Page 118 of Party Favors

He hesitated for only a moment and then shifted so that he was over me. He braced himself with his elbows, looking down at me with so much desire in his eyes, but with a softer emotion alongside it, one that made me melt inside. He brushed some of my hair away from my face. “Everly.”

I swallowed hard. Then I reached up to capture his mouth, urging him to kiss me again. Words turned into heavy breaths and thoughts turned into sensations. There was nothing but Max and his touch and kiss. Everything else ceased to exist.

I tugged at his shoulders again and this time he did what I wanted, his weight pressing down against me, our legs intertwined, my heart beating hard against his. This shifting seemed to be all that was needed to get him to forget all about holding back. He parted my mouth and kissed me deeply, tasting me. His blood-scorching, toe-curling kisses were overwhelming, his fingers perfectly kneading and grazing and pressing me into mindless ecstasy.

When I was nine years old, there had been a freak snowstorm near my house. We’d had to go to the store for supplies. On the way home the roads had looked clear, but they weren’t. Black ice everywhere. My mother slid and careened out of control for a few seconds when she hit a particularly bad patch, but it had felt like hours. I remembered the weightlessness in my stomach, the sensation of soaring through space, being out of control but somehow thrilled at the same time. The hollowed-out feeling like you were going way too fast but part of you didn’t want that sensation to stop.

It was how I felt now. Careening out of control, weightless, lightheaded, stomach floating—and I wanted more.

I reached down for the hem of my tank top, intending to take it off. I had to feel his skin against mine.

His hand went around my wrist, stilling my movement. “Wait, what are you doing?”

“What do you think?” I asked, reaching up to kiss him, but he turned his head slightly so that it landed on his jaw. I furrowed my eyebrows. What washedoing?

“I’m trying to be sensitive to your situation,” he said. “I know that you don’t have a lot of experience—”

“Barely any,” I supplied. If we were going to call my non-past out, we should at least do it accurately.

“Barely any experience, and I don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable situation or pressure you. Especially because you make me forget myself.”

“You make me forget myself, too.” I moved against him and he made a sound that was part pain and part pleasure. His hand stayed on my wrist, though, holding it in place.

A section of my brain that wasn’t hazy registered the fact that he was trying to be respectful to me and my situation. “You’re not taking advantage of me. I’m an adult and I can make my own choices. You don’t need to protect me from myself. Speeding cars, maybe. But not from myself.”

His chest was still moving back and forth rapidly, like he was having a hard time catching his breath. “I do want to protect you. Even if the person I have to protect you from is me.”

“You don’t have to do that, either.”

“I want to keep you safe and make it so that nothing bad ever happens to you.”

Which was very sweet and endearing and my heart turned into a gooey mess. I loved him so much that it felt impossible to keep it contained inside any longer. I tugged my hand out of his grasp and reached up to stroke the side of his face gently. “I know I’m supposed to feel nervous or anxious about escalating things, but when I’m with you, I don’t feel that way. I want to be as close to you as I can and everything that entails because I love you.”

“You what?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

If Meemaw were dead, she would have been rolling in her grave right now. It was the one thing she had drilled into my head once I’d become a teenager—I was never supposed to tell a man I was dating that I loved him first. It had always seemed outdated and sexist to me, but given Max’s reaction, maybe it had some merit.

My first inclination was to try to retract it. Take it back and pretend I’d never said it.

But that would be lying and I didn’t want to do that.

“I have to go,” he said.

Now I was the one dumbfounded. “What?”

Max disentangled himself from me, and I was too shocked to react to the sudden loss of his warmth. He stood up and grabbed his shirt and put it back on, doing up only one button, and then got his coat, and the whole time I was thinking he was doing the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted clothes off and him in bed with me, not clothes being put on and him leaving.

My brain was so scrambled from his kisses that I couldn’t process what was happening. I tried, though. “Where are you going?”

“I promise I will call you,” he said. He lingered in the doorway for a moment to look at me and then he was gone.

I lay in my bed, unable to move, all of my limbs short-circuited and nonfunctioning. What had just happened? Or not happened?

Was he really that freaked out by me telling him that I loved him?

I had thought Max was more mature than that. If he didn’t love me back, he could have just said it. Or that he wasn’t quite there yet. He didn’t have to make a great escape and leave me feeling so depressed and defeated.

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