I stepped around him to look at the creation he had been working on and my laughter got trapped in my lungs. My jaw dropped open and I turned to him with gigantic eyes.
“Is that me?” I sounded like I was being strangled.
“Really? You have to ask?” His tone was humorous, but there was something else underlying it.
The picture he had created was a cartoon character, exaggerated and outrageous. The colors seemed to pop off the paper. It was a nurse in an outrageously sexy outfit, the kind girls wore for Halloween when they were on the prowl. She had wild red hair and was holding a cartoon syringe in one hand and a heart in the other. Despite the exaggerated proportions and obvious enhancements to make her shockingly sexy, she was me. The hair, the eyes, the face … all of it was me. How on earth had he done that in the twenty minutes we had been screwing around?
“It’s amazing.”
“I keep telling you that so are you. You just aren’t listening.” He moved to take the painting down and I reached out to stop him.
“Can I have it?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Of course.”
It was huge, I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but the idea that that was how he saw me … sexy, beautiful, and in control … I didn’t want to let it go.
“Nash, let’s go somewhere.”
“What do you mean? I was just gonna come back to your place with you if that was cool.”
I took the painting he offered me and hugged it to my chest.
“I never went on dates in high school, never had a guy try anything funny or get handsy so I could tell him to stop. I didn’t kiss my first boy until I was almost twenty years old. I want you to take me somewhere kids go to fool around. This was fun, and I haven’t really ever been the type to just let my hair down and have fun. I think parking with you in a car sounds like a blast.” It also sounded hot and sexy and would fulfill every teenage fantasy I had ever concocted that involved him.
“Saint, it’s cold out, we both have empty apartments, we’re both tall, and I’m not anywhere near as small as I was in high school. It might sound fun, but the reality is going to be cold and cramped.” He was grinning lightly when he said this, though, and I knew he just needed to be persuaded.
I put one of my hands on the center of his chest, felt his heartbeat steady and sound under my fingertips, and looked up at him with pleading eyes.
“Please, Nash.”
He sighed and put a hand under my braid at the back of my neck.
“As long as you realize I probably won’t stop at second base and that means your ass is the one that’s going to be naked and cold, then I’m in.”
I giggled, actually giggled, which I don’t think I had ever done before tonight, and kissed him on his scruffy chin.
“Deal.”
He put the stuff from our painting party in the trunk, hopefully because he wanted the backseat free … goody … and we started to head out of the city kind of toward Brookside.
“Where are we going?”
“Lookout Mountain.”
It was just outside Golden and where Buffalo Bill Cody’s grave was located. I had heard about it but had never actually seen it. You were supposed to be able to see the entire city from up there.
“Is that where you used to take girls?”
“Uh, no. By the time I knew girls had more going for them than the fact that they smelled good and would do my homework for me if I told them they were pretty, I was pretty much living with Phil full-time. Dude is a player, way worse than Rule or I ever was. I had the house to myself pretty much every night, so when I got the opportunity I just took them home.”
“What do you mean ‘got the opportunity’?” I remembered girls hanging all over him in high school. It didn’t look like he had to work too hard at finding a willing bed partner.
“I hung out with a dude in a band, every chick’s idea of the perfect rebel, and the captain of the football team. I was just some guy with a bad attitude that was constantly getting told what a mistake I was at home. I didn’t know how to talk to girls that mattered. I had girls floating around that were easy and would put out … they didn’t really care who the guy was. That means they could’ve been into Rule for the night, or Jet. Opportunity definitely had to play into it.”
That was so odd. My perception and the reality of everything back then just seemed so different. I wanted to ask him more about it, but we got to an outcropping of rock that was flat and just long enough and wide enough for him to park the car. He killed the headlights and threw an arm over the back of the seat and looked at me in the now-dim interior of the front seat.
“We can go back to the city. You say the word.”
I didn’t answer him. I lifted up and wiggled over the back of the seat instead. I pulled off my flannel shirt along the way. He left the car running, but it was still January in Colorado and we were high up in the foothills, so it was brisk in the car and the windows were already fogging up. He watched me for a second and then got out of the car. There was no way he was fitting over the seat like I did, and he pulled his wallet out on the way. He handed me the square foil packet and climbed in, pulling the door shut behind him. He stripped off his hoodie and hat and we sat facing each other.
I thought he would grab me and pull me to him, but a ghost of a smile teased around his mouth and he pushed back his broad shoulders so that he was lounged across the leather seat.
“This is your game, Saint. How do you want to play?”
He was always putting me in the driver’s seat, pushing my limits, making me say what I wanted from him. Maybe that was why I never froze up with him, why I never had to question what was happening between us, because everything that was happening was what I was asking for. There was no room for rejection or judgment that way.
I shivered, and not at all from the cold.
“I want you to kiss me.”
He reached out and caught my braid in his hand and used it to reel me in. When our mouths touched, it was so much more than a simple kiss. He tasted like the past and like the future, the then and the now. He felt so strong and solid, but his lips were soft and searching. His skin was rougher than normal, but when he pulled me closer and our noses bumped, the glide of that little piece of metal he wore was smooth. He twirled his tongue with mine, and used his teeth on the plush curve of the inside of my lip. I gasped into the kiss and felt him chuckle. Before, I would have automatically assumed he was laughing at me. Now I knew he was just amused because it felt that good and he knew it.