And now I can again. Now I can with this secret. With the fact that he is Noah to me. That I am the only one who is allowed to use his first name. I roll uptown, riding to our place, twilight turning into night.
I lock up my bike near the entrance to Madison Square Park. He’s already there, sitting on a bench, earbuds in his ears, the sleeves on his orange shirt rolled up. He grins the whole time as I walk over and sit next to him. I take the earbuds out of his ears and put them in mine.
He’s listening to Broadway show tunes; this time to “Old Man River” from Show Boat. I smile at the music, then roll my eyes. “You and your show tunes.”
“Me and my show tunes,” he says and I take the earbuds out and lay them gently across his thigh, my fingertips touching the fabric of his pants.
He looks down at them, then rests his hand on the slats of the bench. I move my hand next to his, and now our hands are so close I feel warm all over, like a dark chocolate bar is melting all through my body. Somewhere, in the distance, a car squeals to a stop at a traffic light. It might as well be happening on Pluto.
“Kennedy,” he says, then shakes his head, but he doesn’t stop looking at me. His eyes, those dark-blue eyes, are like a tractor beam and I can’t let go.
I inch my hand closer, my fingertips nearly touching his. The space between us is charged, buzzing with ions, desperate for contact.
“Say the word,” I say, and I press the tops of my fingers lightly against his. I watch as he spreads open his hand, making room for me. I slide my fingers into his, flesh against flesh at last. The touch of his skin is at once a relief and a thrill. He locks his hand around mine and holds on tight.
“I miss you so much,” he says, looking at me like he did in the car on the way to the Yankees game, like he did at the café, like he always said he would.
I am happy. I am hope. I am no longer at war with myself. He is where I belong.
“Me too,” I say, gripping his fingers so hard as the slow-motion connection of the moment snaps in a second. In a blur, I move. I straddle him. I climb on top of him, dropping his hands, and lacing my fingers through his hair. He exhales sharply, and his chest tightens. He grips my hips, holding them close, but not too close, keeping a sliver of distance between us, as he always did. We stare at each other. The months melt away and I fall back. Into his blue eyes. Into his touch. Into his arms.
Here in Manhattan, on a bench in the park, the spring night slinking behind us, we are poised to smash into each other. To crash back into orbit.
His lips crush mine, and it is a wild rumpus of kissing, a chaos of lips and tongues and teeth. A pandemonium of sighs and moans and breaths and names. I grip his thighs tighter with my own, pressing against him, chest to chest, body to body, everything aligned. Everything fits, especially me with him, and him with me. He is the puzzle piece that slides into place in my heart, filling all the sad and empty spots inside me.
He tugs me closer, and I move with him, wanting to eradicate any negative space still between us. I erase the final millimeters with more kisses, deeper, hotter, needier.
I don’t know how long we kiss. All I know is it’s long enough for the kiss to threaten to turn into too much more, and that’s why he finally pulls apart, gently, but firmly, pushing me off.
I follow the cue. I’m not ready either to go too far. I slide off him but stay as close as I can, arms around him, laying my head on his shoulder. He strokes my hair, murmurs my name in my ear. The sound of it whispers across my skin, setting off another round of goose bumps.
“Kennedy, you have ruined me for anyone else.”
I can’t help but smile. I’ve never had any power. I’ve never craved the power like that. But I have it because it comes from the one thing we have that no one can touch.
I crane my neck, look up at him. “I’ve been ruined for a long, long time,” I said, threading a hand in his soft hair, and pulling him back to me for another kiss, telling him with my lips that he is mine, that I own him, and the way he kisses me back is all the confirmation I need that he wants to be possessed by only me. The warm air drifts softly across the bare skin of my arms as a car screeches to a stop somewhere on the busy street. The sounds of New York don’t stop us, not when we are caught up in our favorite hobby—deep kisses that make your head foggy.
Sometime later, I don’t know when, we stand up to leave.
“I have something for you,” he says.
“What is it?” I ask, but he’s already unbuttoning his shirt, revealing his white T-shirt underneath. The T-shirt fits him like a dream, stretched tight across his strong chest, showing the muscles in his arms. My heart skids against my rib cage. He is beautiful. He is mine.
He hands the crisp orange shirt to me, and I press it to my nose, inhaling him, inhaling our secret. Then after another searing kiss that is a promise of ten thousand more to come, I unlock my bike and return home, to my bedroom, where I lock the door, and put his clothes on, falling asleep in his orange shirt, feeling safe once more.
Chapter Eighteen
Kennedy
After our first date at the Chocolate Cafe, we went to the Frick, one of my favorite museums in the city. He bought the admission tickets and we walked into the galleries on a quiet summer afternoon when the crowds were thin.
I leaned in, speaking almost in a whisper. “I think this is the perfect museum. Want to know why?”
“Tell me why you think this is the perfect museum,” he said.
“Because you can do the whole museum in under an hour.”
“Ah, so you’re not one of those people who needs to spend an entire day looking at art, considering it, staring at every single painting?”
I shook my head. “I’d rather know the story behind the art. That’s why I want to study art in school—to look at history through art.”
