“Hi, Kiss And Run Guy.”
“Not to be mistaken with Forehead Kiss Guy?”
She scrunched up her face. “Hmmmm. They do look a lot alike.”
I laughed and leaned in and kissed her. Just a quick peck, but it got my heart going anyway.
I could have sworn she was blushing when I was done.
“So this is it,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “The infamous studio apartment with the view.”
I twisted to look over my shoulder. “I’d give you the tour, but you can see everything from here.”
She laughed a little and peered around. “Smaller than I expected.”
“The room at my mom’s house is much bigger,” I added.
“And it doesn’t have a giant toilet outside.”
“Silver lining.”
She nodded at the air mattress where my bed used to be. “What’s this?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “The guys left this here. Thought maybe I’d want to use the place from time to time. I’m still paying for it.”
“Use it for what?” she asked, blinking at me innocently.
“Uh… naps?”
She nodded wryly. “Right. Naps.”
Now I was blushing.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope we ended up back here after the date. The air mattress wasn’t ideal, and Brad put a damn Toilet King blanket on the bed just to be a dick. But still. Aside from getting a hotel room, which I shouldn’t be spending money on with all the new expenses, there was no other place for us to have privacy now. She had Maddy at the cottage. My new living arrangement wasn’t good with the kids there. An air mattress and the Toilet King was somehow the most reasonable option.
She was standing inside my personal space. Close enough that I could smell her hair. I wanted to pull her to me and put my nose to her head and breathe her in.
I stayed where I was.
“I need to see that billboard up close,” she said.
“It’s not close enough?”
She laughed and made her way around the foot of my air mattress, dragging a finger on the blanket as she went. She opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the tiny balcony into the warm summer air. I followed her and we stood there, hands on the railing, looking up at The King.
“You can see every pore…” she said in wonder. “You know, this would be a really nice view if the billboard wasn’t here.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“Okay, but be honest,” she said, turning to me. “He’d be the first person you’d think of if you had a plumbing issue.”
“He’s been the first thing I think of the minute I wake up, all day long, when I go to bed…”
She laughed, shaking her head at the sign.
“I gotta give it to him,” I said. “His marketing is effective. He might be some kind of evil genius.”
She leaned on the railing. There wasn’t much room for two people out here. She was just within my personal space again, and she didn’t move to go back into the apartment. The proximity was a tiny intimate sign that even though we hadn’t done anything past first base yet, the intention for something past first might be there.
She’d almost come over last night. If she had, I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be just sleeping. It felt like we were inching toward something more serious and I wondered what it meant.
Or if it meant anything at all.
This was a woman who could leave a place and never look back. She kept her life reduced to two suitcases because she didn’t get sentimental about anything. Was she sentimental about sex?
She had to know this wasn’t just a fling for me. I’d told her I missed her last night. I’d asked her to stay longer and renew her contract. It didn’t sound like she was going to do it, but she knew I wanted her to. She wouldn’t just come over for a hookup knowing I wanted something more serious. I couldn’t picture her doing that.
It felt like we were either going to be all or nothing. We’d kiss, because we were supposed to kiss, and then we wouldn’t cross any more lines if she wasn’t planning on staying and that would be that.
Or we’d cross all the lines. Many, many times. And we’d do it because this was leading somewhere—or she was considering the possibility of that and seeing how it felt. If she wanted to come over last night, maybe it was because she was.
Emma looked over at me and smiled, and I let myself hope.
“You ready to go?” I asked.
She shoved off the railing and we left.
“It’s so weird being here with you on the same walk we did that day on the phone,” she said, once we were on the bridge. “It’s like I teleported into your universe.”
