Series: Like Us Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 241
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Reddened flush crawls up her neck, and she tries to focus on opening the peanut butter.
“Switch,” I say, my voice husky with arousal, but I exchange the water bottle for the jar of crunchy Peter Pan. “Is your fam not fans of Jif or are they just obsessed with the little guy in green tights?”
Luna has gathered water in her cheeks like a chipmunk storing nuts, and she almost spits it out in a laugh. After swallowing, she says, “Life’s mysteries. What came first? My parents’ love of Peter Pan or their love of the peanut butter brand? You know…this is the first time I’ve ever thought about it.”
“Really? I’m shocked.” I easily undo the lid with one twist. “I woulda thought peanut butter ideologies would rank pretty high for you.”
“Jelly surpassed it.” She caps her water, only to open the bag of pretzels.
“Smucker’s or Welch’s?”
“Smucker’s,” she sing-songs.
I cup her cheek. “I knew I loved you.”
The heat of her flushed face warms my palm. She munches on a pretzel stick, then dips another in the peanut butter. “Can I ask you something?” Her voice is quieter.
“Anything.” I promise without thinking it through.
“Have we done that before? What we did tonight?” Her amber eyes sparkle with anticipation, but they’re also edged with darker confusion.
What we did tonight.
“We’ve never been alone together at a bar,” I say, wanting to clear this haze for Luna if she’s asking me to. “We’ve never kissed in public like that. I’ve never bought you shots when it was just you and me.” I pause. “But we have talked about doing these things together. Going to bars. Drinking green shots.”
“Only the green ones?” she asks.
My pulse skips, and I look into her, puzzled. “Do you remember?”
“No, but I could tell you were overwhelmed by it. I didn’t know why.”
Guess I didn’t keep my shit totally intact back there. I almost couldn’t believe we were doing the things we imagined doing together. Somehow, she led us to Thirsty Goose, to drinking green shots, to dancing in the middle of the bar (that might’ve been more me), but we’re living the fiction that she would’ve written about us.
Our story is real.
Destiny. She’s a beautiful bitch, and I’d love her more if she didn’t try to fuck us at every corner.
I exhale slowly. “It’s been an overwhelming, top-tier sort of night.” I give her a slow once-over. “One I don’t want to forget.”
Her lips rise. “Me either. And hopefully I won’t this time.”
“You won’t,” I breathe. Nothing bad is happening to her again. I will throw myself in front of her before it does.
She stares past me, deeper in thought. “I…did have a strange feeling when we were dancing. Like we’ve done it before. It’s when I stopped moving.” Probably when she broke out in a cold sweat. She cracks a pretzel in half. “But it was probably nothing.”
I frown. “We have danced like that before,” I tell her.
“But just in our rooms?”
“No, one time we were at a pub. In Scotland. We weren’t alone though. Your family and other bodyguards were around.”
“Was it during Christmastime?”
“Pretty close to it, yeah.”
Her brows hoist. “Was that band playing?”
“The Who?”
She nods.
I nod faster back. “Yeah. It was the same song we heard tonight.”
Her eyes begin to well, but she shakes her head before I can fully embrace the moment as the return of a memory. “It’s like it’s almost there, Donnelly. Like I can catch glimpses of the picture through the fog, but it disappears before I can really understand it.”
“It’s a step forward,” I say. “That’s good news, Luna, no matter how small. And it’s a happy memory.”
She’s recollecting more than just moments from the night she was kidnapped. I know she’s been picturing the room where they handcuffed her, and I’ve been worried all she’d come to remember is that horrific fucking night.
It’s the one thing I wish she’d always forget.
She seems more disturbed by the whole ordeal, her face scrunching. “What if that’s all I can ever see? Just these cloudy moments? What if they never feel real and they never look vivid? It’s taunting. I wonder if it’d be better to see nothing at all.” Tears prick her eyes, but she sniffs hard, keeping waterworks at bay, and she stabs the peanut butter with the pretzel stick. “A part of me still wants the full picture, the good and the bad and not the blurry.”
“What about your diary?” I ask her. “You could’ve written about Scotland.” I think about the confrontation with Noah Perch. “You could’ve written about your hookups…” I trail off at the sight of her wince. “It’s alright if you did—”
“I don’t want to read about it,” Luna admits, her voice rising with short breaths. “I don’t want to read about how I slept with that guy in the back of his car. I don’t even want to read about how I first met you.”