9781250209153

“Scottie.” Her voice is a whisper. “I like you. It’s crazy and unexpected,
but there it is. Something is working here.”
“You can’t like me. That’s not … we’re not…”
“What?”
I shake my head. “This whole thing started because we hated each other,
and then we got into a car accident and I paid you to be my girlfriend.”
“Yeah, it’ll make a great story for our kids. Will you lighten up? We’re
allowed to like each other.”
I turn my head away. “I don’t get it. You could have anyone.”
“So could you, asshole,” she says. “Why does anyone like anyone? We
just do. It’s pretty simple.”
“But I’m—I’m a—”
“Ginger?” She tsks. “Yeah, it’s surprising to me, too, but I did have a
thing for Anne of Green Gables in second grade.”
I laugh out loud. “Shut up.”
She smiles. It’s open and earnest and wanting. “I love when I get you to
laugh.”
We look at each other again. My heart is drumming beneath my sweater.
Irene inches forward the slightest bit, and so do I, and we hesitate for only a
moment.
“Don’t overthink it,” she whispers again.
Our mouths find each other easily. It’s just as amazing as the kiss at the
Emporium, but this time, it’s only for us. She lays her hand along my jaw
and kisses me like she means it, and I am breathless and weightless and
dizzy at the very fact of her. Lips and tongue and teeth, her hair and her skin
and her perfume, but more than anything, her very essence, her fire and
flaws and that steely determination to be better, to always be better.
I don’t let myself think about the things still unresolved: the tow truck
and her cruelty and the hurt I can’t reconcile. But even more tangled than
that, the pain I’ve been carrying that has nothing to do with Irene and
everything to do with the last girl I loved and the crater she left inside me.
“Are you okay?” Irene asks.
I pull back and paw the tears off my cheeks. “Sorry. Just—stupid
emotions.”