Page 62 of Love Bleeds

I'd won a ton of prizes at science fairs and placed top of my class more than once. Yet I'd never felt as accomplished as I did the moment I made my best friend come undone with my hand.

"Enjoyed that?" I echoed his earlier question as he came down from his high.

"You have no idea."

"I think I got a little bit of an idea," I disagreed, because I'd just come too, hadn't I?

Crimson chuckled. "Further testing may be required." He leaned in to kiss me, but before he could, I raised my hand between us to stop him. Something close to fear flickered across his features. "Are you...regretting this?"

"That's not it!" I hurried to say. "It's just... If you kiss me now, I think... What I'm trying to say is, I'm kind of hopped up on magic right now, which sounds super stupid, but..." I shrugged awkwardly.

"You think I shouldn't kiss you because you're magic?"

"I don't want you to think that's why I..." I gestured between us. "This had nothing to do with that."

"I understand." He brushed the pad of his thumb across my lower lip. "Now that we got that out of the way, can I kiss you?"

"Any time," I promised.

Crimson didn't waste another second before bringing our lips together. I sighed into the kiss. A happy sigh, because those butterflies were still in my belly, and now they were taking flight, fluttering throughout my whole body. It felt bubbly and weird and strangely wonderful.

And then there was the magic too. My lips grew warm with it, which was just as strange, but if it bothered Crimson, he didn't let it slow him down.

Something passed between him and me. Something that wasn't physical. Something that no science in the world would have words to explain.

Notyet, I reminded myself. Science didn't have words for ityet.

But this moment, I didn't care about science. I only cared about kissing Crimson. It was a long, deep kiss, and by the time we parted, both he and I were breathing heavily.

"That was..." I trailed off, because I didn't have the words to describe what we'd just shared. I'd kind of thought that Crimson might finish my sentence for me, but he remained completely silent. His eyes were closed. For a second I thought he was sleeping, but then his forehead wrinkled, as if in thought.

"Crimson?" I asked, even as my own lids grew heavy with the desire to close.

He blinked at me. "I just..."

"What?"

"I saw something."

"What did you see?" Absent-mindedly, I wiped my hand on my pajama pants as I studied my friend's face and fought to stay awake and alert. Had he remembered something?Whathad he remembered?

"I think we were playing some sort of game. No wait, I know what game it was.Dungeons & Dragons?" The way he said that made me think that, even though he remembered the name, he wasn't really sure what it meant. Not yet. The memory was coming back to him, but slowly.

"We used to play that all the time. Once a week." I stifled a yawn. "So it kind of makes sense that you would remember that. We used to meet at Carly's house," I added, hoping that the additional information would shake something else loose in his mind.

"Carly?" He tried the name. "I think she was there. And her dog." He smiled as he said that. "He's a little shit, isn't he?"

"Ezra's a good dog!"

"She pissed on my bag once."

"She was just a puppy!" But I grinned at him anyway, for remembering the event. "You weren't even mad. Not really."

"No, I guess not." He frowned. "This is weird."

"Who else was there?" I asked, if only to keep him talking. It seemed the longer he lingered on the memory, the more details came back to him.

"More people. Another girl. You. And..." He paused. Suddenly he looked as if Ezra was right here and she'd nipped his ankle the way she sometimes had when she was young.