Page 64 of Never Forever
Remember that first summer we spent here? In this place. When we told each other our secrets and we became friends? Remember how it all began in such sweetness and kindness and innocence?
Remember when we both lost our virginity in your truck?
“How can you even run here?” I asked, like he was doing this banal thing on our sacred ground. Then I realized how that might have sounded. “I mean, why are you running here with her?”
He jerked his thumb behind him at the track. “Rachel Berkowitz went to state last year as a freshman. She’s already got recruiters interested in her.”
“So you’re what… coaching her?”
He shrugged.
“To do what? Give up a scholarship, disappoint a lot of people and break a bunch of promises?”
It was, easily and without a doubt, the meanest thing I’d ever said to him. I almost gasped after I said it. I almost apologized. Except, well, it was true. Every word of it.
The silence was brittle and sharp. He didn’t look at me. I stared at him.
“No,” he finally said, kicking a rock with his shoe. “I’m just helping her with some endurance work.”
I snorted. “If I remember correctly, that wasn’t exactly your strong suit.”
Oh God, I was really going for it now. My mouth was running away with me.
It was being here. At the bandshell. The smell of him, salty and sweet, making me say stupid things.
He stepped closer, his toe hitting mine and I tried to step back, but the bench was behind me. “I’m sorry, what are you referring to, Carrie?”
Stop! Abort! Danger!
If nothing else, just walk away.
Instead, I threw gas on the fire.
“Oh, I think you remember? The first few times we messed around…I mean it was all really sweet of course, if not a tiny bit… fast.”
Another step forward and his other foot hit mine. We were toe to toe and if I took a deep breath, my breasts would brush his chest.
My nipples really wanted me to take a deep breath.
I hadn’t stood this close to him in years. Painful, agonizing years. I was dizzy with adrenaline and memories and pain…and fucking longing.
“You’re really doing this?” he asked, and I forced myself to look him in the eyes. To blink my eyelashes and play dumb.
“Doing what?”
He growled and I felt it in his chest, in the tiny bit of air between our bodies.
Going there?That’s what the growl meant. I was fluent in Matt Sullivan’s growls.You’re really going there?
To the memories of the truck and the bedroom at his dad’s house and the years of what we did to each other.
“I don’t know what you mean, Matt. If you want to communicate, I suggest using words.”
“I was seventeen and I think I more than made up for it,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Do. Not. Play. Dumb. You remember,” he growled. My nipples were so hard they could cut glass. My spine was halfway to breaking for him. One touch from him and I’d crumple. Did he know that? Thank God he didn’t touch me. “We both remember how it was between us.”