Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (15 page)

A burn began in my chest, spreading like a wildfire across my chest. I knew that in the dark, he couldn’t see just what he was doing to my skin, but I believed, in that moment, that I glowed.

The weight of his gaze was heavy and in my head, I screamed the word, “Safe,” but in my heart—well, I felt something else. A kind of delicious ache, something I knew I shouldn’t want, shouldn’t think about, but still I did. An ache that was as unrelenting as it was emphatic. My hand moved slightly, as if to protect the space that reacted to his words.

“Jude…” It was all I said, all I could say, with him staring at me like that, his words invading my head and forming a memory already. My lips closed and opened, my breath little spurts of air.

“Trista,” he said, leaning closer to me. My heart galloped and my breath caught in anticipation. “Tell me,” he whispered, “your secret.”

I licked my dry lips and tried to remember what secret I’d planned to tell him. But his was so monumental that I couldn’t think of anything to compare. So instead, I told him the truth. “My secret is that you’re right.”

T
he pause
between us was too long, too heavy. The moment was weighted with what he’d said, and heavier still with what I gave back to him. Without conscious volition, I found myself leaning toward Jude, closer and closer in the dark, until I did the unthinkable.

It was as if the hands of the inevitable had pressed me to him, finally.

I wish I could say that the moment our lips met, I pulled back immediately. That I was awash with shame and frustration and self-loathing.

But I couldn’t say that, because the only immediacy of that moment was the way our bodies shifted toward one another, fingers reaching and mouths opening and our breaths mingling in the hollows of our mouths as we kissed for the first time on that roof.

His hands cupped my chin and his fingers curled into my face, pressing against bone; it was as if I was being anchored to him; he was holding me and not letting go. My skin tingled and my lips slid against his as if this was something we’d done time and time again.

He tasted of chocolate and something dark, and when his tongue swiped against mine, I dissolved into his touch. His scent swallowed me whole and I just sank, deeper and deeper, into the kiss, into him.

The sound of clapping caused me to pull away from him abruptly. My first instinct was to look in his eyes, in the dark, and my second was to look where the sound came from. The roof was completely dark, and as my vision sharpened I realized, with a sense of relief, that we were alone on the roof. The clapping continued, the sound carrying from the deck. Someone’s laughter punctuated the air but it felt a hundred miles away from Jude and me.

“Trista…”

I pressed my lips together to keep from reaching for him again. We were still inches apart, and I could hear his every breath and realized they were in time with mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said, though I didn’t know why I was apologizing. My eyelids shut and I swallowed. “That was a mistake.” I burned all over, from my legs to my neck, inside too—where the words were formed and then left my mouth, leaving an acrid trail in their wake.

He didn’t say anything to that, just made some noncommittal noise in his throat. My body was in a tug of war to pull further away or to fall into his touch and give in to the desire that lit me. I couldn’t help but think about how he’d said I was hungry—I’d never thought I was myself, until he’d kissed me and stopped.

“We were drunk,” I said, already trying to form an excuse for this moment, a moment that couldn’t happen again. The thought pressed painfully against my chest but I shook my head.

“I wasn’t drunk.” His voice was soft, but his tone wasn’t teasing.

“Okay, well, I was.”

“You weren’t either.”

There was nothing I could say to that, because he was right and there were no excuses for kissing my boyfriend’s roommate. I couldn’t pass this off as a drunken mistake. I may have had a slight buzz, but there was no wavering when I’d leaned toward him and kissed him first.

And the worst part of it all was that I now knew what it was like. And I wouldn’t be able to not think about it.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say. Finally, I turned my head away and stared intently at the cup of beer I’d cradled between my legs.

“Stop apologizing,” he replied. He wanted to say something else, and for a moment I wished to rewind time five minutes before and stop him from telling me his secret. Because then, maybe, I wouldn’t have kissed him. And then, maybe, I wouldn’t crave what wasn’t safe.

