truck?” he asked.
“Here is good,” I said, and kissed him again.
“I haul manure in this truck,” he said when I gave him the chance to speak.
That had to be the weirdest way to phrase a proposition ever, but it worked. “Inside is better.”
33
it’s hard to walk while you’re kissing someone. Harder still to work a door handle. And that’s not a euphemism for anything dirty. So don’t ask me how Ben and I managed to get where we were, tangled up together on the bench seat of the truck, somehow working around the console and the steering wheel and the gearshift, and only once blowing the horn.
That’s not a euphemism, either.
I only know that when Ben was kissing me, the whole world retreated. I felt things I’d never felt before, in places I never knew were connected.
But I was pretty sure that whatever was buzzing against my thigh was not normal. For one thing, it was ringing.
Ben dragged his mouth away from mine and mumbled a curse that was a little shocking and kind of hot.
“Ignore it,” he said.
That was easy for him to say when his cell phone was rounding third base. If anyone got a home run tonight, I didn’t want it to be Verizon Wireless.
“I can’t,” I said when it buzzed again. “It’s in a really distracting place.”
He shifted his weight enough to reach into his pocket—I sucked in my breath at how high his hand grazed my thigh-took out the phone, and tossed it toward the dash. It fell to the floorboard and kept ringing.
“Problem solved.” And then he kissed me again, and I forgot about the ringing, until there was a chirp of a voice message and oh my God how was I even paying attention to that?
I turned my head, asking breathlessly, “Aren’t you going to see who it was?”
“No,” said Ben, his voice tickling the spot behind my ear. I shivered all the way to my toes, and I wanted to lose myself in that sensation, but a really unwelcome worry kept tugging me back to earth.
“What if it’s your mother?”
“It probably is. I don’t care.”
My insides melted at the rough edge in his voice. Mr. Responsible wanted to be with me so badly, he didn’t care who was calling. It was, quite possibly, the most flattering thing a guy had ever said to me. Verbally or nonverbally, and trust me, he was really eloquent with the nonverbal just then.
“What if something is wrong? It’s really late.”
He tensed, and it had nothing to do with me, or with the way his weight pressed me into the cushion of the truck seat or the way our shirts had worked up so that the skin of my stomach was so hot against the hard muscle of his.
“I don’t care.” He touched his forehead to mine, his voice frayed at the edges with a conflict that went beyond us and the cab of his truck. “I’ve given up my fraternity and my apartment and my band, and I’ve been wanting for three whole days to see your underwear again, and for just one hour I’m not going to let the ranch interrupt.”
That was really presumptuous, that he was going to get to see my underwear again. But considering