“Do I have something on my mouth?” Noah asked, bringing a thumb up and rubbing his bottom lip so that I could see his teeth.

“What? Oh no, no, I was just, uh…”

He arched a brow, cocked a smile.

“Staring?” he said, completing my sentence.

“Not really staring. I think I blinked a couple of times.”

He narrowed his eyes. “So that doesn’t count as staring?”

“No, I don’t think it does.”

Noah’s eyes dropped to my lips, and he made a show of blinking before bringing his gaze back up to mine. I couldn’t hold back the laughter. It spread to Noah, the walls between us quickly crumbling, chipped away at the base and turning to dust with every new belly laugh.

“You’re too much,” I said, setting my wineglass down, my thoughts turning into a hazy and lusty mess. I kept trying to remind myself that Noah was just a friend, but that was becoming increasingly hard to believe when nothing about this felt “friendly.” There was a much more thunderous undercurrent that pounded against the boundaries of friendship.

It was an undercurrent that carried me forward.

My body moved on autopilot, as if a horny little green man had landed inside the folds of my brain and taken control of things himself. I closed my eyes, leaned in, lifted an arm over Noah’s shoulders, took a breath, felt his on me.

I pulled him in, felt him melt against me.

Our lips met. What followed was a kiss that unraveled reality. A kiss so strong it was responsible for the Big Bang part dos, creating entire galaxies between our skin, a kiss that made me feel drunk and high and blissed-out all at once. It was warm and soft at first, tender, the both of us exploring this new land with an eagerness that was barely able to be contained.

And then it wasn’t. Tongues whipped together, teeth nipped at lips, the sweet taste of wine and man swirled together, same as the stubble from our five-o’clock shadows. My skin scratched, my body thrummed. Heat expanded in me as if a star had been dropped in the very center of my chest. It took everything I had in me to not throw a leg on him and straddle him down into the couch, showing him just how wild this kiss drove me, how hard it made me.