Page 56 of All of You

I raised and dropped a shoulder. “I’m all right.”

She chuckled, and then her face turned serious again. “Why was your sister so shocked you were dating me?”

“You’re A-list. It’s pretty rare to meet someone like you to begin with, but to date someone like you… it doesn’t happen to normal dudes.”

“You’re not exactly normal, Ben,” she said, like that was something I would know.

“What do you mean?”

She let go of my hand and crossed her arms over her chest. An unusual thing for her, which I only realized when she did it, and it seemed so foreign to me.

“You are exceptional.”

I opened my mouth to laugh, or refute her, but nothing came out. My eyes were wide as I searched her face, no response emerging.

“Don’t look so shocked. You are. You have been through incredible hardships and personal lows, but you’ve worked to get out of them. And I can’t tell you how much I respect your openness about that—that you don’t try to pretend the things you went through didn’t matter or didn’t change you. That’s amazing.”

Her breathing had elevated a bit, and her arms tucked even more tightly together.

“It’s nice you think that.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. My gaze moved over her, trying to figure out the deal with those crossed arms. I much preferred us holding hands. “Why are you all tied up now?”

“What?”

“You wrapped in on yourself. You have your arms crossed so tightly around you, I bet your lungs can’t fully expand. What’s up?” I sat up on the couch, leaned toward her to get closer, right in her face, for some reason.

She swallowed and looked down at her arms like she hadn’t realized that’s how she was sitting. “I, um… I didn’t want to touch you.”

She shot me a false little smile.

“Why?”

My heart knew before my mind did, though. It was warming up, getting ready for the sprint.

She started to speak, then stopped herself. Her cheeks were flushed and made a stark contrast to her usually very fair skin and her green dress. For a woman with incredible lung capacity, she was breathing in shallow, useless breaths.

“Because all I want to do is touch you.”

The words broke out, as if against her will. She smashed her lips closed and blinked at me.

It took me only a second or two to react.

I reached around behind her, cupping the back of her head, and brought her face to me before she even got those arms uncrossed. My hands slid along the smooth hair pulled into a long ponytail, and my lips crushed against hers. Another second, and she had her hands on my rough cheeks, running into my hair, over my shoulders.

I sat taller, and she leaned toward me so our bodies pressed against each other, both instinctively seeking to close the gap between us that, now that I thought about how long it’d been there, was unfathomable.

For minutes that moved in slow motion and yet felt like we were skipping ahead, we reveled in each other, kissing like it was our first and last kiss, every part of me wanting her, searching for her, needing her. At the tipping point—the one where things would progress past the line of stopping if we kept going, we both pulled back.

I guessed I looked as wild-eyed and well-kissed as she did.

Good grief, she’s gorgeous.

It was nearly painful to sit there next to her and give her space to breathe—give myself space to breathe before I ripped off her dress and made her part of me.

“We should take a breath,” I said reluctantly. Oh, how reluctantly.

The tilt of her head held a question.

“We should. Or this will be way more than either of us signed up for,” I explained, wishing I didn’t care, that I hadn’t made myself promises in the last year that mattered to me.

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