Page 81 of Signed, Sealed, and Smitten
When he doesn’t tease me about my corny joke, I look at him again. His eyes have a faraway look, and he’s pulling on his bottom lip.
“Jay? You okay?”
“I’m aware this is going to sound …” He rubs his forehead.
“Sound what?”
“Phoebe, I think I was your pen pal.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Phoebe
Jay thinkshe was my fifth-grade pen pal?
I smirk at him. “You’re letting the building lore get to you. We would have figured this out already.”
“I’m serious,” he says.
He looks shaken enough that I stop smiling. “Come on. What are the chances?”
“Tell me if this sounds familiar,” he says, forehead wrinkling as he concentrates. “For safety reasons, we could only use our initials, and the letters were delivered in a class batch to the school address. I wrote to PJ, and you wrote to …”
He leaves me to finish the sentence, and I remember him reintroducing himself to me in the library weeks ago. “JP. Jameson Paul.”
He nods. “What does your J stand for?”
“Jane.” I say it faintly, still trying to process this. There’s no way. My mind races to pull up other details from those letters.
“Phoebe Jane. It fits you.” He smiles. “JP and PJ. I remember thinking that was kind of funny. Your city wascalled Celebration. I thought it was a dumb name, but it had a road that went straight to Disney World, and I was jealous.”
“It is a dumb name,” I say. But how would he know it if he wasn’t my pen pal?
“You said your school should be called Booty School because everyone who went there was?—”
“A butt,” I finish, staring at him with wide eyes.
“I thought that was so funny. I showed it to all my friends in class, and then we got in trouble for laughing.”
“Your teacher emailed my teacher, and my teacher said we couldn’t use inappropriate words in our letters anymore.” I give him a light whack on the bicep. “I got a lunch detention for that, you snitch.”
He catches my hand and holds it, lowering our joined hands to rest on his knee, his thumb stroking lightly over my knuckles. “You believe me now?”
I search his eyes, wondering if he feels the same thing I do. A sense of chaos and bafflement and … wonder. “How is this possible? It’s too much of a coincidence.”
He looks around the roof and shakes his head. “This is what you call serendipity.”
“Happy accident. That’s what serendipity means. I couldn’t remember if it meant fate or good luck or something like that, so I looked it up.”
“Then maybe it’s not serendipity.” He reaches with his free hand to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear, then cups the back of my head and meets my eyes. “At this point, it seems inevitable.”
So does the kiss that will happen next. I know it, and I want it, even though I don’t have any more answers than I did downstairs in my apartment. I’m tired of fighting my feelings, and with this new revelation, it feels like I’ve been trying to fight something even bigger than that.
I lean toward him, inviting him to close the gap.
He does, brushing his lips over mine, and it sends prickles across my scalp the way only intensely sweet things can. I barely have time to register the feeling before he kisses me again, this time with more pressure, and his lips are just the right amount of full and just the right degree of warm.
His fingers slip into my hair at my nape while his thumb brushes against the corner of my mouth. I don’t know if he pulls me closer or I lean in, but I think it’s both, and I settle my hand over his heart, pressing when I feel its strong beat.