Without another word, I slid down the shingles to the deck, sliding off the lip of the roof with a shakiness that had nothing to do with the height of the deck, but everything to do with the man I’d left up on the roof.

When I rejoined the party, there seemed to be even more people than before. No one looked at me, which was good. Because I felt like I wore the betrayal all over my skin, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I left the partygoers and moved into the bathroom, turning the shower on hot and stepping in. I didn’t want Jude’s juniper scent to live in my head. I didn’t want his lips to be the last thing to touch my skin for too long.

Facing the tile wall of the shower, I placed my palms against it as the water beat down my back. I hardly felt it, I was so absorbed in my thoughts. The memory of Jude’s lips would echo—I knew that. Because even though it had been the first kiss, it had felt familiar. Not comfortable—definitely not that.

My fingers curled and I ached to type something for Jude, to get the jumble from my head. I’d tasted longing on his lips, and somehow he’d transferred that to me, too.

When I stepped out of the shower, I looked at my reflection. My blonde hair was dark, darker still where the purple was. My blue eyes were dark, and my lashes were dark and all I saw was a girl who kissed a man who wasn’t hers.

My lips weren’t red or swollen; the kiss had been far too brief to affect my skin so superficially. No, it all was underneath, where my blood bubbled close to the surface.

After getting dressed, I grabbed my laptop from Colin’s dresser, thankful I hadn’t left it out on the dining table for it to be damaged from the party in some way. I opened up a new post on my blog and wrote.

I closed my laptop after publishing and pulled the blankets up over me. I hoped Colin wouldn’t look for me, hoped he wouldn’t pull back the blankets and see the kiss all over my face. I knew I’d need to tell him, eventually, but at the same time I wondered.

If I told Colin and he didn’t care, if he used that to break up with me, I’d be free from him. But then in a way, I’d be free of the girl I was when Ellie was alive, the girl who was dating Colin. And I didn’t know who I’d be without that connection to her, to my past.

If I told Colin and he was upset, well, I wasn’t sure how to handle that in a way that wasn’t cold. Because while I knew I loved him in a way, I didn’t love him the way he should be loved as his girlfriend.

I knew it was selfish of me, to want to keep it to myself. But that’s who I was.

The kiss had been a mistake. I knew that. And even though I couldn’t get the taste of him off of my lips, I knew I couldn’t repeat it.

Because as brief as it had been, I’d been filled—stomach to chest—with a range of emotions. As if there’d been a river in my chest, held back by the dam of my ties to Colin. But the tingle from that fullness had lingered long after I’d told him it was a mistake.

And now I was obsessing over it—over him. I’d had this feeling about Jude, like he could upend my life without really trying to. That I could fall in love with him without meaning to. That he, unlike Colin, was not safe. My heart would need little or no persuasion to feel things I hadn’t felt in years.

But
that
couldn’t happen.

It was just a kiss
, I reminded myself. It didn’t—couldn’t—mean a single thing.

It was just a kiss.

* * *

T
he following morning
, I was up before Colin, getting dressed in front of the closet mirror. Colin had come to bed around four in the morning, drunk and reeking of cheap cigarettes and cheaper beer. He’d curled into me for a moment, but for one reason or another he’d rolled back to his back and fell right to sleep.

As I snapped my bra straps up on my shoulders, he woke up. His eyes were bleary and his complexion was ruddy as he stared at me.

“Good morning,” I said cautiously. I kept waiting for him to tell me he knew—that he’d heard or he’d seen—about the kiss.

“Hi.” He sighed and pushed up to sitting.

“How do you feel?” I asked, not meeting his eyes as I picked a tank top from the closet.

“Like shit. I deserve to feel like absolute shit.”

No,
I thought.
I do.

“Why?”

“Because of the party,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face.

“It was kind of wild.” I put my head through the hole and pulled my arms through, glancing at him in the mirror.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t mean to get so out of control.”

I stopped myself for a second after grabbing the yoga pants. “You got out of control?”

