Page 33 of Blossoms of the Heart
I continued to stare for far too long, joining the host of women I could see looking at him now.
I couldn’t look away.
I took in his dark blue jeans that showed off the athletic definition in his legs.
Maybe he felt my eyes on him, but then there were so many more eyes fixed on him. I wondered how it was he’d singled me out when he turned and his eyes landed straight on me.
This felt just like that time when I was about fifteen and he was a sophomore in college. My mom caught me staring at him and gave me a lecture on how I needed to find a boy who was closer in age to me.
Then when she caught me sneaking off to the beach because Tai and his friends were having a party she went mad at me.
As I watched him he felt just as forbidden to me as he did back then.
But I wasn’t some starry-eyed teenager anymore. There was a difference between being fifteen and twenty, eighteen and twenty-three.
Twenty-nine and thirty-four.
No one could tell me who I could and couldn’t be with anymore.
A beautiful Japanese woman that looked like a model rushed up to him and gave him a hug, but his eyes were still on me.
A little kick to my leg broke my stare and I turned back to Mitsuke. Her face was an illuminated glow of bliss.
“Oh my God,” she beamed. “You still have the hots for my cousin.”
“What?” I narrowed my eyes and wished we’d gotten something with ice. My skin was on fire and my cheeks burned.
“Don’t youwhatme.” She wagged her pointer at me and smiled. “You like him. you still like him, after all these years.”
I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out.
The thing was, although I knew it was obvious to everyone that I had a mega crush on him when we were younger, I never admitted it.
I told Mitsuke everything, absolutely everything but not that. I’d always been too embarrassed to admit it, always thinking she would say he wouldn’t like me or something like that.
I also never told her what happened that last summer when I saw him either.
“He’s very nice.” I stuttered.
Mitsuke laughed. “You and I both know that Tai is far from nice. My cousin is an absolute prick. If I weren’t related to him I wouldn’t speak to him at all.” She giggled. “I can see you don’t mind the bad-boy types.”
“Mitsuke, please just drop it.”
“He’s coming over.” Excitement danced in her eyes.
I looked back to where Tai had been and saw that he was indeed coming over.
God, this was the longest day ever.
But perhaps the most exciting I’d had in a while.
