“I think I love her just enough.”
Good thing I was holding on to the edge of the door or I would’ve toppled over. I swear his love went down to my knees, making them weak. That and the way he’s been watching me ever since he arrived.
Like he can’t get enough of me.
“Are we going to stand here all day or are you gonna invite me in?” he asks when I don’t say anything.
I shake my head and step aside. “Yeah. Come on in.”
His boots click as they cross over the threshold and something about that makes me flush. It also makes me restless and talkative.
“So you’re one of those guys.”
Zach turns around to face me as I shut the door. “What guys?”
“Who call their mode of transportation a she.” I walk to the kitchen where I’ve set up all the books and things that we’re going to use tonight as I keep babbling, “It’s a little crazy, I think. It’s just a bike. I mean, I have a car. I love that car even though I’m a little scared of it right now. But I don’t call it a he. I just call it an it, you know. Oh, and the guys who name their cars? Ugh. How pathetic do you have to be to do that? Right? It’s like –”
“I have a name for my bike.”
My eyes almost pop out and I press my lips together, grimacing.
Why do I keep saying the wrong things around him?
I spin around and find him almost right behind me. “You do?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
He takes a step toward me and I press against the edge of the island. “Blue.”
“What?”
“I call it Blue.”
Zach’s crowding me now. His big, tall body is bent to the shape of mine. I feel his thighs pressed up against my slightly open ones and I hear my own pulse in my ears. Racing, racing and roaring.
“You call your bike Blue?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But it’s black.”
“So?”
“I…” I frown and for some reason, he finds it funny. He finds it a reason to bend down and kiss my blue hair softly.
My eyes fall shut on a sigh.
“Speechless, finally,” he whispers to my hair. “And all it took was one simple fact.”
Narrowing my eyes, I put a hand on his stomach – the stomach that I was kind of riding yesterday – and give him a push.
He leans back and I say, “Very funny. Why do you call your bike by a name that you call me? And while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about why do you call me Blue?”
Zach throws a look at my hair and shrugs. “Yeah, that is a mystery.”
“I didn’t get blue hair until the eighth grade. You’ve been calling me Blue since day one.”
“Your point?”
“Why don’t you ever call me Cleo?” I burst out with a question that I didn’t even know I had.
I’ve had it forever, inside me.
Suddenly, I have this great, great urge for him to say my name. It’s not that I don’t like the name he gave me. I love it. I’ve always loved it even when I never accepted it.
But I want to hear how my name will sound on his tongue.
I want to know what goes through his mind when he calls me by his special name for me. Why did he name his bike after me?
I want to know everything about him. Every little thing.
“But that’s not your name, either.”
“What?”
Zach leans over and whispers on my lips, “Cleopatra. That’s your name, right?”
I swallow against the onslaught of emotions. I feel the savage flapping of the butterflies in my stomach and I press my belly against him to make him feel it too. Make him feel all these crazy, intense emotions inside of me.
“But hardly anyone calls me that.”
A lopsided smile as he traces my cheek with a thumb. “Do you know Cleopatra was an Egyptian queen?”
I nod. “Yeah. My mom used to tell me that she was the most beautiful woman of her time.”
“People are crazy, aren’t they?”
I clutch his dark t-shirt at his waist. “Why?”
“They don’t know what they’re talking about. One look at you and they would’ve snatched away her crown and laid it down at your feet.”
The shudder that goes through me is the biggest one yet.
He called me beautiful.
Beautiful.
I blink up at him. “You’re being nice to me.”
He smiles slightly and acknowledges my statement with a grunt.
I place a kiss on his jaw.
“So, is this it?”
He tips his chin toward the books scattered on the island and I nod. “Yeah. Art sometimes leaves his storybooks here but I borrowed all of them from Doris. So we have a lot of reading material.”
His nod is short, barely there.
I can feel his reluctance. How much he doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to read. He doesn’t want to do this.