She laughs. “Asshole!”
I laugh louder; I’d throw my head back if it wasn’t pressed against the ground.
Then she moves closer to my side, propped up on one elbow as she looks down at me. I can feel the softness of her hair brushing against my arm.
“Why wouldn’t you kiss me?” she asks and it surprises me. “When you went down on me last night, you never kissed me. Why?”
“I did kiss you.”
“You didn’t kiss-kiss me,” she says and she’s so close to my lips that I want to kiss her now, but I don’t. “I don’t know how to feel about that—I don’t like how I feel about it, but I’m not sure how I should feel.”
“Well, you shouldn’t feel bad, that much I do know,” I say, being as vague as I can.
“But why?” she probes and her expression is beginning to harden.
I give in and say, “Because kissing is very intimate.”
She cocks her head. “So, you won’t kiss me for the same reason you won’t f**k me?”
I’m instantly hard. I hope like hell she doesn’t notice.
“Yes,” I say and before I have a chance to say anything else, she’s crawling on top of my lap. Shit, if she didn’t know I was as hard a rock then, she definitely knows now. Her bare knees are pressed against the blanket on each side of me and she leans over, her arms holding up her weight and I f**king die when she brushes her lips across mine.
She looks right into my eyes and says, “I won’t try to make you sleep with me, but I want you to kiss me. Just a kiss.”
“Why?” I ask.
She really needs to move off my lap. Oh shit…it’s not helping that my dick is pressed between her ass cheeks right about now. If she moves just an inch backward—
“Because I want to know what it feels like,” she whispers onto my mouth.
My hands move up her legs and then her waist where I grip my fingers around her form. She smells so damn good. She feels amazing and all she’s doing is sitting on me. I can’t even begin to understand what she would feel like inside; the thought makes me crazy.
Then I feel her pressing herself against me through our clothes, her little h*ps moving gently, just once to persuade me, and then she stops and holds herself there. I’m throbbing painfully. Her eyes search my face and my lips and all I want to do is rip off her clothes and bury my c*ck inside of her.
She leans in and places her lips over mine, slipping her warm tongue into my reluctant mouth. My tongue moves against hers slowly, tasting it first, feeling the warm wetness of it as it begins to tangle with mine. We breathe deeply into each other’s mouths and, unable to resist her or deny her this one kiss, I grab each side of her face and press her forcefully against me, locking my lips around hers with ravenous intent. She moans into my mouth and I kiss her harder, wrapping one arm around her back and pulling the rest of her body closer.
And then the kiss breaks. Our lips linger on one another for a long moment until she lifts away and looks down at me with an enigmatic expression I’ve never seen before, one that does something to my heart that I’ve never felt before.
And then her face falls and the expression withers into the darkness, replaced by something confused and wounded, but she tries to hide it by smiling down at me.
“With a kiss like that,” she says, grinning playfully as if to mask something deeper, “you’d probably never have to sleep with me.”
I can’t help but laugh; it is kind of ridiculous, but I’ll let her believe what she wants.
She crawls off my lap and lies beside me again, resting the back of her head in the cradle of her hands.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
I look up at the stars with her, but I don’t see them really; she’s all I can think about and about that kiss.
“Yeah, they are beautiful.”
And so are you….
“Andrew?”
“Yeah?”
We keep our eyes on the sky.
“I wanted to say thank you.”
“For what?”
She answers after a pause: “For everything: for making me shove your clothes into that bag instead of folding them and for turning the music down in the car so it wouldn’t wake me up and for singing about raisins.” Her head falls to the side and so does mine. She looks me in the eyes and says, “And for making me feel alive.”
A smile warms my face and I glance away and say, “Well, everybody needs help feeling alive again every once in a while.”
“No,” she says seriously, and my gaze falls back on hers, “I didn’t say again, Andrew; for making me feel alive for the first time.”
My heart reacts to her words and I can’t respond. But I can’t look away from her, either. Reason is screaming at me again, telling me to stop this before it’s too late, but I can’t. I’m too selfish.
Camryn smiles gently and I return it and then we both gaze up at the stars again. The hot July night is just right with a light breeze blowing through the wide open space and not a cloud in the sky. There are thousands of crickets and frogs and a few whippoorwills singing into the night. I always did like to listen to those birds.
The quiet is shattered suddenly by Camryn’s shrieking voice and she’s jumping up from the blanket faster than a cat from a bathtub.
“A snake!” She’s pointing with one hand and the other is clasped over her mouth. “Andrew! It’s right there! Kill it!”
I jump up when I see something black slithering over the foot of the blanket. I jump back quickly to keep my distance and then I go to stomp on it.
“No-no-no-no!” she screams, waving her hands in front of her. “Don’t kill it!”
I blink back, confused. “But you just said to kill it.”
“Well, I didn’t mean it literally!”
She’s still freaking out, her back slightly hunched over as if shielding the rest of her body from the snake, which is hilarious.
I raise my hands out, palms-up. “What, you want me to pretend to kill it?” I laugh, shaking my head at how funny she is.
“No just—there’s no way I can sleep out here now.” She grabs my arm. “Let’s just go.” She’s literally shaking and trying not to laugh and cry at the same time.
“Alright,” I say and lean over to snatch the blanket off the grass now that the snake has moved off it. I shake it out with one hand since Camryn’s holding on for life to the other. Then I take her hand and we start to head back toward the car.
“I hate snakes, Andrew!”
“It’s Friday,” I say simply.
She lets out an aggravated breath.
“I’m not a slut, or anything,” she says, dropping her legs from the dashboard, “and I’m sure you don’t think that since you are the one who has sort of pushed me to be more open with my sexuality and what I want….” Her voice trails. It’s as if she’s waiting for me to confirm what she just said, like she’s still worried of what I might think of her.
I look right into her eyes. “No, I would never think you were a slut unless you went around screwing a bunch of guys, for which then I would be in jail because I would have to beat the f**k out of all of them—but no, why are you saying this?”
She blushes and I swear her shoulders almost come up around her cheeks.