Page 49 of The Break-Up Pact

His hands squeeze mine, the question in them before he asks it. “What do you want to do?”

The word want snags in my chest like a hook and pulls. I want to go back and undo the past—not that day under the boardwalk, but all the days that came after it. I want to know what the future holds before I take too many steps into it. I want to rehash everything that’s ever happened, I want to scorch the earth and start new, I want to be able to trust this wholly and completely without all the what ifs and what abouts still rattling in my head.

But there is one thing I want that’s louder than all the others, crackling between us. One thing I want that I know I can have. One thing I’ve wanted for so long that it feels like it’s grown roots in the marrow of my bones.

I lean in, my hips slowly closing the distance between us. “You mean right now?” I ask.

Levi’s fingers loosen from my hands and settle so gently on my waist that, if it weren’t for the warmth spreading out from under my ribs, they’d feel like an extension of me. Like the dip above my hips was meant for the shape of his hands. “Yeah,” he says, his voice low, his eyes hungry and half-lidded in the shadow of the bar. “Right now.”

“This,” I tell him, and then I catch his lips with mine and sink into the heat of it, the sweet shock of it, the world slipping out from under me so fast that it feels like we’re falling into a brand-new one, and it’s just Levi and June all the way down.

Chapter Fifteen

By the time we reach my apartment, my fingers are trembling with the anticipation, fumbling with the keys like I’ve never seen the door before. Levi only makes matters worse when he presses his chest to my back, settling a hand on my stomach to pull me closer against him, grazing my ear, my neck, my shoulders with his lips.

That’s it, then. The next headline about us. Revenge Exes Fall Off Spiral Staircase to Their Horny, Unsuspecting Deaths.

My eyes flutter shut, my knees near to the point of buckling, and I decide if the universe takes me out like this, it will be one hell of a way to go.

By some miracle that certainly doesn’t have anything to do with me, the door opens, and we spill through it. Levi uses the hand on my waist to pivot me, uses his other to slam the door shut. He backs me into it, pulling away from my face to take a long, slow, satisfied look at me—it’s the first time we’ve been truly alone all night, and in that one look I feel some last barrier burn out from under us, ignite the sparks between us into an open flame.

He settles his hand on the underside of my jaw, using his thumb to skim my cheek. He leans in just close enough for our foreheads to touch, but holds my face there, not letting me get close enough to kiss. Just drinking me in and taking his time.

“You,” he says, his voice low, “are so beautiful.”

I almost hold my breath so I don’t laugh. He catches the quick, self-conscious quirk of my lips, and uses that same thumb to brush the bottom one. Whatever breath I was tempted to hold is knocked right out of me by the gentle way he parts my mouth, by the instinctive way my teeth graze against the pad of his thumb, my tongue skimming over his salt and earthy sweetness.

“I mean it, June. Everything about you.”

He finally tilts my head up to kiss me again. I’m held in the sweet, aching pressure between Levi and the door, so rapt with the feeling of his lips on mine, with the hardness of him pressed against me, that I could go boneless with want right now. I don’t recognize a single one of these demanding, searing impulses coursing through me. It’s like my entire life, I’ve only ever had the taste of something described to me, and now I’m finally taking my first juicy, absurdly rich bite.

I reach my hand up to the back of his neck, digging my fingers into the heat of his scalp, tangling them in his curls. He lets out a shudder of pleasure and I feel it echo into me, landing square in my chest.

We come apart, catching our breath, and when I open my mouth to speak, I’m nowhere near as eloquent as he was. There’s nothing in me except the raw, bare truth: “I want you so badly I might die.”

His pupils are near blown out when he kisses me again with an entirely new urgency, leaning back from me just enough to hook his hands under my thighs and lift me onto him. With him so flush against me, I can feel his own want throbbing all over my body, so overwhelming that it feels like my blood is simmering just on the verge of a boil. He’s pressing his lips into my neck, my shoulder, my collarbone, and then I’m being lowered onto my own bed, slow and gentle and easy, and I’m staring up at Levi and thinking to myself I could see every edge of the world a hundred times over and never see anything half as beautiful as him.

It isn’t just that it’s Levi. It’s Levi with those curls of his mussed from my own hands. It’s Levi with his lips red and raw from my mouth on his. It’s Levi with his gaze roaming my body, settling his eyes on mine, tender and burning and dark with want. It’s Levi undone, Levi unspooling, Levi who is giving me every part of him in this moment before I take the rest.

I ease myself up, taking in the full sight of him. He steps forward, settles the tips of his fingers at my hairline, running them through the remnants of my messy braid.

“You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about this,” he tells me.

There’s a boldness surging through me, and it’s so solid and demanding that I ask, “Like when?”

He leans in, his knee coming down beside me to press into the mattress. “When we were dancing that night, and you were wearing that red dress, and all I could think about was…” As if to demonstrate, he uses his other hand to slowly take one of the straps of my crop top and slide it off my shoulder.

“I didn’t realize you liked it so much,” I tease.

“Oh, I hated it,” he says. “Because every time you moved in it, all I could think about was getting you out of it.”

My chest blooms with a slow, satisfied warmth as he traces the line of my collarbone with his knuckles.

“I thought about it that afternoon in the ocean,” he says, coming closer. “How easy it would be to just—lean in. Kiss the salt water off your lips.”

This time he does just that, a slow, aching kiss. One unlike the others that have come so far, exploratory and gentle. Just as we sink fully into it, he pulls away, grazing my lower lip with his teeth as he goes. Then he kneels between my legs, pressing his hands to my thighs.

“I thought about it when you were running toward us on the beach. Before all of this started,” he says, kissing the sliver of skin between my top and my jeans. “You run like—like you were born to do it. Like you have your own gravity. Like you’re flying.”

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