Page 21

LATE NIGHTS ON the beach were always my favorite.

They were quiet, tourists were asleep, and the stars were so bright they looked like glitter on midnight tulle.

Sebastian and I walked along the shoreline, the humid wind picking up specks of sand that stung our skin.

The ocean was a soft, constant rumble. I had my shoes in one hand, my bare feet leaving prints in the shore beside his shoe prints.

When I’d found Sebastian in the lobby again, after I’d finished closing up the bar, he was in the far corner, staring at one of the hundreds of photographs on the walls. When I got closer, I realized that he’d found his dad’s photo. He stared at it intensely, frowning.

I cleared my throat loudly. He glanced over at me. I felt on edge. Nervous—why was I nervous ? I didn’t like it, though I knew what would put me at ease.

I nudged my head out the door. “I guess we should talk. Let’s take a walk?”

So we went to the beach.

I stooped and picked up a pale seashell.

There was a chip in the side of it. Most shells that washed up here were broken.

The noise of the waves rushed in and back out to sea.

The tide was low, so the water was a distant, dark rumble.

It was soothing. My head always felt clearer with my feet in the sand.

“So …” I hesitated, not knowing what to say. Why had it been so much easier to talk to a stranger ?

“This is weird, isn’t it?” He glanced over at me.

I barked a laugh. “Well, now that you said something, you’ve made it weird.”

He held up his hands in innocence. “I didn’t say anything!”

“You thought it—same thing.”

“ You said it,” he pointed out.

You’re infuriating , I thought.

“She’s cute when she’s pretending to be angry.” “I’m not doing anything.”

“I’m not cute,” I replied.

It was his turn to look thwarted. “I didn’t say—” I leveled a look at him. He sighed. “Yeah. Right. I get it. You don’t like being called cute. I clocked that back at the concert last week.”

“Because I’m not cute,” I said. “Cute is for puppies and babies and best friends since fifth grade. I’m hot.”

His eyes widened. “Uh—yes.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You sound unsure.”

“I can’t decide if you’d be even angrier with me if I called you hot right now,” he admitted, and sped up his step to fall in line with me.

The wind buffeted his loose black T-shirt, showing a sliver of skin above his jeans.

I wished the moonlight was nonexistent. I wished I hadn’t seen the quick flash of his cut abs and the ropy shadow of a scar cutting down the left side. I wished I hadn’t even looked.

I whipped my head back in front of me and trained my eyes on the pier. Bad, this was bad. “So now that we’re in person, do you have any bright ideas for how to get you out of my head?”

“I was hoping you had an idea how to get me out of yours—that doesn’t involve throwing me off a balcony.”

I laughed—I couldn’t help it. “Did that hurt your feelings?”

He held up his thumb and pointer finger an inch apart.

“I’m sorry.”

He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “I somehow don’t think you mean it …”

To that I shrugged. “You did say you’d be a hot ghost.”

The pier loomed like a haunted shadow. At night, with the tide low, you could go under it, barnacles and seaweed hanging above you like summer holiday streamers.

The shadow of a crab scuttled out into the waves.

I turned back to him, hands behind me, and leaned against the waterlogged pier leg.

“Okay, let’s start at the beginning: How could we be linked? ”

“Well, we didn’t get struck by lightning together, and we didn’t piss off the same witch, and we aren’t stuck in a time loop …” He sucked on his teeth, and then paused, pinning me with a look. “But you know what we did do?”

“Nothing that I can—” I froze. Realization crawled across my cheeks, as horrible as a blush. “ No .”

He slid closer to me, his hands behind his back. “Oh yes.”

“I’m sorry, there isn’t a kiss cam this time to entice me.”

“Oh, it was the kiss cam that convinced you?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“I didn’t want to disappoint Willa,” I said easily, because the truth was embarrassing.

“And who could pass up kissing Sebastian Fell?” I heard him think.

That made me defensive. “That’s not it. I didn’t kiss you because of who you are. That’s not why I wanted to.”

He studied me with a look of distrust.

“I mean it,” I said, leaning toward him.

We were close enough that our bodies buffered the wind, so we could hear each other, and no one else.

“I wanted to because when Willa turned the camera on us, you asked me if I wanted to. You didn’t expect it.

