“Seth.”

“Sorry, I—”

The next thing I knew was that his lips were crashing onto mine.

The first few seconds were clumsy and desperate and felt like falling without ever hitting the ground. Then Jasper gripped my face with both hands and lined it up, made it better, and oh. This was what the tornado inside me felt like when it was released then, catapulting both of us into the eye of the storm in a tangle of limbs and frantic hands.

Jasper pulled back just long enough to rasp, “Is this okay?”

“So fucking okay,” I breathed before I pushed his back against the wall.

And shit, I had stopped believing in God when I was thirteen, but kissing Jasper felt like a religious experience. There was something holy in the way I could feel his lashes tickling my cheek, slender fingers resting at the base of my neck like they belonged there, my gasp when his fingers tugged at my hair like a breathless prayer.

By the time Jasper broke the kiss, my lips were tingling. I couldn’t quite hold back a delirious laugh when my eyes fell on the picture of one of Seven Hills’ founders that hung on the wall right next to us, staring us down with a disapproving frown.

Jasper smiled at the sound and carefully took my hand that had been clutching his shoulder, my breath catching in my throat when he dropped a featherlight kiss onto each knuckle, the gesture unexpectedly gentle after the demanding kiss a few seconds earlier. “You need to stop being so hard on yourself, Seth. You’re . . . you light everything up.”

I blinked at him for a few seconds, my brain too fuzzy to make sense of anything he was saying. Still in a haze, I murmured, “Well, yes, that’s kind of what you do when you’re the lighting guy.”

I could feel Jasper’s chuckle vibrating through my own body where we were still pressed against each other. “No, that’s not what I mean. Tu es mon soleil.”

“What does that mean?”

“You are my sun.”

For a moment all I could do was stare at him. Then, a nervous little laugh made it past my lips. “I think I might have to get a French dictionary.”

Before he could respond, heavy steps sounded through the hallway, making us jump apart immediately. Señor Garcia, our Spanish teacher, stared at us for a few seconds before he grumbled, “I don’t even want to know. Go to your room, both of you. Your own rooms, please.”

“Yes, Sir,” I muttered, while Jasper, the smug bastard, apologized in Spanish.

Shaking his head, Señor Garcia headed down the hallway.

As soon as he was out of sight, I said, “We . . . we should really go.”

Jasper nodded, albeit reluctantly. To my surprise, he firmly grabbed my hand as we made our way to our rooms, only letting go once we were standing right in front of my door.