She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him closer. She felt greedy, like she wanted all of him. Like she had to hold on to every touch, commit every caress to memory, absorb every moment into her bloodstream.
He kissed her hair and laughed softly. “I’ve been wanting to kiss you since that very first day, you know,” he said.
She sat back and rolled her eyes. “You did not. You just wanted me out of your house.”
He laughed. “Well, yes, at first I did. But the thing was, when you seemed so confident, so unafraid of me, when you refused to let me intimidate you, I was intrigued.” His finger trailed from her cheek, down her jaw, to her collarbone.
She slid her fingers into his hair. “Mmm, were you really?”
He nodded as his hands moved down her body. “I was.”
She pulled him close. Just as she was about to kiss him again, his phone alarm went off.
He laughed. “Dinner.” He shook his head and stood up. “Perfect timing.”
A few minutes later, he came back into the TV room with a tray full of food.
“I don’t know how it’s become my job to bring you food all the time,” he said.
She beamed at him. “I don’t know either, but I like it a lot.” She glanced at the tray. “Ooh, baked Brie? Where did that come from?”
He lowered the tray to the coffee table and sat down. “I found it in the back of the freezer—pretty exciting, right?” He gestured to the bowl on the table full of crackers. “That’s what these are for.”
She leaned forward and cut into the Brie.
“You think of everything. See, this is why the food is your job. I wouldn’t have thought of crackers!”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “That, my friend, is absolute bullshit, and you know it.”
Izzy giggled. “I was trying to praise you, okay?”
Beau put a stack of salami slices on his plate and a handful of crackers. “Oh, did I miss where you were telling me how you’ve wanted to kiss me since the first day?”
Izzy looked sideways at Beau. He was smiling but a little shyly. She could tell he wanted a real answer.
“Well. Not since that first day. Then, I just thought you were an asshole. But after that day by the pool…”
He sat back against the couch and grinned. “Really? You seemed wholly unaffected by me!”
She rolled her eyes. “Come on. When you were parading around half-naked like that?”
He laughed. “I mean, I was trying to impress you, I just didn’t know I’d succeeded.”
She turned her whole body to face him. “You were trying to impress me?”
Beau didn’t answer, and reached for his plate.
“Beau.”
He looked like he was concentrating hard on spreading Brie on a cracker. Finally, he shrugged. “I guess…it depends…on what you mean by ‘trying.’ Did I know you were sitting by the pool when I walked outside to take a swim? I suppose the answer there is yes. Did I do the butterfly to show off a little? Perhaps also yes.” He grinned at her. “I hadn’t done it in years. I was glad I remembered how.”
Izzy couldn’t believe that he’d come out to the pool on purpose, just to see her. She put her hand on his and let it trail up his wrist, his forearm, to finally rest on his shoulder.
“You also, by the way, seemed wholly unaffected by me,” she said. “I thought you didn’t even like me.”
Beau laughed. “Oh, trust me, I’ve been very affected by you from the first moment,” he said. “And I’ve liked you more and more every single day that you’ve been here. I just wasn’t…am not, probably, all that great at showing it.”
This was one of the most unusual conversations Izzy had ever had with a guy. Usually, with guys she’d dated, they’d fenced with each other for a while with random flirtation and occasional insults. But then, after they hooked up for the first time （or the second time, and usually even the tenth time）， everything was vague, up in the air, about when—or whether—they would see each other again, what was going on between the two of them, how they felt about each other.
But she and Beau had already talked about so much in the past few weeks that it felt natural for them to talk about this, too.
Maybe that meant she could ask him the question she kept wondering about.
He nudged her. “What is it?”
He knew her too well at this point for her to hesitate.
“If you’ve been wanting this since the beginning, why didn’t you kiss me before?”