“I should wait for them to arrive,” he says. He sounds calm, but his shoulders are tense, and he mutters something else in Portuguese before unclicking his seat belt and turning my way. “If you . . .”
He trails off. I stare back at him, watching his eyes shift from cool concentration to something slower and hotter. We look at each other for so long that it starts to feel like a dare—like a challenge to the other to glance away first. I draw my bottom lip in between my teeth, just slightly, and it does the trick—his gaze drops to my mouth. I win.
“If I what?” I whisper.
I watch him try to pull himself together.
“If you want to go, you don’t have to wait with me,” he says.
“I can wait,” I say, but the truth is, by now, I can’t.
He kisses me first, hard, fast. It’s exactly like last time—zero to a hundred in seconds, all fierceness and fire, and we’re twisted awkwardly and battling to touch each other over the gearbox and the space between us until we break apart in frustration, chests heaving, and he says, “Come here.”
He pushes his seat as far back as it goes. I climb into his lap. He looks up at me, smoothing my hair back from my face, running his hands down my sides.
“We obviously won’t . . .”
“Not here, no,” he says, smiling, and tilts his chin up to invite another kiss.
I’ve kissed plenty of guys. I know what it feels like to get caught up making out with someone, how the world seems to fade and it’s just your bodies and your breath. But this is . . . bigger. Brighter. I didn’t know kissing could feel like this—as though it’s clearing my mind until there’s only sensation.
Lucas kisses with absolute assurance, commanding even when he’s trapped beneath me, with one hand urging my body closer to his and the other tangling in my hair, tilting my head so he can kiss me more deeply. I want him so badly it’s an aching, desperate urge—I have to get closer, take more of him, give more of myself.
Within ten minutes, we’re breathless and beyond reason. We obviously won’t becomes We probably shouldn’t, and then after twenty minutes of making out in the driving seat like teenagers, without a single car passing us down this dark country road, it becomes We could just and Quero você, I want you and God, Lucas and Please and Please and Yes.
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
“Oh my god. You had sex with him in his car?”
I rest my head on Smartie’s steering wheel for a moment. I’m held at some lights and Jem is on speakerphone on the passenger seat. “I actually cannot believe myself,” I say. “We were on a public road.”
“Izzy! I didn’t know you had it in you!”
“Neither did I! But he got me so het up.”
Jem laughs. “Het up. You are adorable. Well, I’m happy for you. Assuming it was great. Was it great?”
I swallow, switching into first as the lights change. It was great. Dizzyingly, disconcertingly great. We were squashed into a car with the steering wheel digging into my back, still half dressed in our uniforms, but I had never been less aware of my surroundings. I could have been anywhere. And every sensation was amplified, dreamlike. My forehead to his, his hands gripping my waist, the way he shifted underneath me as if he knew precisely what I needed, even if I wouldn’t have been able to tell him myself.
“It was intense,” I tell her, exhaling as I speed along to the hotel. I’m early. I’m never this early, but I just couldn’t sleep. “I guess because we hate each other so much, it kind of multiplied everything? That’s such an intense feeling, right, and there’s always been that fire between us. Maybe angry sex is actually the best sex?”
“Uh-huh,” Jem says slowly.
“You don’t think so?”
“Well, no, actually, but it’s more that . . . I’m not sure you really hate each other, do you?”
That pulls me up short—I notice I’m going seventy and make a face, braking.
“？’Course we do. He was such a dick to me last Christmas, don’t you remember?”
“I remember,” she says. “But maybe you’ve forgiven him for it.”
“What! I have not.” I’m quite affronted. “He’s not even apologised—or offered any sort of explanation!”
“OK, well, I know you tend to hold a grudge like Gollum with something shiny . . . but have you actually asked him what happened, pigeon? Maybe he didn’t get your card.”