Page 86 of He Should Be Mine

I turn my head and plant my lips on his. And my world implodes. Reality falls away.

His lips are every bit as soft as they look. And he tastes of expensive whisky. He is warm and delicious and everything I ever wanted.

He goes rigid. I can feel shock and surprise jolt through him. All his muscles tense. The future holds her breath and waits. What Dario does next rewrites my entire destiny.

He moans. I feel it reverberate through me. Oh fuck, that’s the deepest, hungriest, sexiest fucking moan that has ever existed. It pulls a soft whimper from me.

Then I squeak as his hand cradles the back of my head, holding me gently, as his lips start to devour me. He isn’t kissing me back. He is consuming me.

Dario is kissing me. I’m kissing him.

It doesn’t feel new. It doesn’t feel like lightning and fireworks.

It feels like coming home.

Finally, finally, I’m home. After a lifetime of searching, I’m finally exactly where I belong. In Dario’s arms.

Dario is kissing me in a way that I have never been kissed before. Slow, gentle, tender, passionate. Deep enough to taste forever. A kiss that can never be forgotten. It is rewiring my DNA and making it so I will never be able to kiss anyone else ever again.

He pulls away, and I stare at him. His brown eyes stare back at me with a smoldering intensity.

I’m breathless. My lips are puffy. My mind is a melted puddle of goo. Even my knees are trembling. I’m wrecked. Completely dazed. Just from a kiss.

Oh lord help me. It’s official.

I’m in love.

Chapter twenty-four

Dario

I’m sitting in the dingy basement of a pizzeria, and all I can think about is Molly and how it felt to finally kiss him.

The kiss was everything. A baptism and a rebirth. My existence has been sundered into two halves, the meaningless days of my life before I kissed Molly, and all the glorious days left to come.

How can a simple meeting of lips be so very monumental? I don’t understand, but I don’t have to understand for it to be true. I don’t understand how electricity works, but it lights up my life.

Molly’s kiss has changed me. It has forged me into a better man. It may seem absurd, but it is a fact. As solid as gravity. As real as the air I am breathing.

He whimpered as I held him. He tasted of peaches. He turned all soft and pliant in my arms, surrendering to my lead so sweetly that my heart nearly couldn’t take it.

I still don’t know how I managed to pull away. I didn’t dare kiss him again. Partly because I didn’t want to get carried away and partly because repeating something so holy felt like sacrilege.

Our kiss was a moment far too profound to be clumsily duplicated. It is a bright moment that dazzled with all the colors of a kaleidoscope. It’s a fragment of time that I will cherish forever.

The memory of it is going to become polished like a jewel. It is going to shine from all the times I am going to hold it tightly and experience it again in glorious detail.

In fact, I think I have found my seven minutes. The seven minutes they say your brain flickers for after your body dies. Seven minutes of vividly reliving your happiest memories.

A smile stretches across my lips. I like the idea of my last thoughts being of Molly.

Suddenly, fingers snap in front of my face.

“Earth to Dario. Are you with us?” Carlo’s voice is sharp, his tone just shy of mocking.

His face jolts into focus. Sharp jaw, scar under his left eye, gold ring on his pinky.

Right. Pizzeria basement. Four men around a grimy table, pretending to play poker while we plot treason. A meeting of co-conspirators. The inner circle of a coup.