Page 44 of Neat
Logan laughed as I blinked my eyes open again, charging after him with my brush. He ran behind his canvas, and when I flung another attack, it landed all over the painting he’d been working on.
“Hey!” he said, peeking over the top at the new addition to his work. “You ruined it!”
“I made it better.”
“Oh, yeah?” Logan swiped his brush over my painting, making a haphazard smiley face right over my snow man. “There. I returned the favor.”
I laughed, walking over to marvel at the new addition. “Huh. You kind of did.”
Logan peered over to look at the painting with me, like he wondered if it actuallydidlook better with that smiley face, and it was just the distraction I needed to reach out and run my brush in a line from his ear to his collarbone.
I ran out of his reach before he could react, but he was on my heels quick, chasing me until I was hiding behind one of the chairs in the new pottery section. He hid behind his own barricade, and when I stood and slung another brush full of paint at him, it went everywhere — on the chair he hid behind, the new firing oven, the anvils and bevel cutters and other tools we’d arranged neatly in bins on the shelf.
Logan’s mouth popped open as he stood. “Wait, stop,” he said, putting his hands up before I could fire off another round. “You’re messing everything up.”
I laughed, ditching the brush all together and dipping my hands in the palette. A rainbow of colors stained my fingers and palms as I ran over to him and planted them right in the middle of his chest.
“Who cares! It’s paint,” I reminded him. “It’ll come off.”
“This is one of my favorite workout shirts!”
I shrugged. “Shouldn’t have worn it to an art shop.”
Logan narrowed his eyes, but then he dropped his own brush, hands on a path for the paint on his palette.
I took off screaming, looking for my next shield. Logan rounded the stack of boxes we had yet to unpack before I could hide behind them, catching me in his wet, paint-covered hands just as I slid around them. He wiped them down my arms, leaving multicolored streaks from my shoulders to my wrists.
“This shirt looks better with sleeves,” he said with a grin.
I wiggled out of his grasp, panting and laughing as I sprinted across the shop to get more ammo. But I hit a wet spot, my shoe sliding over the gob of paint left by one of our attacks, and before I knew how to stop it, I was windmilling, the world tilting.
“Oh, shit!”
I tried to steady myself, but it was useless, and I wrapped my hands around my head to try to protect it from the fall.
But it never came.
Logan slid in like a baseball runner stealing home, catching me in his lap as I tumbled to the floor. It was a loud and awkward contact — me hitting him, him hitting the hard tile, both of us a mess of limbs and paint as we tried to figure out what had just happened.
“Are you okay?” Logan asked, hands framing my arms first, then my face, his eyes searching me for bruises or bleeding. He still had paint all over those hands, but I couldn’t find it in me to care that he was getting it in my hair and all over my cheeks.
“I’m okay,” I said on a laugh, giggling more when the worry didn’t erase from his face as he continued his search.
I reached forward, running my own paint-covered thumb over that line between his brows again. It was like that touch pulled Logan into another room, another time, another world where it was just me and him and the warmth of my thumb on his forehead.
The music faded, the only sound now the steady thumping of his heart and mine.
Logan’s next breath was a shallow rasp, a hard swallow rocking his Adam’s apple as I continued dragging my thumb down, over the bridge of his nose, the tip, slipping down to catch his bottom lip before I dragged it off his chin. I watched my thumb making its descent, and when it fell from his face, my hand rested on his chest, fingers twisting in the fabric of his t-shirt.
I flicked my eyes back to his, but his were locked on my mouth now.
I smirked. “You want to kiss me, don’t you, Logan Becker?” I whispered.
His eyes fluttered a bit, but otherwise, there was no response. There was no effort to deny or confirm, just his golden eyes locked on my lips, his hands still framing my face, my fist in his shirt, tugging him closer.
“Do it,” I whispered, fingers curling more into his cotton t-shirt. I tilted my chin up, seeking him, heart pounding in my ears so loud I couldn’t be sure I’d actually said the words.
A pained sound rumbled somewhere deep within Logan — his chest, maybe, or his soul. Those strong hands slipped farther into my hair, cradling my neck, pulling me closer, his eyes still locked on my lips.
