I paused, my hands falling to the bottom of his sweatshirt. I tugged on it. “You want serious or the joke response?”

His chest rose, pausing, and his forehead came down to rest on mine. “I think I need the joke now,” he murmured. “That’d be helpful.”

The joke. I could do that. I was good at that.

“Well, we’re friends because we’re both ridiculously good-looking.”

He snorted, lifting his head. “Jesus. Are you kidding me?”

I shook my head. “Absolutely not. Ridiculously good-looking people are friends with other ridiculously good-looking people. It’s a whole wavelength thing going on between them.” Sitting back more on his lap, I rested my hands on his legs. “See? At some point, they’ll always intersect, and that’s where we are.” I clasped my hands together. “We intersected.”

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. There are lots of good-looking people I am not friends with, and there are not-good-looking people I’m great friends with.” He tugged on a tendril of my hair, pulling my head back a tiny bit before letting go to slide his hand down my back and tunnel up under my shirt.

His finger began tracing circles on my skin.

Goosebumps spread all over me. I ignored them.

They were weird. Odd. I couldn’t handle having them, or the sensations that came from being in his arms, feeling his touch, feeling him all around me. Or the way his breath fanned over my shoulder, then my face because he was so close.

We were friends.

Friends didn’t affect each other like this, hold each other like this.

But we were still friends, right?

I swallowed over a lump. “Which one am I?”

“What do you think?”

I could hear his smirk.

And I couldn’t help myself. I reached up, my hands touching his face. I explored him. My fingertips moved over his jaw, feeling a slight stubble there, grazing its roughness, and I touched his mouth. He trembled, just slightly, but I followed the lips, and I was right.

He was smirking.

But it was disappearing under my touch.

I couldn’t see him, but I felt the air changing. It was folding in around us.

I could smell him, the mixture of sand and pine filling me up, circling around me, pulling me in.

I was closing my eyes, giving in, when suddenly he asked, “What’s the serious answer?”

“Why we’re connected?”

“Yeah.” His voice was rough, deepening. He felt what I was feeling, and before I knew it, I’d rocked forward on his lap.

He caught me, splaying his hand over my hip, and he leaned forward. I felt his breath warming my neck. Slowly, so slowly, he moved to pull on the end of my sleeve. He tugged, inch by inch, until a portion of my shoulder was bare to him.