Page 10

“No,” I say, more to myself than to him. I start to walk around my bedroom, trying to figure out why he’s treating me this way. He’s acting like a perfect gentleman. He is polite, kind, funny, and flirty. Why me? It just seems to come out of nowhere. We just met, and I have a lot of feelings for him that I shouldn’t have this early. He’s not my boyfriend, and we’re not dating. And to top it all off, he’s the most attractive guy I’ve ever seen, even in magazines and on TV. Why would he choose me out of everyone on Earth who would kill to be with him? The girl who is shy and not very pretty and is still trying to figure out who she is?
Jaxon asks, “No, what?” as he looks worried and confused on my bed.
“You and me,” I say softly, and I don’t really think he can hear me, but he must have superhuman hearing because as soon as the words leave my lips, he gets up and pushes me against the dresser with his body. His Jaxon eyes get bigger, so most of them are black, and there is only a small sliver of the Jaxon-blue that is usually there. To be honest, he looks angry.
“Why the hell not?” he grinds out, his jaw tightly clenched as if he’s trying to keep himself calm. He holds me tightly by the waist with his hands. When his hands start to massage my sides, I gasp in surprise and then moan in a breathy way. My body is completely touching his, and I can feel all of his muscles getting tense against me. He looks at me like he can see right through me, and that makes me want to answer him and make him happy.
I say, “You and I don’t make sense,” and he lets out a low growl from deep in his throat. I’ve never heard anything like it before. But it is very sexy. Why did I think that?
“Jaxon,” I say again. “You’re amazing. You’re tall, handsome, kind, and friendly. You can’t possibly want to be with someone like me. We—” Jaxon cuts me off and gets even closer to me, if that’s possible.
“Don’t tell me what I want and don’t want. Nothing can stop me from getting what I want, and I want you.”
His mouth comes down on mine before I can say anything else.
He kisses me with more passion than anyone else. All I can think about is him: his hands on my sides, the cedar and pine scent of his cologne, and how well his lips move against mine. He pulls my bottom lip into his mouth, bites it gently, then lets it go and dives back in for more. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull myself closer, not caring about the risks.
He tilts his head to the side, which makes the kiss go deeper. I grab his hair, and Jaxon lets out a low groan, which makes me feel even more sure of myself. He wants me. Me! Before him, I kissed other guys. I don’t have a lot of experience, but I do have some. This kiss was different from all the others. I’ve never had butterflies in my stomach before or wanted to hold on to them for hours. I have strong feelings for him, and I didn’t know how strong they were until now. He kisses me to show me how much he loves me. It’s raw.  It’s true. I can’t help but believe that he wants me. But I’m afraid he wants more than I can give him.
I don’t want to, but I pull away from the kiss. I put my forehead against his and breathed deeply to calm down after the kiss. I talk to him while looking into his eyes. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Jaxon says with a laugh and puts his hands on my back.
“Hey, Jaxon…”
“Don’t start,” Jaxon says. He puts a finger on my lips to stop me from talking, which really surprises me. He doesn’t know what I’m going to say.
“That kiss was f*****g amazing, and I know you thought so too. So don’t tell me I can’t want you. You’re perfect. You’re smart, funny, and beautiful, and I really want to get to know you better. I know we just met, but I know if you give me a chance-”
I kissed him to stop him. It was short, more like a peck, but it worked and he stopped talking.
“You didn’t know what I was going to say, Broody,” I said, using the name I had given him. He scrunched his eyebrows. He looks like a cute puppy.
“Broody?”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing out loud. It doesn’t really work, and I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah. That’s what I call you because the first time I saw you, you looked really broody. You had a tough guy face on and I thought you were going to be mean. But then you looked at me and you looked… lighter. Happier. It surprised me…”
“I could never be Broody with you,” he says with a smirk. “Especially when you kiss like that.”
I have to put my hand on my face to keep the sound of my laughter down. I’m putting Maisie to bed now, and if I’m too loud, she won’t be able to sleep. And my mom will kill me.
I turn my head and see that I’m up against the dresser in my room, the same dresser that Maisie knocked a snow globe off of. There are other snow globes on the dresser from all over the world, from places my mom has been for work. Maisie was right; the one in Paris was one of my favorites. There was a gondola in the middle of the medium-sized snow globe, and a couple in love was sitting in the middle of the boat. Instead of snow, there were gold flakes that fell from the top when you shook it, making a ring around the couple.
“You have a lot of snow globes,” Jaxon says. He picks up the one closest to him, which is from California. When he shakes it, the snow inside the globe starts to fall. The brown bear inside disappeared into the white, which is very interesting to watch.
“I have more in the closet. I started collecting them with my mom when I was young and never stopped.” I could remember how old I was and when my mom gave me each one.
“You’ve really been around,” Jaxon says quietly as he looks at the snow globes on my desk and the other dresser.
I laugh at what he said. “Not at all.”
Jaxon tilts his head a little and puts down the snow globe. “What do you mean?” he asks, looking at me.
This is the part that makes me feel bad. “Um, I’ve only been to Alaska and here. I moved here a few years ago from there. I collect snow globes because my mom is a flight attendant and buys me one every time she goes somewhere.”
Jaxon keeps looking at me, and I feel embarrassed by the attention. I start to think he’ll laugh at me for having a dumb collection of things from places I’ve never been, but he doesn’t. Instead, a soft smile spreads across his face.
“Okay, I guess we need to change that. If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go? If money weren’t an issue.”
“Easy,” I say right away. “Paris, France. I think it’s really cool that they use boats to get around. It’s not great for the environment, but it’s still pretty. I want to see how they make those pretty glass sculptures.”
Jaxon smiles at me the whole time I talk. After I finish my short rant, he says, “I’ll take you.”
What? The. Oh no. He’ll take me to Paris?
I laugh nervously. “That’s a nice thought, but I don’t think I’ll ever get to go. Maybe after college, when I have a job that pays better than the coffee shop-”
“I told you money wasn’t an issue. I’ll take you in my private jet.” He leans in and kisses me slowly, then puts his hands back on my hips. I want to laugh at how silly his statement is, but when he grabs my waist, the laugh dies in my throat. His hands are so big that his fingers go all the way across my back and his thumbs go all the way down to my belly button. Jaxon tries to move back, but when I grab his arms, his lips curl up a little before he dives in again.
I can’t stop thinking about him. We met for the first time at the coffee shop and talked with Ezra and Skyler for hours. I learned a lot about him. After that, we sent each other texts. We talked on the phone for hours. He called me “babe” and “love” and touched me all over at dinner tonight. At first, I thought he was just being flirty, but now I think he really does like me for some crazy reason.