Page 47 of What's in a Kiss?

Di: even though I’m here, now, writing this alone in my bedroom, I am still, in some realm, kissing Jake Glasswell. Always. Our first kiss hasn’t ended.

I know it never will.

Chapter Thirteen

I awake in a cool silk cocoon, my head on a down pillow so supple it might be alive. My nose detects the slightest calming notes of ylang-ylang. I’m not all the way awake, and yet I somehow feel replenished. As if I, an infamous insomniac, may actually have had a good night’s sleep.

No tossing and turning until my sheets are 98 percent on the floor? No heat in my lap commemorating a late-night iPad rabbit hole? No recurring dream of being evicted and living in a tent by Henry’s Tacos? Did I actually have deep and peaceful rest?

My eyes open.

Holy wow.

Out a giant window, a sliver of sun crests the eastern mountains, trimming the sky a dizzy pink. It’s not rare for me to be up this early—but I don’t think the sunrise has ever been the first thing I’ve laid eyes on. This is a revelation, a private box in the opera house of life. This is the kind of sunrise that makes a person want to seize the day.

I feel a feather-light caress on my left shoulder. I turn my head and see a man’s hand on my arm, his finger drawing circles on my skin. I lie very still. I picture the arm that must be connected to that hand. I trace it underneath my back, my neck,coming out the other side to connect with an underarm, then a chest—

I turn my head and inhale.

Glasswell’s spooning me. Shirtless.

And...?

Yep. Pants-less.

Underwear-less.

“Aughhhh!” I shriek, leaping out of bed and taking the silk cocoon with me. This is a mistake whose implications I only realize once I’m standing up. Because I’ve left Glasswell—let’s just say volcanically exposed. Things are lying everywhere. While I’m busy trying not to look, Glasswell also leaps out of bed.

“Whahappened?” He spins around, sendingthingsflying everywhere.

Since he’s not awake enough to notice that he’s naked and—I’mnotlooking—also harder than a diamond, I pitch the comforter at him.

“Isitaspider?” he says, fighting his way out from inside the blanket.

I take the opportunity to straighten the pajamas I put on last night. “Hey, De Beers,” I say to Jake, “how did I get here?” I point fiercely at the bed.

“You fell asleep in the library,” he says.

Then I remember. The journal I’d fallen asleep reading... The kiss that never happened... Except...

I wrote about it in vivid, swoony detail, so explicit I can feel it in my lips and body, even now.

Our first kiss hasn’t ended.

I know it never will.

After that, the journal was only blank pages. That kiss was the last entry I ever wrote.

What if I wasn’t exaggerating?

What if there reallyisanother world?

Where Ididkiss Glasswell, and itdidchange both our lives?

Where I went to Juilliard.

Where we’re married. Like this, right here.

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