He moved closer as we walked past the first set of paintings. “I like that idea. It’s a cool way to look at history.”
“Right? Through paintings. Through what they tell you about people.”
“It’s kind of like psychology, in a way,” he said, as if he were mulling over the idea. “It’s all about understanding people and what matters to them.”
“Exactly,” I said, and smiled.
He nudged me gently with his elbow. “Tell me some art history then.”
“So, this museum used to be a house,” I began, launching into a history of the Frick. “The house of Henry Clay Frick, who was some sort of Pennsylvania businessman at the turn of the century and a huge art collector. This was basically his personal collection. And he bequeathed it all at his death as an art collection for the public.”
Suddenly, I stopped talking. Noah probably knew this. He grew up near New York, he spent tons of time in the city as a kid, and he’d lived in Manhattan his whole adult life. I didn’t even have an adult life, and here I was, trying to teach him something he probably knew. Hell, he looked the part today, cool and sophisticated in his forest-green shirt, his dark-black pants, his fancy shoes, and trace of stubble.
“But you probably knew all that,” I said hastily, and stepped away from him.
He reached for my hand. “I didn’t know any of that, Kennedy. I’ve never been to the Frick before.” His eyes held me, steadfast and serious. “Thank you for taking me.”
We strolled through the West Gallery, which boasted several Dutch paintings. He stopped at Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Young Woman, an image of a stocky, ruddy-looking woman dressed in black silk, with a massive lacy honeycomb contraption that rose up the length of her neck and met her at the chin. A similar collar adorned nearly all the subjects in the Dutch paintings in the West Gallery.
“What’s the deal with the Dutch crumb catchers?” he asked, appraising the paintings. “They’re like these gigantic collars. I mean if you shook them upside down, I bet all this food would fall out.”
I laughed, and next Noah gestured in the direction of a Francisco de Goya painting hanging in the corner. T
he painting was called The Forge and depicted workers forging metal.
Noah leaned in to whisper. “Do you think Mr. Frick was playing poker with Mr. Guggenheim and they bet this painting? And then Frick won and Guggenheim said, ‘I dare you to hang it up. Yeah, how about in that corner that had the framed Elvis towel before?’”
This time, I cracked up. I liked that he was sort of blasphemous. But mostly I liked what he was doing—he wanted to make me laugh.
“It was probably one of those big black towels,” he continued. “With the King wearing the white leather studded jacket.”
“You must have been a huge fan of his when you were a kid, right? I mean, he was popular back when you were growing up. That was his heyday, I think?” I teased him, waiting for his response.
His smile took over his face and he shook his head at me. “Oh, my, aren’t you so funny.”
We checked out a Turner, then strolled past an exhibit of Fragonards, including The Stolen Kiss painting that was on loan from a museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the picture a man plants a kiss on a woman’s cheek.
“I like that one,” he said to me in a low, sexy voice.
Goose bumps flared across my skin. “Me too.”
There was no joking, no teasing, no making fun of the art, or each other.
He reached his hand out to touch my hair, to brush some of the brown strands away from my neck. The slightest touch made my insides flip upside down. “It makes me think of you,” he said, soft and husky near my ear. I shivered all over and closed my eyes for a second to let the feeling race through me. “Then again, most things these days make me think of you.”
I didn’t move. I simply lingered there, with his hand on my hair, his words in my ear, my body so dangerously close to his. I was aware, faintly, of a few museum goers walking by.
“Let’s go the courtyard,” I said, gesturing to the rectangular courtyard in the middle of the house, with a fountain and benches. Soon, we were alone, out of the way of any prying eyes. He tugged at my arm and spun me around so we were face-to-face. His eyes raked over me, his gaze landing on my lips.
“Can I give you a stolen kiss, K?”
My body hummed and buzzed all over. “You don’t have to steal it, because I’ll give it to you freely.”
“Then I’ll take what you’re offering,” he said, and we reenacted the painting. I was on a slow simmer when his lips touched my cheek, and he held there, unrushed, unhurried. It was merely a kiss on the cheek, but I’d never felt this way before. I’d never felt my body want something, someone, so much.
We pulled apart, and the look on his face was dazed. Like a punch-drunk cartoon character. As we sat down on one of the benches, he reached for my hand and wove my fingers tightly into his. Holding hard. I squeezed back.
“What am I going to do with you?” he said in low voice.
“What do you mean?”
“What am I going to do about the fact that I am falling so hard for you?”
Everything in me sizzled. I was alive, electric, turned up high. I was going to need a fan, or maybe a contingent of servants with palm fronds to keep me cool. “I’m falling for you too,” I said, because I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Do you think it’s bad that I’m older than you?” he asked, and he seemed embarrassed. But since I was in it with him, I’d be the last person to think his feelings were bad. Even so, I was glad he raised the issue. It would have been weird if he hadn’t brought it up.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. Because I didn’t. His age—and he was only eight years older—didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t a big age difference; it wasn’t even that big a life difference. Many of my friends’ parents had the same or bigger age differences. “Do you?”
I held my breath, hoping, praying, needing him to say no.
“Kind of,” he said. “I mean, I don’t even think this is legal.”
