Page 35

THIRTEEN

ruby

I knowexactly what I’m about to do, and I can’t believe I’m about to do it. But I need to know.

Lorenzo’s front door is locked. I pull out his house key and let myself inside.

The apartment is dark. The scent of hot stock is still in the air; Lorenzo and Cash must have heated up my chicken-and-rice soup for dinner. This thought makes me feel overwhelmingly and inexplicably tender toward my best friend.

His bedroom door is closed. I linger outside it for a moment, considering the possibility that there’s a girl sleeping—or not sleeping—in bed with him, but I chase the thought away. Not because I haven’t witnessed plenty of girls stride proudly out of his bedroom, their skirts and tank tops wrinkled from spending the night discarded on the floor. But because he won’t have full mobility for another few weeks, and Lorenzo always needs to be the best at what he does. No exceptions.

I slip out of my shoes and open his bedroom door.

The scent of him hangs in the air, so warm and familiar it makes my heartbeat quicken in anticipation. My night-light is on, bathing the room in the gentlest yellow glow. Lorenzo is asleep, propped up on pillows, his chest bare and the crisp whitesheet cutting a sharp angle across his muscled stomach. I let myself do what I’ve been doing way too often lately, taking him in, gazing at all the fine details of his body; creeping, really, if I’m being honest. But I don’t feel guilty, because this is innocent compared to what I’m about to do.

I sit on the edge of the bed and raise my hand to his good shoulder. My fingers graze the smooth round of muscle, pure thrill shooting through me. I’ve touched his shoulder before but never like this.

“Lorenzo,” I whisper. When he doesn’t stir, I lean closer and whisper it in his ear. I glance at the prescription bottles next to his bed, wondering if he’s out cold. But no, he stopped taking them yesterday.

I whisper his name again, and this time he jerks awake. His eyes find me, blinking slowly like he’s not sure what he’s seeing. “Ruby?” he whispers. The gravel of his voice cuts right down to my core.

“Hey.”

He props himself up on his good elbow and squints at me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Did something happen? With Brad?”

I smile and shake my head. “Nothing happened.”

He looks like he’s about to say something else, but as we gaze at each other in the soft light, his mouth closes, and I wonder if he suddenly realizes exactly what’s about to happen.

His eyes follow my every move, wonder in them, as I lean slowly closer to him. My hand presses against his chest to steady my body. His skin is hot. I know I should feel doubt as I close the empty space between our mouths, but I don’t, not an ounce of it.

My eyes close when I press my lips to his. That first instant of touch seems to last forever. Then I take a breath, breathing him in, coaxing his lips apart, and I taste him for the first time.

He tastes like sleep and like Lorenzo, that familiar scent of him concentrated times a thousand, dark and clean at the same time. Like something I’ve been missing my whole life.

He kisses me back, slow and uncertain at first, then slow and sure. I’m waiting for him to push me away, because that’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? But his tongue finds mine, sliding into me, and that deeper taste has my body moving without thinking. I straddle his lap, and my hand finds his bicep, his muscles tense with the effort of propping himself up. He relaxes back onto the pillows, and I move with him.

“Ruby,” he whispers. His voice is pleading. But is it for me to stop? Or is it pleading for more?

He slides his hand up my body to cradle my face, kissing me deeper. He’s definitely not pleading for me to stop.

His kiss is all the same things he is: strong but soft, quietly confident, totally enthralling. If perfection existed, this would be it, this moment where there’s no before or after, just this kiss and the echo of my name on his lips.

Up close, I realize I never really knew what Lorenzo smelled like. The scent of him that I have locked away in my memory must only be the scent of his soap. With his lips under mine and his stubble brushing my cheek, I know something new about him: He smells like summer. Fresh and green and complex as air itself. Strange how many random girls who barely knew his name have smelled his scent like this, and it’s only now my turn. It makes me want to never let him go.

I do, though, only because I have to. In theory, we could go on kissing like this for hours, but that’s not going to happen, not with the unmistakable hardness I feel where my belly presses against his groin. Not with the dangerous hunger building within my core and swelling every time I breathe him in.

I pull away from him slowly. I open my eyes in time to catch the way his head lifts off the pillow, following me like a shadow,his lips parted in anticipation of my mouth. Like he won’t allow a single inch of space to separate us. His eyes open slowly, like he’s waking from a dream. For a second I’m hit with an intoxicating rush of knowing he’s completely at my mercy.

My hand rests on his bare chest, just below my second favorite of his tattoos, a continuous-line rendering of a fox. It was a drawing I made in art class senior year. Temptation is so great my fingers are almost shaking, and in that short instant where we’re unmoving, I feel him waiting for me to do what I’m going to do next. I draw my finger experimentally over the tattoo, tracing the line of the fox’s body down an inch, then another. His abs contract under my touch—he’s a little bit ticklish. And something about that, the way his body reacts to me involuntarily, tells me I have to stop.

I lean over his chest to kiss him one last time on his cheek. He turns his head so our lips almost touch, and I see him smile. Then I climb off him and tuck myself against his shoulder so I can’t see his eyes. He lets out a deep sigh, and everything goes quiet.

It’s not the kind of kiss you can come back from. It can’t be qualified like Brad’s “pretty good” kiss. I told myself I just needed to know whether kissing someone you love feels different. Of all the make outs, the sex, the orgasms I’ve treated myself to, a kiss had never changed me. I always wondered ... is that just in fairy tales and Hollywood? I needed to know.