Page 35 of Sucker Love (Sugar Pill Duet #1)

After an hour of sleep and a quick lunch I’m brought sufficiently back to life, and we go up to Kent Pond to walk along some of the easy trails.

I keep a firm hand on Noel’s in case he slips on ice and watch him take in the sights with the sort of keen-eyed interest of the uninitiated.

It’s a childlike wonder almost, someone who’s never seen anything like this and doesn’t plan to take a second of it for granted.

This may not be his thing, but for all of his bitching he’s making the most of it. I appreciate that in him.

I wonder if he can tell, precisely, how special this all is to me.

I’ve waxed a little poetic about it to him—ad nauseam in his mind, I’m sure—but I don’t know if he really gets it.

How so many of my earliest and happiest memories were made here.

When my family was still intact, before my mother’s passing turned Dad into something unrecognizable.

The winters I spent here might’ve been the last time I was truly happy.

I get the feeling that he does, though, as his arm goes around mine and hugs it to his body and his head turns to watch the ice skaters on the frozen pond through the trees.

I feel like he is somewhere on my wavelength and that we are aligned.

And maybe we don’t need words for it, for this, for whatever’s happening between us.

If something really is happening between us.

This is real.

Do I tell Noel how I feel? Am I supposed to tell him?

Is that the courteous thing to do, to get this all out there and not just assume in some moony, unspoken way that we’re on the same page here and we’re both falling in love?

( Is it love?) The timing is so bad. And while I think he is feeling me, maybe he’s just like this.

He was like this the night we met. He is affectionate by nature, I think, once he’s comfortable enough. When he’s sure he won’t be rebuffed .

I understand him now, I think.

I think about the time we just laid on the couch and made out—which was hot as hell, honestly—and how he was the one to initiate that.

Just kissing. Nothing else. No ulterior motive.

Didn’t escalate it to sex, even as he told me that he always escalated to sex.

That tearful confession on the hotel room floor, begging to be mine, for all of this to be real.

He is mine. This is real.

I think.

We come around a bend of trees that hides us sufficiently from the view of any other would-be hikers and I stop walking, which means Noel stops, too. He turns to me and brushes his hair away from his rosy cheeks. “What’s up?” he asks.

My stomach is fluttering when I take his cold face in my hands and kiss him.

It’s a sweet kiss, lingering, my tongue brushing his lower lip as he sighs and wraps his hands around my wrists.

I suddenly want —I’m just full of want for him.

Here, against a tree, or in some frozen gulch, whatever.

It doesn’t matter. The way he tastes is intoxicating, and I couldn’t describe it with a gun to my head as anything but him .

He’s making those little sounds in his throat that just urge me on, dare me to take him and everything below my waist goes sort of taut.

It’s hard to break away, but I manage it eventually.

By the time I do, we’re both breathing a little fast.

“What was that for?” he says.

I rub my cold nose against his. “I can’t just kiss you because I feel like it? ”

Noel studies my face, eyebrows drawn together. He’s even more beautiful like this, all contrasts against the snow-covered landscape. Dark hair, amber eyes, flushed face and lips. “No,” he informs me at last, mouth twitching. “You can’t .”

“Too bad.” I kiss him again.

He laughs and pushes half-heartedly at me.

“You’re going to get us murdered,” he murmurs against my mouth.

“I’ve seen the stickers on some of these cars around here.

Live Free or Die and You Can Take My Guns From My Cold Dead Hands and whatever.

They just need an excuse to pull those itchy trigger fingers. ”

“That’s just the rednecks from New Hampshire.” I wrap my arms around him. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you from the big, bad bigots.”

He melts into the embrace and pushes his head beneath my chin, warming his face in my neck.

Not for the first time, I marvel at how well we fit together.

The delusional romantic in me feels like he was made for me especially.

Like whatever powers that be took pity on me and spat this guy out into the universe knowing I’d need him someday. Incredibly stupid, but there it is.

That’s the thing. I didn’t think there was any romantic, delusional or otherwise, left in me. Now just the thought of Noel makes me gooey.

“Hey,” I say softly. “Can I tell you something?”

“What?” He’s rubbing his cheek against my throat in that way he does.

I pull back a little so I can look into his face. “It means a lot to me that you came here this weekend, Noel,” I tell him. “Um, maybe it’s stupid, but this place is really special to me. I’m really happy I got to share it with you. So...thank you.”

He cocks his head slightly, which sweeps his hair into his face, and he has to shake it out again so that he can look me in the eye. “Of course,” he says. “I mean, you did ask.”

“Yeah, but I know this isn’t your thing.”

One side of his mouth quirks. “I don’t know what my thing is until I give it a chance. Sometimes you gotta show me I like things.”

“Mm.” My heart beats faster as it moves up into the region of my throat, which makes it much harder to breathe. “There’s something else, too. That I wanted to tell you.”

“Yeah?” God, he’s so beautiful. I love the way he has to tilt up to look into my face and it exposes his nice long neck and love bites half-hidden by his scarf.

And I love his smallness compared to me, how almost diminutive he seems. And the sound of his voice, with its perpetual condescending edge, and how he looks at me like I’m the last thing that matters in the entire world.

Love the way his eyes seem to glow and glitter out here and his cheeks and nose are blushed from the cold and his lips are so puffy and soft.

And. . .

And fuck me, I bitch right out. “You look really cute,” I say lamely. “Today.”

Noel gives me a strange look. When I don’t say anything else, he raises an eyebrow. “Okay,” he scoffs. “Um, thank you.”

“It’s true.” I’m scrambling. “You do look really pretty. All the snow suits you...I mean, out here, where it’s like pretty and clean snow, not dirty city snow—” Oh my god.

I sound like an idiot. He just looks at me.

“Hey,” I say, changing the subject. “You wanna go dancing tonight? There’s a couple nightclubs in town. ”

He blinks at me and for a second I think he won’t take the bait, but then he does. Or he throws me a bone, in all of his infinite mercy. I’m grateful either way. “Out here?” he says. “Nightclubs?”

“Sure there are.”

“How do you know they’re any good if you haven’t been out here since you were a kid?”

“I came out here for my twenty-first birthday,” I say.

“Ah.” He pouts. “But I didn’t bring clubbing clothes.”

“It’s fine. It’s not like...you know. It’s not Anathema. It’ll be people in jeans and puffer coats.” I lean down and kiss his forehead. “And you’ll still be the hottest one there, regardless of what you wear.”

He brightens a bit. Of course he can’t resist the urge to potentially be the center of attention.

And I, with a sudden and fierce possessiveness, hope he doesn’t attract too much.