“Anyway, trust me, I understand wanting to be independent.” He held my hand tightly. “But sometimes winning means figuring out how best to use others’ resources.”
That sounded a bit mercenary, even for me. “I don’t want to use you,” I whispered.
“Then don’t.” With that, he kissed me, stars above us, galaxies worth of emotions unspooling in my chest. When we kissed like this, I felt like the person I’d always wanted to be—ten feet tall, powerful, confident. Liked. I spent so much time pretending that things didn’t matter, pretending I didn’t care about being alone, but when we kissed, I no longer felt left out. And all those rules and cues that often seemed beyond me became so easy when he put his arms around me.
Instead, it felt like the best kind of game—like taking turns that built on each other. He did a concrete action like licking the seam of my mouth. I did something in response like capturing his tongue between my lips, making him groan and shudder. Back and forth we went until we were both breathing hard, losing all track of turns, both winners, and maybe he was right and it didn’t matter who went first or second or who did more when we had the same common goal.
His hand was warm, urging me closer as his mouth continued to coax more gasps from me. My own hand got bold, toying with the hem of his T-shirt, fingertip grazing the warm skin of his back, making him hiss and break the kiss.
“I’m supposed to be showing you constellations.” His laugh was as unsteady as my breathing.
“I like this better,” I assured him, even as I let him scoot back a little. “But sure, teach away.”
“You’re going to kill me.” He rested his head on mine, tucking me against his shoulder. I liked this almost as much as the kissing, liked the calm closeness of simply being here like this. The night air was chilly, even with the picnic blanket around our shoulders. He pointed up at the sky. “So okay, that’s the North Star. And from there you can start to make out different constellations.”
As compelling as him talking science was, he didn’t make it very far through his astronomy lecture before we were kissing again. I wasn’t even sure who started that round, only that one second he was talking about Orion’s Belt, and the next we were lip-locked as urgently as if we hadn’t already spent huge chunks of the day like this.
“Damn. You’re hell on my astronomy knowledge,” he said as we came up for air.
“We’ll just have to do this again.”
“We will,” he said firmly, eyes linking with mine. There was a message there. A promise maybe even, and that made it easy to gloss past the con and everything it represented, everything that could happen, good and bad, and to focus on our return trip—to fantasize about more days spent like this. With him not having a job to get back to, maybe we could even stretch it out further… The thought made a happy shiver race through me.
“Cold?” he asked, pulling me closer.
“Not really, but maybe we should go? Should we go find the cabin place?”
“Yes, we most definitely should get a room.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. I maybe liked him silly best of all, but even him adorable didn’t stop the flock of elephant-sized butterflies migrating through my insides.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said quickly. Too quickly.
“Please mean it like that.” He lightly tickled along my ribs. I was ticklish to start with, and even through my shirt, his touch made electricity crackle all along my torso.
“You’re better at this than me,” I groaned because I wanted to touch him too and had no idea where to start. And no idea what would happen when we got back to the cabin.
“You like science, right?”
“Uh…yeah.” I didn’t completely follow him.
“Well, after kissing you all day, I can definitively say you are excellent at it. Too good, really. But you know, if you want to keep testing that hypothesis…”
“Dork.” I pushed at his arm, but not hard enough to actually move him. I was pretty happy exactly where I was, even if the conversation was less than comfortable. “I mean I don’t know what to do. What comes next. I hate not knowing the rules.”
“There are no rules.”
“That’s not helping.”
“I’m serious. I know you like rules and all, but there really aren’t any for this. This is just us messing around. It’s not brain surgery.”
Saying it was that casual for him really didn’t help, so I made a frustrated noise.
“Does it help if I say we can keep kissing—and only kissing—when we get to the cabin? We don’t have to do anything else simply because there’s a bed there. That’s not like…a requirement or something. I mean, sleep at some point would be good. And maybe some horizontal kissing, but I’m not asking you to go further than you want.”