Page 20 of For Pleasure Or Worse

A seed planted in my heart and started budding.

"Sounds all right," I lied, my face giving it away.

"Okay.” He smirked. “How about, 'You are smart, and deep, and funny, Tally.'"

He let go of my hand and slid it across my lower back, inching us closer together.

"I am?" I couldn't take a compliment for the life of me. I felt averse to it, undeserving, even if what he was saying was true. I didn't know what to do with it.

Mateo’s tongue drew across his bottom lip, and my throat went dry. "I'm going to do that honesty thing again with you now."

"Okay," I said quietly. I was scared of how much more honesty he had in him. Because I knew what I would be doing if I were honest with myself at this moment and it wasn't anythingnearinnocent.

"I am trying so hard to be respectful, Tally," he drawled. That low sweep of an accent curved around me. "So hard to be a good boy, you know? You are easy to forget my manners around, and I don't want to lose my gentleman card on a first date."

No one around us had a clue, not a damn idea that heat was sinking low in my belly and my legs felt an instability that had nothing to do with the skates. The music was drowned out by the pounding of my pulse in my ears as my senses gravitated in the direction of the man in front of me.

"Well for…let's sayresearch, so I can confirm or deny"—I found my courage—"what would you say if you weren't trying to be so respectful?"

A muscle in his jaw rippled; yellow-brown eyes darkened to umber. He pulled me closer again, impossibly closer, feathering his fingers against my hip, and the tip of his nose dipped into my hair so his mouth sat just behind my ear. God, everything in my body was thrumming.

"Tally, for every good, pure, adoring thought I've had about you since you walked your tight little ass outside and sat in my car tonight, I've had another just as wicked and ten times more raw. Because I can tell you you're beautiful all night, but you know that about yourself, don't you?"

He looked at me. My mouth had parted silently; my eyes had drooped. He pinched my jaw between his fingers and made me nod back in agreement. His touch lingered.

"But, Tally,” he whispered. “I want to tell you how beautiful you are with your mouth full.” Those same fingers swept across my bottom lip and a sigh fell out of me. "You have such pretty fucking lips," he added. "So pretty that if I was being disrespectful I might even think about kissing them."

"But you're definitely not." My gaze flitted to his plush mouth, the stubble of hair framing it so perfectly. “Being disrespectful.”

"I couldn't." He leaned in. His breath fanned across my mouth and it was pure warmth and mint. “I wouldn't want to screw this up.”

I let my eyes close.

And then I caught an edge. Or he caught an edge. Or both of us leaned too far in one direction at the same time and my skate dipped behind his. Either way, we were on our feet one moment, the next in a tangle of flopping limbs on the cold, hard wooden floor for the second time in one night.

Mateo groaned, holding his side. I stared up at the perforated ceiling tiles like they were the stars in the sky. "This is what I get for being disrespectful. It's all my dead relatives keeping me in check."

I laughed. I laughed, and laughed, and went willingly into his arms when he picked me up off the floor and dragged me off the rink.

It waspast ten when he walked me to the door of my apartment. The air had a bite to it. Early November coolness washed over us like the dim overhead light that cast a white circle onto the concrete.

That almost kiss had lingered for the entire drive home. It was like an unanswered question. A blinking cursor begging us to finish the sentence. In my head he was backing me into a wall and claiming me, but in reality, Mateo's hands were resting comfortably in his pockets while I scraped at an invisible line in the sidewalk with my shoe.

"Do you?—"

"This was?—"

We spoke over one another.

"No, you—" I started.

"Go ahead," Mateo offered, putting a hand out as if letting me have the floor.

"I had a lot of fun with you."

His smile widened, and he looked up at the sky, clearly thinking about something. It gave me a chance to admire how handsome he was in another light, the sharp angles of his chin still so prominent when basked in darkness, his full lips, the freckles on his neck that brought my eyes down to the dips in his collarbone.

"Do you ever howl at the moon?"

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