“Actually, it is,” I corrected. “I looked it up. The age of consent in New York is seventeen. I’ve been seventeen since June. So, two months now. Since before I started coming to your office,” I added.
He smiled a small smile. “Look at you. Checking out the facts. I’m flattered.”
“I’m not trying to flatter you,” I said firmly, because the truth was important. The law even more so. Some states labeled eighteen as the age of consent; but God bless New York for marking seventeen. Besides, I was consenting. He was my choice. “I wanted to know. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
God, if he ended it after that kiss, after that date, I was going to wither away. He was the only person I’d ever felt this way for. Being with him took away the hurt and shame from the pack of lies I’d told.
“Still,” he said and his voice trailed off. “I kind of feel like a schmuck.”
“Don’t,” I said quickly, and laid a hand on his. “Don’t feel that way at all. I like you so much, and I don’t think about the age difference. You like me, right?”
“Obviously,” he said, and nuzzled me briefly, before turning serious again. “Still. We need to be careful.”
“You mean no making out in museum courtyards?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I mean, nothing more than making out.”
My cheeks turned red. We’d only kissed but we were already talking about sex.
“Noah, I’m so not even remotely ready to go there,” I said. I’d never had sex, and I wasn’t ready to. If he wanted more, he was with the wrong girl, and that was that. He was going to have to be okay with this line or I’d walk. “You need to know that to be with me.”
“I am on board with that. And I think that’s all we should do. Age of consent or not, legality or not, you’re in high school and I’m in—whatever you want to call it. After high school. You know how it’d look.”
Noah
It would look bad.
I ran a hand roughly through my hair and dropped my forehead in my palm. What was I doing?
Regardless of having the law on our side, she was a teenager. I was supposed to be the mature one. Then there was that little bitty issue of her being my client’s daughter. I was skating on wafer-thin ice, but God help me. She was some kind of magic to me. She was everything I never knew I wanted, and she’d quickly become the one and only person I felt like myself with.
In some ways, I was used to being alone. No brothers or sisters, no mom or dad, I was all work and no play. My relentless focus on work and growing my career had paid off handsomely, and it had also kept me busy. But at the end of the day when it was just me, I was left feeling adrift.
With Kennedy, I was anchored. She filled all the lonely spaces inside of me with her laughter, with her wry and witty humor, with everything we had in common.
Sure, I probably should have walked away before I got in too deep. But here’s the thing about falling in love. All the movies, the books, all the TV shows will tell you that you can’t help who you fall in love with. You scoff and laugh and say Yeah, right. Of course you can help it.
Until it happens to you.
And you can’t help it.
You are powerless to resist.
Or really, you choose to stop resisting.
Because rather than walk away from the forbidden fruit, I did what man has been doing for ages. Bit into it, and bit away the shame of how it would look, of what it would say about me to feel this way for a girl in high school. Damn the consequences; the reality tasted better than the risk. I wrapped my arms around her neck and pulled her close. “I didn’t plan this, K. I didn’t set out to feel this way.”
“I did,” she said, sounding sheepish. “I’ve had a huge crush on you forever.”
“You did?” I asked, wrenching back to look at her curiously.
“Yes. I like you so much. That’s why I kept coming to your office,” she said, like it was an admission of a secret.
“You wanted to wear down my resistance?”
“Did it work? My nefarious plan?”
“Musi
cals, chocolate chip cookies, not a word about a TV deal. Yeah, I’d say it worked perfectly,” I said matter-of-factly. Then I lowered my voice, down to the barest of truths. “And now I’m yours.”
I’d never felt so vulnerable as in that moment. I was risking so much, but gaining so much more, because with her, I was so damn happy.
“Are you mine?” she whispered, and I could hear the nerves in her voice, like she wanted to be sure and certain of all I felt.
“Kennedy, I’m so crazy about you I’d want to be with you even if you liked hip-hop or hair bands, and I can’t stand either of those.”
“You don’t have anything to worry about on that count. ‘So tell me why should it be true. I get a kick out of you,’” she said in the most enticing voice I’d ever heard her use, and it turned me on to no end.
Our Stolen Kisses
You’d used the F-word.
No, not THAT one.
The good F-word.
The falling one.
You were falling for me, and I was falling for you, and we were falling together into the land of the fallen. You placed your hands on my cheeks, touching my face, then your lips found mine, and we kissed until the museum closed. For the first time in my life, I had something pure, something perfect, something the opposite of everything I’d ever known.
I was happy. Happier than I’d ever been. I let your word—I’m yours—fill me up with a giddy kind of joy that comes only with falling in love.
Chapter Nineteen
Kennedy
One of the benefits to my mom’s habits is that it was easy to pull the wool over her eyes about my own affair. It was easy because she was preoccupied. It was easy because she was having her own affair with Jay Fierstein, my dad’s business partner. It was easy because I knew how to pull off the cover-up, having watched and helped her for years.
It was a piece of cake for another reason too. Because she never would have suspected it. It never would have occurred to my mother that I might be involved with her agent. In her solar system, all the planets—Noah Hayes included—revolved around her. The notion that I might have knocked one of her planets out of her orbit would not even compute.
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