Page 69 of An Overdue Match
“Angel, darling, you have to stop crying,” Tai finally says after my energy is completely spent. He gently circles his fingers around my wrists, and I allow my arms to fall to my sides without much of a fight. What’s the point? There’s no way to hide my hair loss from him any longer.
Breath warms the crown of my head before soft lips press a kiss to my scalp. I freeze in Tai’s arms.
Is my mind playing tricks on me? My heart so desperate that it’s imagining a kiss to my naked crown?
“You’ve never been more lovely to me than you are right now.” His arms tighten around me, the tip of his nose nuzzling the shell of my ear.
I have to be hearing things. First my body betrays me by shedding all my hair, and now it’s turned on me again by making me have audible hallucinations. “No one wants me like this,” I manage to croak.
Tai cups my cheek and leans forward, tilting my head so Ihave to meet his eyes. They’re deep pools of earnestness and adoration. “I want you like this, Angel,” he says fiercely. “I’vealwayswanted you.”
He can’t mean that. I’m unnatural, unwomanly. No one could be attracted to me this way. What movie or book or piece of art shows the leading man falling in love with a bald woman? Beauty has standards, and I fall way below them. Tai’s trying to be nice. To make me feel better. There’s no way he’d want me the way that I am, and there’s no way he’s always wanted me because he didn’t know about my hair loss before now.
It’s easier to believe the multitude of voices I’ve heard on repeat since my diagnosis than it is to accept what Tai’s saying.
“Angel, I’ve known. About your alopecia. I’ve known, sweetheart. Before our kiss, I knew. I knew you were sporting a beautiful bald head under your wig.”
“It’s impossible.” I shake my head. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better, but you couldn’t have known. Couldn’t. If you had, you wouldn’t...”
“Wouldn’t what? Find myself daydreaming, distracted by the torture of wanting to be near you when you kept pushing me away? Imagining finding some secluded corner of that library of yours and kissing you until you realized what I’ve known all along—that you drive me crazy in the best way possible? That I wouldn’t resort to any means necessary to spend time with you? Because that’s what I did, Angel. That’s what I did, and I knew.”
That can’t be possible ... can it?
“I can prove it.” He shifts his weight and pulls his cell from his back pocket. After opening the phone, he taps on the screen a few times until he finds the picture he’s looking for and then angles the screen so I can see. It’s a snapshot of a sketch he’d drawn. Me, without a stitch of hair anywhere on my face or head.
I suck in a breath, tears filling my eyes once again. I blink them back so I can study the drawing. How had he known? How had he known and still wanted to be with me? To touch me and kiss me and call me lovely?
“There was something about you I couldn’t put my finger on. Something incongruous that I couldn’t place. Then I did a head tattoo for a woman, and the thing I’d been obsessing over clicked into place. It was your hair, I realized. You wore a wig. Then I looked closer—which was no hardship because you really are beautiful, Angel—and I noticed your brows and eyelashes.”
“You really already knew?” I ask, still wrapping my mind around this revelation. “And you still wanted me?”
Tai’s gaze dips to my lips. “Want, Angel. Present tense. I want you more than I’ve wanted anything in my entire life.”
He leans forward slowly, as if giving me time to pull away if that’s what my heart is telling me to do.
“I want you too, Tai,” I murmur right before our lips meet.
Where our last kiss had been driven by passion and need, this one is soft and tender. Tai seems to take his time to savor the feel of my mouth on his. He reaches up and cups the back of my bare head, swallowing my sound of surprise and protest, telling me over and over again how lovely I am to him with every caress, every touch.
Chee chee chee!
A high-pitched chittering sound not unlike an angry, scolding rodent screams at us from the tree line.
“Why is there always an audience when we kiss?” Tai grins against my lips.
I turn my head toward where the sound came from, freeze, then groan.
On a low branch of a nearby elm tree stands a bushy-tailed squirrel carrying what looks to be . . .
“Is that a squirrel with your—”
“Wig. Yep.” What is it with me and forest animals? “First the raccoon, then the deer, and now a squirrel. Woodland creatures seem to have it out for me for some reason.”
“What?” Tai asks on a laugh.
“Nothing. Just that I’m the antithesis of a Disney princess, apparently. Instead of singing and helping me with my household chores, the woodland creatures in my life like to wreak havoc instead.”
Tai’s smile widens. “Should I try and get your wig back?”
