Page 49 of Only and Forever
Tallulah tips her head, noticing me staring at her. “What is it?”
I bring the beer to my mouth, then take a long pull. “Nothing.”
She arches an eyebrow. “And yet you’re staring at me.”
I am staring at her. I feel the beer warming my body, loosening my lips. “Twilight suits you, Lu. That’s all.”
Tallulah’s quiet for a second, blinking, before she tips back her whiskey glass and drains it. “I know.”
I laugh, hard and right from my belly.
“Suits you, too,” she says casually.
My laughter abruptly dies away.
“At least,” she adds, “it would, if three-fourths of your face weren’t hidden behind the remnants of Bigfoot’s last trip to the hairdresser.”
I gape. “Excuseme!”
“Your beard,” she laments. “It’s out of control. You’re a pair of eyeballs, a strong nose, and a beard.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Tallulah sets her whiskey on one of the crochet coasters adorning my coffee table, then leans forward, crawling across the sofa, landing up on her knees right beside me. Her hands clasp my face and frame it. Gently she smooths down my beard, tracing the contours of my jaw. Her thumbs sweep the perimeter of my mouth, as if she’s searching for my lips.
She’s quiet, her face tight with concentration. Inching closer, shelifts my beard and feels along my throat, beneath my jaw. My breath catches in my lungs, and my brain short-circuits, processing all the places she’s touching me, how good it feels—her knees pressed into my thigh, her fingertips grazing my skin through my beard, her thumbs tracing my jaw.
Her eyes meet mine. “What’s wrong is that you’rehiding.”
I swallow roughly. “I’m not hiding.”
But in a sense, she’s right. I am. I’m hiding my loneliness, my fear of failure, my exhaustion from years of hustling, scrimping, and saving, my ache for someone who wants to see and loveallof that.
“You,” she whispers, leaning in, clutching my jaw between her hands, “are hiding a hot-as-hell bone structure beneath all that beard. It’s a tragedy.”
Suddenly I don’t know what to do with my hands. I plant them hard into the sofa, my palms crushed against the woven linen. “I don’t know about that.”
“Donot,” she says, leaning closer, her mouth a breath away from mine, “even try to tell me you don’t know you’re a smoke show.”
I try to swallow again, but it’s so hard to think, to do the simplest thing, while she’s touching me like this, calling me hot, that I almost forget how to do it. “How do you know I’m a smoke show? Last time you saw me clean-shaven, I was eighteen.”
“Yeah. And you were hot back then.”
My eyes snap wide. “You thought I washotin college?”
She laughs. Laughs! “Of course I did.”
“Why the hell is that funny?”
“Viggo,youknew you were hot back then.”
“I didnot. If I did think anyone thought me hot, it certainly didn’t include you.”
She waves that away like my logic is a gnat, just as easily brushed off. “Nonsense.”
“Not nonsense,” I tell her emphatically. “Not nonsense in theleast.” My heart’s pounding, my head spinning. It’s one thing to have had an unrequited crush on Tallulah. It’s a whole other thing for her to have had a crush on me, too.
Then again, she just said she thought I was hot back then, not that she had acrushon me. There’s a difference, at least to me. And I have to know if there’s a difference to her.