Page 107 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

He rolls me over, pins me to the bed. “You are terrible.”

“What, you’re wounded? Maybe you should’ve tried not to get wounded.”

He narrows his gray eyes, like I’m being amazing and terrible all at once. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

I shrug. Say nothing.

“You should’ve tried not to get wounded? Jesus.” And then he flops back down and laughs.

And then I’m laughing.

“Uh,” he says.

I prop my head up on my elbow. We just look at each other for a while. And we’re not playing a game; we’re just looking at each other. And it’s as if the world stills. Everything stops. The wind in the trees. The cats riding the vacuum cleaners. Everything.

And then he kisses me. And I kiss him back.

It’s a sweet kiss, not awanna-fuck?kiss. Not anaughty wake-up-call girlkiss. Not ajackalope-bosskiss.

Just pure affection.

In other words, it’s the most dangerous kind of kiss we could have.

I’m the one to stop it. I sit up and put a hand on his arm. To an outside observer, it might look like an affectionate touch. But I suppose it’s like baby goat faces—something that looks nice but is pure vicious survival. A reminding touch. To remind ourselves of the fuck buddies-only pact.

When I look into his eyes, I know he knows it.

“Okay,” he says. Because we don’t need the words. Which makes it all the sadder, I suppose.

I grab my phone, just to mentally reset myself. I find a goat video I saved for him. I make him watch.

He smiles even though he tries not to, because he’s a serious scientist who shouldn’t love baby goat videos. But really, who can resist baby goat videos?

I go into my cloud to find him another really good one. We watch it together and he laughs.

He’s always so happily astonished by them; that’s what makes it fun to show him. It makes me feel like I’m showing him wonders from the future or something.

After that, I show him a bunch of photos from my phone. Mia and me in the Catskills. The pizzeria attached to the home where I grew up. My mom and dad and me celebrating Three Musketeers Day, a holiday we made up for ourselves. “We didn’t have much money, but we were together in a fierce way,” I say. “March twenty-first. We’d eat all our favorite foods and do our favorite activities. No matter what day of the week it fell on, Mom and Dad would take off work. Sometimes they’d get me out of school early.”

“It’s coming up,” he says.

“I know. I’m going to miss it this year.” I flick past. No sense in going down there when I’ll be there at the end of the month.

I land on another sad image. “This space was for rent a few weeks back. I know they would never rent it to me with my credit, but I had to see it. Look at it. There’s a restaurant going in now, but look at the tin ceiling.”

He’s not looking at the tin ceiling. He’s looking at me. “Why would you go and see it if you know you can never have it?”

“You’re gonna laugh,” I say.

He traces the line of my jaw. “This is me.” Something strange happens in my heart when he says that.

“I have a dream board,” I say. “I know you’re a scientist and everything—”

He kisses the words off my lips. “You put the image on your dream board.”

“Yeah. I feel like it helps to have pictures of what I want. Though to be my ideal space, it would have to be on a corner. And really small and cozy like my old space. I would have one table outside, but none inside. I have a whole rationale about it.”

He wants to hear my rationale, so I tell him.

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