“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I breathed. We laughed. He lowered himself to kiss me again, lightly this time, then, throwing the sheet off us, flopped onto his back. He threaded his fingers through mine, bringing the back of my hand to his lips.
“You’re a hard one to catch, you know that?” Ricky said, chuckling. “Which is funny, considering you kissed me first.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks, and I lifted my free hand to cover my face.
“Yeah. Ha,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking—”
“I knew what I was thinking,” Ricky interrupted. “That if you’d just given me a second, I might’ve told you that I liked it.” He reached over and gently tugged my hand away from my face, his voice taking on a husky tone. “I might have told you a lot of things.”
I swallowed, flustered by the sight of his reddened lips.
“Like what?” I said, holding my breath for the answer.
“Like . . .” Ricky rolled to his side, drawing me to him again and kissing me once, twice, a third time, “how long I’ve wanted to do this.” He tugged on my bottom lip gently, and my body, released from its prison of doubt, prickled with want.
“Yeah?” I asked after he pulled away. “How long is that?”
“Since the improv show.” Ricky snickered to himself, then flopped onto his back. “Okay, before that. Probably since the day we met, if I’m honest with myself.”
My mind shuttled back to the art fair, to the moment when I’d been so sure he was about to kiss me. So I hadn’t misread him after all. I remembered what Michelle had told me, after Ricky had delivered me coffee in L&D—Maybe he just likes you. My stomach turned in pleased knots.
“You little punk,” I said, nudging his arm. “You told me you weren’t interested! Who does that?”
Ricky shrugged. I watched him squeeze his eyes shut, clench his jaw. His hand tightened in mine. The shift in the atmosphere was instant, and I didn’t understand why.
“I . . . ,” he started. Then he cleared his throat. “You know about Camila, right? About how we broke up?”
Oh. Hearing him utter his ex-girlfriend’s name a minute after we’d finished playing tonsil hockey on his floor was kind of a buzzkill.
“Not all of it,” I said. “I know that she’s with someone else now.”
Ricky nodded. It had been months since Camila dumped him, and he hadn’t brought her up voluntarily once. I had thought it was odd but figured that their three-year relationship had just fizzled out. But now, he looked pained, like the memory of her still lingered and hurt. Not a look I was prepared to contend with.
“When she was breaking up with me,” he said, “she told me that I didn’t actually love her. That she had always known that something was off about us, but she couldn’t put her finger on it until she met someone who did.” He covered his eyes with his free arm. “And at first, I was pissed. She’d cheated on me, right? Met some other guy and was carrying on right under my nose . . . but then, I realized that I’d been doing the same thing. With you.”
My heart skipped a beat, and I averted my eyes, focusing instead on the flickering of the fake candlelight against the ceiling.
“My dad’s had about a hundred girlfriends,” Ricky continued. “He’d bring a nice lady around, sit her at Abuela’s dinner table, and then bring a different one the next week. My mom was the only one he knocked up, that we know of, at least, and he ditched her the moment he found out.” He laughed. “She was really sick, you see, and she knew that she probably wouldn’t be around to take care of me. So she found my abuelos, and thank god they fell in love with her, because the rest is history.
“But my abuelos have been together for, what, almost fifty years? They’re that old married couple you read about. Still totally obsessed with each other. A while back, after a bad breakup, I asked Abuelo how they’d made it work over all that time. You know what he said?” Ricky turned bodily to face me, propping himself up on one arm. His voice dropped into a thick, drawling Mexican accent. “‘Listen, gordito. The secret to long-lasting love is simple. You wake up. You roll over and look at your wife. And you say to yourself, today, I will choose you. I will love you. And you keep doing that every single day until you die.’” He grinned. “It sounds better in Spanish.”
I snickered.
“Your grandpa sounds like a wise man,” I said.