And that meant something—it …” It means something.

It was thoughtful, and that was the man I wanted to kiss , I thought, because it was too big to say out loud.

It implied things I really only thought about in songs.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Then … may I kiss you?”

The question didn’t sound mocking, or insincere. My mouth went dry. Oh. Oh no.

It was the kind of question that felt slippery as ice and sticky as glue all at once.

“It can’t be that simple, can it?” I asked, heart climbing up my throat, beating like a rabbit’s. “A kiss and we’re suddenly out of each other’s heads?”

He hummed in thought, and then closed the space between us until it was just me, and him, and this strange, charged air between us.

I wasn’t sure if it was from our telepathic connection, or if this was just the normal energy of being around someone like Sebastian Fell.

Did everyone feel like this around him, a quick heart, tingly stomach, hating that you lingered a little too long on the slight curve of his mouth?

He bent his head toward mine and murmured, “What if it is? One kiss, and that’s it. What could be more simple?”

A hundred other things—IKEA instructions, sourdough starters, the Pythagorean theorem, to name a few.

He placed a hand beside my head, palm flat against the pier leg.

It was dark enough that I couldn’t see his face, but even if I could, the wind had picked at his hair enough for it to come loose from its half-up ponytail, obscuring part of his face.

“Haven’t you at least wondered what it’d be like? ”

I tried to sound nonchalant as I said, “I already know what it’s like kissing you.”

He shook his head. “But not like this. While in each other’s heads.

All my thoughts, all of yours.” He sounded like he kissed people a lot, as if it was as natural to him as breathing.

It made me wonder how often he found himself worried about what the other person thought of the kiss.

What did he have to be worried about? Even though he was fifteen years retired from that boy band life, he was still tragically handsome in that Hozier sort of way, sharp cheekbones and deep eyes and expressive eyebrows that were almost symmetrical, but not quite, and his soft, slightly crooked mouth.

I imagined that in the Yelp reviews of kissing, he got awarded perfect stars.

“It sounds frightening,” I admitted.

That, at least, I could say with certainty.

It was impossibly tempting to erase the space between us.

I liked kissing him the first time, and I did wonder if the second time would be better.

I wondered, if I kissed him, if I would peel back the bits of him and find the man I saw for a moment in that private balcony, and the one I’d told soft secrets to for the better part of a week, or if I’d just find all the thoughts I dreaded finding.

Thoughts that told me that I was beautiful, but that makeup couldn’t cover all my acne scars.

That I kissed like someone who hadn’t been kissed nearly enough in her life.

That I was mouthy, and that for a songwriter I wasn’t very romantic, and that I was bad at letting go.

Thoughts that highlighted all the silly human parts of me I took care to hide out in LA.

The parts of me that I didn’t even like in myself.

And I wondered what parts of him he hid, too.

So I leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek.

His fingers brushed across my face, swiping away the wild hairs that had escaped my braid.

My heart beat riotously in my chest as his eyes traveled up to mine again, bright in the slant of silvery moonlight, and then his voice said in my head, “I think you need to do it again, to make sure it didn’t work. ”

So I kissed his other cheek. “How about now?”

This close, his eyes almost glowed with how blue they were, like a summer sky. His eyelashes were long and dark, the color of his eyebrows. “Maybe try once more? Between the two?”

His mouth.

Cupping his face with my hands, I gently placed a kiss on his lips.

It was light and brief. I studied his gaze as he studied mine.

There were no thoughts. Nothing at all in our heads.

And then he leaned forward, and in the shadows of the pier he pressed his lips against mine.

The kiss was timid, a quick brush at first, like dipping a foot in the pool to test the water.

He sighed out in hesitation, his eyes searching across my face, waiting for me to change my mind.

Was all that talk bravado? How … alarmingly charming.

If I’d known he was half as unsure as I felt, I would have kissed him sooner.

I brought my hands up to cradle his face and pulled him into a deeper kiss.

He tasted like Diet Coke and breath mints, his mouth soft and tender, until he went rigid with surprise.

Had he never let someone take control before?

Or maybe he had, but it’d been so long that he’d forgotten what it felt like to not just want but be wanted , to be wanted for who he could be and not who he was, and that he could be good and kind, too.