God, if he ended it after that kiss, after that date, I was going to wither away. He was the only person I’d ever felt this way for. Being with him took away the hurt and shame from the pack of lies I’d told.
“Still,” he said and his voice trailed off. “I kind of feel like a schmuck.”
“Don’t,” I said quickly, and laid a hand on his. “Don’t feel that way at all. I like you so much, and I don’t think about the age difference. You like me, right?”
“Obviously,” he said, and nuzzled me briefly, before turning serious again. “Still. We need to be careful.”
“You mean no making out in museum courtyards?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I mean, nothing more than making out.”
My cheeks turned red. We’d only kissed but we were already talking about sex.
“Noah, I’m so not even remotely ready to go there,” I said. I’d never had sex, and I wasn’t ready to. If he wanted more, he was with the wrong girl, and that was that. He was going to have to be okay with this line or I’d walk. “You need to know that to be with me.”
“I am on board with that. And I think that’s all we should do. Age of consent or not, legality or not, you’re in high school and I’m in—whatever you want to call it. After high school. You know how it’d look.”
Noah
It would look bad.
I ran a hand roughly through my hair and dropped my forehead in my palm. What was I doing?
Regardless of having the law on our side, she was a teenager. I was supposed to be the mature one. Then there was that little bitty issue of her being my client’s daughter. I was skating on wafer-thin ice, but God help me. She was some kind of magic to me. She was everything I never knew I wanted, and she’d quickly become the one and only person I felt like myself with.
In some ways, I was used to being alone. No brothers or sisters, no mom or dad, I was all work and no play. My relentless focus on work and growing my career had paid off handsomely, and it had also kept me busy. But at the end of the day when it was just me, I was left feeling adrift.
With Kennedy, I was anchored. She filled all the lonely spaces inside of me with her laughter, with her wry and witty humor, with everything we had in common.
Sure, I probably should have walked away before I got in too deep. But here’s the thing about falling in love. All the movies, the books, all the TV shows will tell you that you can’t help who you fall in love with. You scoff and laugh and say Yeah, right. Of course you can help it.
Until it happens to you.
And you can’t help it.
You are powerless to resist.
Or really, you choose to stop resisting.
Because rather than walk away from the forbidden fruit, I did what man has been doing for ages. Bit into it, and bit away the shame of how it would look, of what it would say about me to feel this way for a girl in high school. Damn the consequences; the reality tasted better than the risk. I wrapped my arms around her neck and pulled her close. “I didn’t plan this, K. I didn’t set out to feel this way.”
“I did,” she said, sounding sheepish. “I’ve had a huge crush on you forever.”
“You did?” I asked, wrenching back to look at her curiously.
“Yes. I like you so much. That’s why I kept coming to your office,” she said, like it was an admission of a secret.
“You wanted to wear down my resistance?”
“Did it work? My nefarious plan?”
“Musicals, chocolate chip cookies, not a word about a TV deal. Yeah, I’d say it worked perfectly,” I said matter-of-factly. Then I lowered my voice, down to the barest of truths. “And now I’m yours.”
I’d never felt so vulnerable as in that moment. I was risking so much, but gaining so much more, because with her, I was so damn happy.
“Are you mine?” she whispered, and I could hear the nerves in her voice, like she wanted to be sure and certain of all I felt.
“Kennedy, I’m so crazy about you I’d want to be with you even if you liked hip-hop or hair bands, and I can’t stand either of those.”
“You don’t have anything to worry about on that count. ‘So tell me why should it be true. I get a kick out of you,’” she said in the most enticing voice I’d ever heard her use, and it turned me on to no end.
Our Stolen Kisses
You’d used the F-word.
No, not THAT one.
The good F-word.
The falling one.
You were falling for me, and I was falling for you, and we were falling together into the land of the fallen. You placed your hands on my cheeks, touching my face, then your lips found mine, and we kissed until the museum closed. For the first time in my life, I had something pure, something perfect, something the opposite of everything I’d ever known.
I was happy. Happier than I’d ever been. I let your word—I’m yours—fill me up with a giddy kind of joy that comes only with falling in love.
Chapter Nineteen
Kennedy
One of the benefits to my mom’s habits is that it was easy to pull the wool over her eyes about my own affair. It was easy because she was preoccupied. It was easy because she was having her own affair with Jay Fierstein, my dad’s business partner. It was easy because I knew how to pull off the cover-up, having watched and helped her for years.
It was a piece of cake for another reason too. Because she never would have suspected it. It never would have occurred to my mother that I might be involved with her agent. In her solar system, all the planets—Noah Hayes included—revolved around her. The notion that I might have knocked one of her planets out of her orbit would not even compute.