“You understand what I’m saying,” I said, everything I had so carefully kept together slipping away. “Yes, you do, and that’s why you’re looking like that at me.”
A muscle pulsed in his jaw.
No answer.
My hands fell to my sides in defeat. “Well, it’s on me,” I murmured. “We said that things wouldn’t change between us, and I let them. I… I’m sorry I did that, Lucas.”
I turned around and gathered our belongings on the bench, my face turned so he wouldn’t see how big of a fool I felt. How much lay underneath my confession. In how many pieces he was breaking my heart.
“Rosie.” His fingers wrapped around my wrist.
I shook my head. “It’s okay.”
He turned me around. Water dripped from his hair, falling down his face. “You’re crying, Rosie.” A sound escaped his lips, and he pulled at me again, wanting to bring me to him. “ángel, por favor. Don’t cry. Don’t do that to me.”
“I’m not crying,” I lied. “It’s just the rain. I’m okay.”
His fingers cupped my jaw and he tilted my head upward until I met his gaze.
“You’re lying. You’re crying and it’s breaking my heart,” he said in a desperate voice. “Rosie, preciosa.” He moved closer, as if he couldn’t help himself. “Tell me what to do to stop this.”
I tried to keep it in. Not to let it out, but that Rosie, that preciosa, did me in.
And everything just… escaped.
“Want me,” I said, and God, how desperate it was to beg for something like this. “Want me like I want you. Because these glimpses of what we could be are killing me, Lucas. That’s why I’m crying, because I’m frustrated, devastated, by the fact that I can’t have you. That I want you and I can’t have you.”
Lucas was so still. He had remained unmovable under the rain, but it was only then, when my last words rang, that his whole body came alive. Like a match thrown into a fire, something roared alive inside of him.
He pulled me closer. “You think you can’t have me?” His breath fell on my mouth. “Am I the one making those tears fall down your face?”
My heart surrendered then. “I’m crying because we’re just friends, because none of this is real. Because maybe all I am to you is that. Your roommate. Ro. Graham.”
His palms went to my cheeks, cupping my face, and I could feel them shaking, trembling. Another thunderclap cracked in the distance. “Rosie,” he said. And the sound of my name rivaled the roaring in the sky. “Every single time I’ve called you Graham, I’ve done it to remind myself that I couldn’t want you the way I do. Every time I’ve taken you on a date, I’ve had to tell myself that it was part of an agreement. And every time I’ve said I wanted to be your best friend, all I’d wanted was to take from you as much as you could possibly give me.”
All the air in my lungs left my body.
“If you want anything from me, you only have to ask.” Lucas’s forehead came to rest against mine, his breath now leaving him shakily. “Don’t you see that I’ll break my back to provide anything you could possibly need? Have I not made myself obvious?”
“You can’t mean that. You—”
“I mean it with everything I am.”
Fighting my own fear, the certainty that this couldn’t be really happening, because how could it be? I said, “If you do, if you really mean it, then I want you to kiss me, Lucas.”
One second Lucas’s hands were around my jaw, and the next they were slipping behind my head, inside the locks of wet hair.
His lips took mine like he was fighting for his last breath, like the rain falling around us signaled the end of the world. Lucas kissed me like this was our first and last kiss, as if this was the only chance he had to give me what I had asked of him. And that should have alerted me of something, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t care when his mouth was against mine, parting my lips and devouring mine. Devouring me.
His body stepped into mine, one of his hands leaving the nape of my neck and trailing down my spine until it curled around my back. A groan climbed his throat when I went willingly, without any kind of resistance because how could I resist when his fingers splayed over the small of my back, holding me firmly to him, his hips pressing into my belly, my breasts against his chest.
Desperate for more, I linked my arms around his neck and rose to my tiptoes, wishing the heavy and soaked layers of fabric between us hadn’t been there. Wishing I could strip him naked, so I’d have as much from him as possible, as much as I’d be able to memorize.