Page 28 of Amelia and Her Prince Charming
All emotions that didn’t make sense when put together, but also, I was experiencing them ALL PUT TOGETHER.
Along with a willingness to sell my left kidney for a cup of water.
And a deep longing to not be wearing only my underwear for this. At least I had on the solid black set. Boring. Almost like a swimsuit, except with its lacy trim, it very obviously wasn’t a swimsuit.
And neither was Hudson’s underwear, which I was doing a bang-up job of not looking at but, because my eyes workverywell, I had noticed was also black. Like we’d color-coordinated this island hypothermia adventure.
It was a lot. Too much to think about to sleep, that was for sure.
Hudson wasn’t having the same problem.Oh, hey, let me confess my love and press a mind-blowing kiss to your hand, then sleep like a child after a long day at an amusement park.Or like a man who didn’t have a care in the world.
Meanwhile I hadallthe cares. Like, what would his lips pressed to my lips feel like? Of all the thoughts swirling to the top of my mind, that one was the most pressing.
I turned to face him. He stirred slightly, then held me tightly again as he fell back under the spell of deep sleep. His face was as familiar as it had always been—the dark brown eyebrows. The thick fringe of eyelashes I’d always been jealous of. The sharp angle of his jaw. The stubble covering his chin. The serious turnof his mouth. I wanted to run my fingers along the lines of his face, the same way I’d done on his palm.
Whenever I was feeling down, Grandma loved to take my palm in hers and tell me all the things she saw for me—great love, success, hard times but the help and strength to get through. She’d warn me too—to open my eyes and really see the people around me. It always made me feel comforted and loved in that baked-cookies-after-school kind of way, and I’d wanted to do the same for Hudson.
Well, that had backfired. It had activated his stoic, closed-off expression, while I was left awash in confusion. And an eensie-teeny-tiny bit of all-consuming desire. That was all. No big deal.
When I had met Hudson, all those years ago, I felt like he’d been a gift sent straight to me from my mom right when I needed someone the most. I’d even had a bit of a crush on him back then, but he seemed totally content just being friends, and so I was too. Then I’d met Shiloh, and my sphere of vision narrowed fully on him.
Knowing Hudson like I knew him now, I realized that I had mistaken his reservedness for disinterest. He lived his life cautiously and thoughtfully, a rarity among the college students in our circle. One of the most impetuous things he’d ever done was quit his job and move to Montana to help take care of me and Quinn.
I slid my arm around his waist and spread my hand along his side to feel his hot skin. He normally didn’t sleep this deeply. One cry from Quinn, and he was in the hallway outside her room. One buzz of his phone when he was on-call, and he was awake and heading to the hospital. He’d exerted a lot of energy to swim and save me and then carry me here and build this fire, plus using all of his body heat to keep me warm.
He had given everything he had to save my life.
I wanted to pull him in, kiss him, and see how we both reacted. Like a science experiment. I had a hypothesis that the sensation I’d felt after he kissed my hand would be magnified by some unspecified and unmeasurable amount when it was our lips touching.
I was an English teacher, not a scientist, but it made sense to me.
What if I was wrong, though? What if Hudson didn’t have feelings for me, and when he said,I love you, he’d left off the part,like a sister.
Family reunions would be even more awkward than waking up in my underwear next to him had been.
“But what if I’m right?” I whispered as I stared at his mouth. I was three inches away from having the answer.
“Right about what?” Hudson asked, his voice low and scratchy with sleep. His eyes were still closed, and he was in that place between sleep and wakefulness before you were fully aware of reality.
“Everything,” I said to him. “And nothing.” My brain was starting to feel fuzzy with exhaustion, thirst, and hunger, like the ideas were there, but they were behind a mist, making it hard for me to grab onto them. I blinked a few times, but it did nothing to clear it.
“Hudson,” I said when he didn’t respond. “What would happen if we kissed?”
His eyes fluttered open. “I don’t know.”
“Should we try it?” My lips brushed his, lighter than a butterfly’s wing and yet somehow zinging through the fog in my mind in a way all the blinking in the world had failed.
“Kissing? Why?”
“For science,” I murmured.
“I thought you hated science.”
“My science teachers should have used kissing.”
“You wanted to kiss your teachers?”
I huffed out a laugh. “No. I want to kissyou.”
