I dragged him back up to my lips, not able to have him away from me for even a second longer.
“Why is everybody kissing all the time now?”
We broke apart and sat straight up to see his seven-year-old sister, Serafina, standing in the doorway. She had her hands on her hips and looked disgusted. I felt mortified. If she had walked in only a few minutes later, she would have found something very different and probably traumatizing.
“Serafina!” I said. My mind was not currently capable of any other words, but her presence was like a bucket of ice water being dropped on top of me. My mind cleared, and I realized how quickly things had escalated, and what exactly I had been doing.
And who I had been doing it with.
“Kat asked me and Chiara to find you, so that she could ride over with you to the match. I’m going with Mamma and Papa.”
She walked back out of the room, leaving the door wide open.
Dante rested his forehead on my temple. “I’d say that qualified for a worst-timing-ever award.” The he captured the bottom of my earlobe with his mouth, and a series of fireworks exploded up and down my spine.
Somehow I managed to pull myself clear. It wasn’t easy.
He went still. “What is it?”
“We can’t do this. I can’t kiss you and . . .” And not have it lead to more. I liked him too much as a person and a friend. Even if he said I could use him, he meant more to me than that.
I couldn’t tell him that. He’d insist I was being ridiculous and that we were just having fun. That I shouldn’t take things so seriously. I’d probably let him talk me into picking up where we’d left off.
But how would I ever change if I kept making the same stupid mistakes over and over again?
“I’m sorry.” It was the only pathetic thing I could say before I left.
My eyes darted over to the crew who silently filmed us. “What kind of favor?” I somehow mustered up the courage to ask. I hoped he didn’t take any detours down memory lane like I had.
He had to whisper in my ear so that the mikes didn’t pick up our voices. I told the shivers running across my skin to stop. “Meet me at midnight out in the gazebo. I want to talk to you about what you’ve discovered about the other girls.”
It had started off romantic and ended up some place practical. Which is good, I reminded myself. The crew finally let us go home, and Dante kissed me good-night on the cheek, and it felt like he had branded me. I had to consciously refrain from touching where he had kissed me. I thanked him and headed upstairs.
Half of the remaining girls waited in my room. “So? How did it go?” Genesis asked.
“It went fine. We had a nice time,” I told them as I kicked off my shoes. I started to unzip my dress and realized that everyone had gone silent and was staring at me. “What?”
“Are you really not going to kiss and tell?” Jessica R. asked.
“There was no kissing and so no telling.” Their expressions looked like a cross between disappointment and relief. “Look, Genesis and I already have an arrangement, and maybe we should make one as a group. If somebody does kiss him, nobody talks about it. It will just hurt everyone’s feelings.”
Several of the girls nodded. I said it like I was concerned about the group’s feelings, which I was, but the honest truth was that I didn’t want to hear about somebody else making out with Dante. I knew what he was capable of, and I didn’t want to imagine him doing all of that with someone else. I decided not to consider the reasons why too closely.
I wished Abigail was in the room, but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. She couldn’t wait to tell us about what she’d done with Dante. Which reminded me that I needed to ask him about it when I saw him later.
Yawning, I told everyone I needed to turn in. I took off my makeup, got into some yoga pants and a T-shirt, and climbed into my bed. Someone in one of the production rooms turned off the overhead lights, plunging the room into darkness. Just a couple of hours until I had to sneak out.
Normally I would have been worried about falling asleep, especially since today had felt emotionally exhausting. But I was so afraid that I would fall asleep that I was wired and ready to go. The party girls downstairs were doing their nightly falling-down-drunk routine, and I had already decided to head to the first-floor bathroom and climb out the window instead of trying to get past them.