“I don’t know if I can let you get married.”
I pressed my lips together, shocked by the turn in our conversation. What was that supposed to mean?
“Because you can’t possibly be planning to be named Lemon Brown. So plain and sad. I think ‘Her Royal Highness, Princess Lemon’ sounds so much better, don’t you?”
“You think Rafe would have me?” He laughed again, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.
He picked up a blade of grass and twirled it between his fingers. His very clever fingers that always managed to make me melt every time he touched me. “How did the two of you meet?”
I couldn’t tell if it was my imagination, or if we were moving closer to each other. This happened a lot when I was with him. Like our bodies were two magnets that wanted to be together, no matter how hard I tried to resist.
“I’ve known him my whole life,” I said. Our mothers met in Lamaze class, which my momma only attended to humor Grandma Lemon. My momma says it’s stupid to give birth without drugs when the good Lord gave us medicine. Anyway, we grew up together, and he was the first boy I kissed. We were thirteen and chasing fireflies.” I half smiled at the memory.
“And then?”
“Then we were in high school and he wanted to do more than kiss and I wasn’t ready. So he ended things with me because there were plenty of other girls who were willing. Like Ellis Wetherly. It broke my heart.” I hoped I didn’t sound too bitter or sad. When Sterling broke up with me, he destroyed something inside of me. I was at an awkward age, feeling vulnerable, and when he did it, my soul hurt like fissures spreading across a mirror—small cracks that spread and widened until the whole surface was ruined.
A murderous look crossed Dante’s face, and I had seen the men in his family angry often enough to know what that meant. If Sterling had been sitting next to me, Dante would have beat his face in.
I hurried on. “I swore off boys for a while. It killed me every time I saw him in the hallway with another girl. And there were lots of other girls. In our senior year I met a foreign exchange student from Spain—Enrique. I was asked to show him around and we started dating, despite some serious communication issues.”
I probably should have stopped. But it was always so easy to talk to Dante. “And then one night, having drank more than I should have, and thinking I was in love, I slept with him. It was awkward and fast and I regretted it the second it was over. I really wished I hadn’t done it later when I caught him at a bonfire party in the backseat of Ellis Wetherly’s car. I smashed out her headlights, but it didn’t make me feel better. Unfortunately, it started a pattern that I’ve never been able to break. Exciting, passionate foreign men who cheat on me and break my heart. Sterling is the only man who never cheated on me.”
“He’s also the only man who broke up with you so that he could cheat on you.” I hadn’t been mistaken. Definitely angry.
I put my hand on top of his, wanting to calm him down, but it had the opposite effect on me. There was this electrical current that seemed to always be waiting beneath the surface when we touched. The second we did, it zipped around my body, making me feel anything except calm, but I left my hand where it was. He didn’t move. It was like he was afraid that if he did, I would pull away again. He was probably right.
“I still don’t understand why you’re engaged to him.” He sounded a bit better. Calmer.
“I went home for spring break, and the first night he was there with his family. He asked me to go to dinner the next night and I did, and the night after that and the night after that. I extended my break a week to spend more time with him, and we called and texted when I got back to Colorado. Then the night before graduation he proposed and . . .”
I trailed off, and his eyes met mine. There was a fire there that singed my soul, that burned me up and made me want to beg for it to consume me. Like a lit fuse between us that waited and waited, and then caused a mountain-sized explosion whenever we kissed.
And like so many times before, all I wanted was to be close to him. I was dying to kiss him, but knew that I couldn’t. Somehow I had angled myself so that our faces were so close that even though we weren’t kissing, if somebody saw us they’d probably think that we were.