Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 88460 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 442(@200wpm)___ 354(@250wpm)___ 295(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88460 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 442(@200wpm)___ 354(@250wpm)___ 295(@300wpm)
“No idea.” She bites her lip, then grins. “Maybe a bunch of trees—a tree line and mountains, to commemorate your time in my little town.” She pauses, eyes glinting mischievously. “And my vagina,” she adds, giggling.
I choke on my breath, caught between shock and laughter. “Oh yeah?” I slide my hand down her back, fingers tracing slow, deliberate circles against her hip. “You want me to get a tattoo of your pussy on my body?”
“That is so gross,” she laughs, smacking my shoulder.
I chuckle, pressing a kiss to her shoulder. “Would you ever get a tattoo?”
Lucy shrugs, staring up at the ceiling. “I’ve thought about it a few times but have no idea what I would ink on my skin.”
I tilt my head, watching her. “Nothing at all?”
“Well . . .” She stretches, her body shifting against mine. “I like the idea of something small. Maybe meaningful. Except every time I think I’ve found something I might want, I talk myself out of it.”
My thumb brushes her wrist. “I think tattoos should mark a moment.”
Lucy exhales, eyes searching mine. “Like . . . the moment you leave?”
Ouch. That was a sharp dig.
Still, I hesitate. The truth is, I don’t know.
I don’t know what happens after I’m gone.
I don’t want to think about that.
I want to exist here, in this bed, with her.
So I tighten my grip on her hip, pulling her closer. “We’ll figure it out.”
Her lips part, like she wants to argue, like she wants to demand an actual answer, something tangible she can hold on to as I smooth my hand up her spine, feeling the warmth of her skin, the steady rise and fall of her breathing.
Neither of us speaks.
Neither of us moves.
At some point, she shifts, her forehead tucking under my chin, her breath ghosting across my collarbone.
“Lucy?”
“Yeah?”
“My back is killing me.”
Chapter 21
Lucy
This is not how I imagined the scene when Harris Bennett met my mother.
No. She didn’t catch us in the act.
She didn’t barge in unannounced.
She’s here because she’s the only person I could think to call with a level head; we already know Annabelle is zero help during an emergency. Obviously, the only logical thing to do was call my parents over—moms usually know what to do, and I’m fairly certain my father’s back has been jacked up a time or two.
Yes. They’ll have the answers.
They’re standing over Harris—giant hunk of a man—like two field medics assessing a patient, fussing over his bruises.
Dad stares down at him, Harris’s lower half covered by my comforter. I couldn’t get a T-shirt on him without causing more pain, so his chest is still bare, bruises and all.
“Well, hello, young man,” Mom says, clasping her hands together as she gives Harris a slow, assessing look. “I’m Liz—Lucy’s mom.”
Harris, for all his usual confidence, visibly swallows before shifting his arm off his forehead and attempting to sit up a little straighter. “Uh, hello, Mrs. . . .”
He doesn’t even know my last name.
Oh God. Could this get any more embarrassing?
“LeBrandt,” my mother supplies, glancing at me over her shoulder, brows raised as if to say Seriously, Lucy?
I shrug.
Harris clears his throat. “Mrs. LeBrandt.”
He shifts again, like he’s trying to sit up properly, but then immediately winces and gives up, sinking back into the pillows. It does nothing to improve the situation. If anything, it makes all this look so much worse—because he looks like some wounded knight in a romance novel, battered and bare chested and in my bed.
“Have you taken any ibuprofen?” Mom asks Harris, pressing her open palm to his forehead. She smooths his hair back as if he were a feverish toddler, giving him the same sympathetic expression she once reserved for me all the times I was sick or injured.
“No.”
She gives me another disapproving look. “Luce—can you grab three?”
As I leave the room I glance at them again. Harris Bennett, a literal football-playing tank of a man and wannabe lumberjack, leans into my mother’s pampering like he is indeed a feverish toddler.
Kill me.
Kill me now.
Dad, who has been standing silently through this whole exchange, finally sighs. “Liz, stop babying him. Look at him, he’s huge.”
Mom scoffs. “He’s hurt.”
“He fell into a garbage can.”
“Poor thing,” my mother goes on. “And after all that, Lucy made you climb the steps up here instead of driving you home?”
I whirl around. “Excuse me?”
No, she did not!
“I felt fine after the fall, Mrs. LeBrandt. I was trying to be romantic.”
I groan, digging through my medicine cabinet, one ear on the conversation in my bedroom.
“Romantic?” Mom repeats, and I can hear the interest in her voice.
Oh no.
No, no, no!
I knock over the ibuprofen bottle in my panic, pills spilling everywhere as I rush to grab three.
“I tried to surprise Lucy,” Harris continues, voice dripping with pure, undiluted theatrics. “Climbing to her balcony, like in the movies.”