Page 73 of Goode Vibrations

She just laughed, standing up and pacing away. “It just sounds impossible. As much as I feel like it’s the only way you and I can make any sense of this crazy thing, it just seems impossible. I fuckingwantyou, Errol. Right now. All the time.”

“With you all the way across all points,” I said. “Do we need, like, rules of engagement?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “We’re adults. We’re choosing this.”

“So if we get to a point where it stops making sense, we just…go with it?”

She bored a stare into me. “We have to be careful with logic like that.”

I laughed. “Because one or the other of us could easily talk us out of it.”

Poppy laughed with me. “Exactly.”

I moved to stand behind her; she twisted to look at me, and then leaned back against me. I held her, non-sexually, my arms around her shoulders and middle. “You know what’s weird, Poppy?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s been less than three days since we met.”

She huffed a laugh. “Thatisweird. Feels like a lifetime has passed since then, somehow.”

“That’s what made me turn around. Feeling like I was missing someone who’d always been there, in that seat next to me. I’ve never felt that way about anyone. Not like this—this hard, this much, this fast.”

“Me either,” she whispered. A laugh, then. “Three days? How is it possible to go from not knowing someone to needing them in three days?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I always thought it was storybook romance bullshit. Like, a trope to sell books and movies.”

“Me too.”

“Joke’s on us, huh?” She sniffed, not quite a laugh.

Silence.

“So.” I squeezed her. “Ketchikan, Alaska. Two weeks. You and me, alone in that caravan, no sex. Just us and our thoughts and ideas and our emotions.”

She faked a shudder. “I’m gonna start regretting it, you put it like that.”

“Me too.” I laughed, then sobered. “Look at it this way—how we fell asleep, and woke up? Together like that? We have that. As much as we want, all night, every night.”

Her head twisted to press a kiss to my jawline, just under my ear. “I like that,” she whispered.

I melted, the way she whispered, the way she kissed me. Turned her in my arms and slashed my lips across hers, slow and hot and deep. She was the first to pull away.

“No fair,” she murmured. “Instigator.”

I laughed. “Sorry. You whisper to me like that, kiss me on the jaw like that, and it just…does something.”

“You mentioned rules of engagement, like how to avoid ending up fucking.”

“Yes?”

“What about nonsexual touching?” She put herself back in my arms, leaning against my chest, gazing up at me. Traced a finger through my hair, over my ear. A thumb over my lip. “Like this?”

I choked. Blinked hard. Felt my heart skipping beats, trying to grow three sizes that day, all at once. “I like it.”

She smiled up at me. “You do?”