“If I agree—”
“Too late to disagree,” I said. “You’re already enrolled.”
“If I agree”—her hazel eyes didn’t waver—“what do I get out of it?”
I grinned. “The chance to help make a replica of the Silver Flute of Ur. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.”
“I can hardly contain my excitement,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm, which didn’t matter. She’d clearly decided to come with me.
Before she could change her mind, I jumped up. “Another beer?” I asked, using the fail-safe method of alcohol-as-distraction.
“Why not.” She passed me her empty and I grabbed two more bottles from the kitchen.
We drank the beers, then another each, as I updated her on two students in a first-year class I tutored—the guy was head-over-heels about the girl, and she was completely oblivious. He was trying time-honored traditions of shy guys everywhere, such as passing her notes and making her giggle. It was sweet, and part of me wanted to put the two of them together in a room and tell them to cut to the chase. Instead I was pretending it wasn’t happening under my nose and letting things take their natural course. And keeping Scarlett updated, naturally.
She smiled and put the most recent empty beer bottle on the coffee table.
“Another?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m nicely buzzed but not too far gone.”
“Me, too.” Four beers in quick succession had made me pretty happy with the world. Well, they had until she opened her mouth again.
“Speaking of you teaching people things, I think I need another kissing lesson.”
Suddenly the walls of the room started closing in on me, and my gaze automatically went to her mouth. Her lush mouth that still had the remnants of fiery-red lipstick.
I swallowed. “No, you don’t. We don’t kiss anymore. We’re friends who don’t kiss.” Panic was rising up from my chest. “We don’t want to form a habit.”
She shrugged, apparently having forgotten we’d already dealt with this. “It takes twenty-one days to form a habit, so I think we’re safe.”
“Actually, that’s a myth. It takes a minimum of twenty-one days, but it’s usually more like sixty-six.” I snapped my mouth shut, aware I was babbling.
“Well,” she said, her eyes bright with the beer-buzz, “we’re even more safe then.”
“Regardless, we agreed not to do it again. We don’t want to jeopardize our friendship.” But I was uncomfortably aware that the real issue was if I started kissing her again, would I be able to stop?
“Yeah, I know.” She picked up her empty and started picking at the label.
“Are you letting Appletini Guy’s bad kissing get to you?”
She didn’t look up. “I don’t remember our first lesson very well.”
The blood in my veins froze. A kiss that had rocked my world hadn’t even made enough impact on her to be memorable?
“You don’t remember?” I repeated, just to be clear. “It was only two nights ago.”
“I haven’t forgotten we kissed, obviously, but I can’t remember details, like what the most effective elements were.”
I shifted in my seat. Every second of that kiss was burned into my memory bank. It seemed that hadn’t been as mutual as I’d suspected. I blew out a breath and focused on being a teacher in the situation, not a man who’d been carried away with his own lesson.
“I think you’re over-analyzing this. The elements don’t matter on their own. It’s more about the big picture.”
“Would you say that to your undergrads? Don’t worry about the specifics of the aqueducts, or which emperor came to power in what year. It’s more about the big picture of knowing there was a Roman Empire?”
“Well, no, but it’s completely different,” I said, looking down the hall and wondering if I could escape the conversation by simply leaving.
“How?” she persisted. “In both cases, you’re teaching something. So the student needs the topic broken down into bite-size pieces.”
At the word “bite” all the air left the room. Scarlett must have interpreted my silence to be disbelief because she grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper.
“Here.” She smoothed it out on the coffee table in front of us. “I’ll graph it for you.”
That snapped me back. “You’re going to graph our kiss?”
She drew an X and Y axis, then a line that went up across the page, but not smoothly—there were spikes and bumps along its progress.
“So, here, for example”—she pointed to a sharp rise in the line—“you did something and the kiss took off. What was it?”
“Seriously?” She wanted to talk as if it had been a clinical experience?
“If this had been a kiss for kissing’s sake, then, sure, we could leave it alone. But it was a lesson. How am I supposed to learn if I don’t remember the stimulus that caused the response?”
“You don’t need to. You were great. There’s nothing more to learn.” Better than great. Her kissing had been phenomenal.
“Again, if an undergrad wanted to learn more about the Roman Empire than they needed to for the first-year exam, would you tell them they were fine, or would you point them to more resource material?”
I blinked. “I’m resource material?”
She threw her hands up in the air, as if she was the one who was exasperated. “You’re the one who offered the lesson in the first place, so yes. You are my resource material on kissing.”
I looked over at the array of empty beer bottles on the coffee table. “We really need to make it a rule that we don’t talk about kissing after we’ve been drinking.”
“You’d rather have this conversation stone-cold sober?”
“I’d rather not have this conversation at all.”
“Oh.” Her face fell.
“What?” I asked warily.
“It’s just occurred to me that although I thought the kiss was good, you might not have enjoyed it at all. That’s why you’re fighting so hard against a follow up lesson.” She scrunched up her nose. “It was awful for you.”
I rubbed my temples—I was getting a headache trying to keep up with her thought processes and keep us out of dangerous territory.
“It wasn’t awful.” Amazing would be closer.
“Then why are you so against a follow-up lesson so I can focus on the bits I’ve forgotten?”
Something in the way she said “forgotten” made everything inside me rear up and protest. Maybe it was vanity, maybe it was neediness, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to be considered a forgettable kisser. Especially by Scarlett.
My gaze zeroed in on her mouth as I wrapped an arm around her and tugged her closer, but not quite touching. Her eyes widened and her pink tongue darted out to moisten her lips. I groaned.
“See if you can forget this,” I said, and lowered my head.
She tasted of beer and heat. As my tongue pushed between her lips, I was already gone. There was no need for preliminaries this time. It was nought to one hundred in under a second. My heart hammered in my chest as I slid my tongue along the length of hers. She pressed hard against my mouth, smashing my top lip against my teeth, and I welcomed the bite of pain, the intensity making my pulse leap higher.
She lifted a knee over my lap to straddle me, but she didn’t sit down. Instead, she rested her hands on the back of the sofa behind my head, keeping to our rule of no touching below the neck. My hands squirmed with the need to pull her down those last couple of inches so her butt could make contact with my groin, but it had been my stupid rule, so I gripped the sofa cushions hard.
Lesson. This is just a lesson. Do not get carried away.
There was something erotic about her kneeling over me without our bodies making contact anywhere but our mouths. I nipped at her bottom lip and she gasped, dragging the air from my lungs. She started to lift her head away—probably for oxygen—but I followed, arching up, not ready to let the kiss end.