“Yeah.” He sighed, and I could tell he had something to confess with the way his body slumped and he looked at me from under rueful eyes. I held my breath, waiting.

“What?”

I heard every beat of my heart in the seconds it took him to finally tell me.

“I told you I don’t drink, but I did.”

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. My chest fell, deflated, and I felt a prick of disappointment. “You were smoking too.”

“I don’t usually do that.”

“And do you usually drink?” I wasn’t upset, but he seemed to take my question as if I was.

“Not usually. I shouldn’t drink, but I do sometimes. Especially when I’m around all those people.”

I didn’t say anything, just pulled my pants up and smoothed my hand over my shirt.

“I feel like we haven’t spent a lot of time together,” Colin said as I gathered my hair into a ponytail.

“Because we haven’t,” I answered simply. “You’re … busy. And I’m trying to stay out of your way.” I met his gaze in the mirror before flicking my eyes to the floor.

“That’s not fair. I’m not busy when I’m playing video games. If you want to spend time with me, you just have to ask.”

“I came all this way because you wanted to spend time with me. I guess I expected that you’d at least try to spend time with me.” I pulled my hair up into a ponytail and turned to where he lay on the bed. Even as I said it, I knew it was unfair. I’d kissed his roommate. At a party he’d thrown for me.

A party that made him forget about me.

“I’m sorry, okay? I’ve got a lot on my mind. My mom wants me to visit and Jude is going on a trip and it’s been really stressful.”

Colin didn’t have a job, because he was a trust fund kid. I’d known very early on that his parents would support him through everything, at least financially. I’d only met his parents a few times—high school and college graduations and once at one of his birthday parties. Part of me wondered if Colin would ask me to come along, to see his mom with him so that I could finally get to know her. Six years was a long time to date someone and not know their parents well.

But there was a much larger part of me that hoped he didn’t ask me to come with him, considering that Colin and I were as emotionally distant as we’d been every day of the last three years. Ellie’s death had caused issues for Colin, since he’d been one of the party’s hosts. I knew, from little things Colin had said, that his mother had called it an
immense inconvenience
. The words still burned a hole in my throat when I repeated them.

“Why does the idea of Jude leaving on a trip stress you out?” I asked, bypassing the talk of his mom altogether.

Colin paused and for the second time, I felt like there were secrets in this apartment, secrets I was not privy to; hiding in the corners and sliding away when I approached. “Because his shoulder is bad and he shouldn’t be traveling alone.”

I hesitated a moment before running my hands down my tank top. “Mila asked if I would go in her stead.”

“Really?”

I nodded. “She talked to Jude about it a little while ago.” I didn’t want to ask what he thought, and I didn’t want him to see how much I wanted go now, knowing what he’d told Mila.

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “That’s a good idea. It’ll get you out of here for a little bit. Give us some space for a few days.”

“I thought you just said we didn’t spend enough time together.” He was giving me serious whiplash.

“Maybe the distance will bring us back closer than before. We went from not seeing each other but once every few months to now being together every day. It’s a little overwhelming, and probably why I’ve pulled back.”

I frowned. “You’re fine with it? You don’t want to go?”

“I shouldn’t really be traveling,” he said and then looked away like he hadn’t meant to say that. “It’s expensive.”

The excuse of expense made no sense, knowing that his parents paid for everything, But I didn’t push it. I thought of the money that was in my backpack. But I didn’t offer it up for him, feeling the bitterness of what he’d told Mila seep into my voice. “What will you do if I go?”

“Hiking. A bunch of us will go up again.”

I wondered if he’d always planned to go hiking without me. And it reminded me of what had been eating at me. “Why did you tell Mila I hated hiking?”

“Because you did.”

Knowing I hadn’t said that, or anything like that, I asked, “How did you know?”

“I know you, Trista. I could read it on your face that whole weekend.”

I thought, from the things Jude had said to me, that I was terrible at hiding my true feelings. Jude made it sound like I wore my fear in my eyes, in the flatness of my lips. But here was Colin, translating my feelings himself.