“No, it wasn’t,” she said, her voice surprisingly earnest. “I like hearing you talk. Go on.”

“I . . . really?”

She gave a nod, shifting a little closer to me.

And so I did. I told her about the book that had made me fall in love with reading, then the one that had shown me good people could do horrible things, and the one that had taught me being yourself mattered more than anything else. I told her about my favorite authors, my favorite genres, my favorite bookstore all the way back home, about how reading allowed me to get out of my head no matter what was going on in my life.

“So, kind of like basketball, right?” Noelle asked at one point.

“Yeah,” I said, unable to hold back a smile. “Kind of like that.”

I stopped talking only when she leaned forward and captured my lips in a slow kiss that stole the breath from my throat. “Is this your way of shutting me up?” I asked, leaning into the hand that was cradling my cheek.

“What? No, I just . . . I love your mind.”

What was I supposed to do other than kiss her again? My hands moved to her waist of their own accord, fingers curling into the soft fabric when her teeth nipped at my bottom lip and oh.

“Noelle,” I whispered, and somehow my voice must have carried the heat that was simmering in the pit of my stomach, the same one that had begun earlier in the library, because Noelle’s eyes suddenly widened a little. “Do you want to—”

“Yes,” she immediately said. “But only if you’re sure that this is what you want.”

I gave a nod, but Noelle caught my chin in one hand. “Words, love.”

And God, something about that pet name and her voice, soft yet insistent, laced with something that I could only describe as wanting, made my skin prickle. “Yes,” I breathed. “I want this.”

The smile on Noelle’s face grew at that. I watched with an anticipatory flutter as she swept the papers off the bed before setting Wuthering Heights down on her nightstand so gently it made something in my chest ache.

She was just as careful when she grabbed onto my waist and pulled me on top of her so I was straddling her lap, my arms looped around her neck. For a few seconds, all I could do was stare at her; with her chin tilted up to look at me, her eyes shining with warmth, and the golden glow of the lamp on her bedside table catching in her curls, she looked so beautiful I forgot how to breathe for a moment. It didn’t help that her fingers had slipped under the hem of my shirt, gently tracing my lower back, the touch so light it sent a pleasant shiver down my spine.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” I whispered.

“I know. I’ve never done it with a girl before either,” she murmured, her voice sounding surprisingly nervous. “I guess we’ll just have to figure it out together, hm?”