I almost corrected him. I hadn’t walked. Other than ducking into the trees when I saw his headlights approaching, I ran.
“I wanted to make sure you made it home and didn’t run into any chainsaw murderers, rabid bears, or—”
“Too smooth for their own good smokejumpers who like to take advantage of girls in dark planes?” I smirked at him before I remembered my dad was barely a foot away. A quick peek revealed he was still engrossed in the game I had yet to watch a second of.
“If that was me taking advantage of you,” Cole said, his eyes skimming down my face until they paused at my mouth. The corners of his mouth twitched. “I don’t seem to remember you complaining.”
I swallowed, pressing the heat of his voice and the glimmer in his eye out of my mind. “I was too busy trying to dodge your mouth to complain.”
And chalk another lie up on the board for Elle Montgomery.
Cole leaned in closer, his eyes only glimmering brighter. “No, you weren’t dodging me, Elle,” he said. “If anything, you were too busy moaning in my mouth to complain.” He made a small noise then, what I guessed was his imitation of the foreign noises I’d made last night.
I knew my skin was reddening, but I wasn’t sure if it was due to embarrassment or anger. I wasn’t an angry person by nature, but Cole seemed to bring out emotions I’d thought were nonexistent, or dormant at the least.
When he made a similar noise, this one not so quiet, I slugged his arm.
Of course, this only made him laugh.
Casting another look back at Dad, I made sure my eyes were in full glare mode before looking back at Cole. “Those weren’t moans,” I half whispered, half hissed. “Those were groans of pure and utter disgust.”
Cole’s smirk didn’t fade. He was apparently just as capable this morning as he had been last night of seeing right through my act. “If that was the way you show pure and utter disgust,” he said, scrunching his face up dramatically before letting it iron out around another long moan. I was gearing up to slug him again when he dodged, his all-out smile in place. “Hit me up again.”
I blew an annoyed rush of air through my nose. I hated being stuck to this bleacher. I wanted to leap off of it and either slap him or kiss him. I didn’t want to care about what everyone else would think and just go with my instincts.
Of course, I didn’t.
“I’m fine,” I said, taking in another calming breath. “Obviously. Other than a deranged man with an enhanced sense of self”—I made sure to outdo that smirk of his— “I made it home just fine last night.”
His chuckle rocked his entire body. His whole body rocking reminded me of the way it had felt against mine. My next thought jumped right to the picture of how his body would feel bare, rocking into mine . . .
Excellent. I’d just become a hormone enraged thirteen year old boy with only one thing on my mind.
“Still fighting that girl I’m so smitten with?” Cole guessed, giving me a knowing look. Please, for the love of God, please don’t say he really can read my mind. Especially not the last ten seconds of thoughts. “I thought we’d made some good progress in setting her free last night.”
“She put up a good fight,” I said, rolling my eyes and giving in to his teasing. “But so did I.”
Talking about myself in both the first and third person should feel strange, but it didn’t. I’d been ignoring it until Cole came along, but my life felt like I was living it in both first and third person most of the time.
“Obviously,” Cole agreed, regarding me like I wasn’t quite the same girl he’d been with last night.
I wasn’t.
But when his eyes stayed on me, softening when they explored my face, I was, too. My life had literally gone from uncertain to downright confusing in one loaded look from Cole Carson.
Leaning into the side of the bleachers, Cole crossed his arms and watched the baseball game for a minute while I watched him. “Since I have the day off and this town’s entertainment options give watching paint dry a run for its money, I think I’ll hang around a while and see if that repressed Elle makes a reappearance.”
At that moment, I kind of wished she’d show up too. “You like repressed Elle, don’t you?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “No,” he said, “I really like her.” He glanced at me through the corner of his eyes. His mouth curled higher. “But I kinda dig stick-in-the-mud Elle, too.”
This admission made me happier than it should have. I shouldn’t care what Cole thought of me and the other me. It shouldn’t matter.
But it did. A lot.
For reasons I didn’t understand, but for reasons that didn’t really matter either. He liked me, all facets of me. He didn’t choose one over the other or expect me to only let one side of me show. He might have preferred one side of me, but he didn’t not like the other part.
“She kinda likes you, too,” I said, almost whispering.
Cole turned to me, and I swear, I would have been content to live the rest of my life staring at the expression on his face. It was sexy as all heck—this was Cole we were talking about—but it was affectionate, almost adoring.
“Which one?” he said in that low voice.
Instinctually, I leaned closer to him. “Both of them.”
I knew I was an inch or a word away from pressing my lips to his in the middle of my boyfriend’s baseball game, in broad daylight, for all my friends, family, and lifelong acquaintances to witness. Another instance where my heart didn’t give a darn about what I knew.