Page 32 of Falling for My Matchmaker

His lips met mine, slow and warm. His thumb brushed along my jaw as he deepened it—just a little.

And that was when my brain officially left the building.

Or, more accurately, tried to—only to run face-first into a wall ofwhat is happening.

Because this was not like kissing Brad.

Brad had been polite. Efficient. Like an HR-approved intimacy tutorial.

This?

This was...heated. Like Nate wasn’t just kissing me—he wasreadingme, one layer at a time.

My heart stumbled. My body responded—in that instinctive, nonnegotiable way that had nothing to do with logic or mock-date outlines.

And suddenly I was very aware of how much he wasinto this.

Not just participating. Not just facilitating.

Into it.

This didn’t feel like a coaching exercise. This felt like hunger with manners.

Which raised the question:

How gay was Nate, exactly?

The way his hips pressed against mine left no room for misinterpretation.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

So I kept kissing him.

I felt his hand skim under my dress, just above the knee.

And then he paused.

His hand froze on my leg like it had suddenly realized it wasn’t cleared for landing. His breathing hitched. He didn’tspeak, didn’t move—just sat there with his eyes closed, like he wasn’t totally sure what planet we were on anymore.

“Are we...doing this?” I asked.

Nate let out a lowmhhmm—it wasn’t a word so much as a vowel in crisis. After what seemed like an eternity, he opened his eyes and exhaled.

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice had that confused, slowed-down quality of someone who’d forgotten where they left their moral compass.

I blinked up at him—my dress halfway off one shoulder, his shirt half unbuttoned. We were flushed, breathing hard, skin warm against skin...and somehow still standing on the edge of something neither of us had expected to find.

We didn’t move.

Just...hovered there. Tangled up in the pause. In the maybe.

“I thought this was for me,” I said finally. “You know—practice. Boundaries. Exposure therapy with wine.”

“It was,” he said. “Itis.”

“But also not?”

He didn’t answer.

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