e choosing silence at school, visiting the bar was a different type of escape. I thought I had the courage to be me, but I’m still hiding behind a facade.
“Most of us regret it,” he says.
My eyebrows knit together. “What?”
“Kissing just for the sake of kissing. Most times, people regret it.”
I roll my eyes. “That’s not true. If it were, there would be more people like me and I’m obviously not the epitome of cool.”
“Think what you want, but I’m telling you how it is.”
Razor moves and it’s slow and he regains my attention. My heart patters with each gained centimeter in my direction. Eventually, he’s in front of me again and so near that my knees brush against his thighs. He reaches toward me and smooths my hair behind my ear. His fingers lightly graze the skin of my neck and I suck in a breath with the beautiful teasing tickle.
“Why here?” he asks.
I shrug. “Just wanted to be wild tonight. To act differently than I normally do.”
“Wild?”
“Wild,” I repeat, and I can’t help the smile that accompanies the word. I must sound insanely silly to him.
“Kissing a strange guy at a bar isn’t wild,” he says. “It’s cliché.”
“Is that right?”
“It is.”
He stares at my lips like he’s having blush-worthy thoughts that involve me. I should say something witty or intelligent, but I’ve been placed on mute.
“I’ll tell you what,” he continues. “If you want wild—if you want a kiss that breaks the rules, I’ll give you one, but not here, not now.”
I think my heart exploded. Razor of the Reign of Terror—the guy all the girls have dreamed about for years—has offered to kiss me. “When?”
“When I say.” His lips edge up, sending a thrill through my bloodstream. “If you have the nerve.”
“I’ll have it,” I exclaim.
“I’ll remember you agreed to this.”
“So will I. My mind is a steel trap.”
He laughs and I frown. He said something earlier about me being drunk and maybe I am, but he doesn’t understand. When I say I’ll remember, I will. “My mind’s messed up. Messed up like there’s something wrong with me.”
Razor’s face falls. “What?”
I wave off his concern. “It’s not brain damage. Well...maybe. I have this huge family, so maybe I was dropped on my head a couple times as a kid. It wouldn’t shock me. You should have seen how many times Liam dropped Joshua, but anyhow, according to my parents I was born with my wires crossed. You see, whenever I learn something that’s random, it stays.”
Razor scratches his jaw again, and this time I notice how smooth it is. I would give anything to skim my fingers against his skin. Now, that would be bold.
“What do you mean, it stays?”
I flutter my fingers in the air, mocking a magician’s assistant. “It stays in my head. All the random facts and knowledge, they never go away. Weird, right?”
RAZOR
WEIRD? THAT’S THE coolest thing I’ve heard. It also explains a ton about Breanna Miller. “You have a photographic memory.”
She shakes her head too fast, and because she’s drunk, she needs to stop or she’ll get dizzy again. “Not even close. I suck at math. Like, suck. As in the moment a number is brought up, it’s like I’m surrounded by darkness. And I don’t remember everything, but I have this crazy ability to remember facts. Really weird, random facts. Like, by the time I was three, I knew the state capitals.”