Page 101 of A Wreck, You Make Me

“What?”

He jerks his chin toward my hand. “That.”

I glance down and see I still have the lipstick tube clutched in my hand. “Lipstick?”

“Yeah.”

I blink, confused. “Um, I don’t?—”

“You do it to hide your freckles, yeah?”?

I suck in my belly. “How do you know that?”

“Because you were talking about it with the girls a couple of days ago,” he says. “Actually, the precise term was your ‘stupid freckles.’”

A couple of nights ago, Tempest, Callie and Meadow had come over for a visit. We already knew about the party, so we were discussing clothes, make-up tips and all the girly stuff that we usually do, and drinking piña coladas that I’d made at the dining table. I was telling them about my trick with the red lipstick. Although they all said I don’t need to hide my freckles at all because they’re pretty. At which point, I remembered that he had said something similar—actually, he’d said he was going to count all my freckles—but I shut that down and moved on.

“You heard that?” I ask. “But you were with the boys.”

And Snow. Because somehow Snow has taken to all the Thorne men and their friends. I guess all she needed was a safe space to get out of her shell, and I’m so happy that she has that now. That night, she was with them—Ledger, Reed and Riot, because they generally go where their other halves go—and of course him, playing that video game she likes. And from what I could hear she was winning, and I don’t think it was only because they were letting her. She’s become quite good over the past week.

Snow, I tell myself.Remember her? She’s your sister. She’s a part of this family now. She loves them. She loveshim. You can’t do anything to jeopardize that. You can’t bring your feelingsinto the mix and complicate things. You have to do the right thing.

“I did,” he rasps, breaking my thoughts.

“How?”

“Because I always hear you.” Then, “I always smell you too.”

“Because you steal my perfume.”

“Guilty,” he says without any guilt whatsoever and it makes my heart race.

Licking my lips, which causes his jaw to clench, I say, “It’s just… They’re countless and I just?—”

“Of course they’re countless,” he says. “Like the stars in the sky.”

“I—”

“But that’s not the point,” he cuts me off.

I shift on my feet, my cheeks blushing and blushing. “What’s the point?”

“The point is,” he says, his eyes flicking down to my mouth for a second, “you don’t want to make your mouth even more irresistible and juicy than it already is.”

“What?”

He glances down at my mouth again and I have to part it. Not to draw attention to it, but because I need to breathe. And when he’s looking at me like that, like he’s so hungry, I can’t get enough air in.

“It does a shit job of hiding anything on your face,” he says after a while, looking up, his eyes burning. “Your freckles still sparkle like a sprinkle of cinnamon on my favorite coffee. But it makes things worse for your mouth. I already fight a hard-on, a fight that I lose, by the way, every time I see your strawberry lips. So trust me when I say, you don’t wanna paint them red and put ideas into my head as to which part of my body I’d like that lipstick to end up on.”

My eyes are wide. “W-which part?”

He watches me for a beat, a slight hint of amusement passing over his features. “It starts with a D and ends with a K.”

I blink and keep blinking, confused.

And his amusement only rises to the point where his lips twitch and he helps me out. “It’s a four-letter word, baby. It has a tendency to get hard when turned on. People are obsessed with its size and say the bigger the better. Mine is always hard around you, and it’s pretty much the biggest you’ll ever come across.”