I Love You, Miss Genius novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: After Hours

By eight that night the floor was empty, and I had made up my mind.

I had spent the whole day with Bettina's voice in my ear.

Whose ghost are you, mine or nobody's.

I did not know the answer to that yet.

But I knew one thing I wanted, and it was not hers to take.

I walked down the long dark floor to the glass office.

The blinds were half down, and he was alone at the whiteboard in his socks, with a marker in his teeth.

I opened the door.

He turned.

"Juno," he said around the marker. "You should've gone home."

"I'm not a temp anymore," I said.

He took the marker out of his mouth.

"No," he said slowly. "You're not."

I shut the door behind me and turned the lock.

The click went through the room.

"I can't tell you why yet," I said.

"What I said on the steps was true. I just can't tell you everything tonight."

His grey eyes didn't leave my face.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"I'll wait for the why."

"What if it's bad?"

"Then it's bad." The corner of his mouth moved. "Is this the part where you tell me what you do want?"

I crossed the carpet.

I put my hands in his hoodie and pulled his head down, and this time there was no rain and no reason to stop.

He kissed me like the first time, and then not like the first time at all.

He kissed me slow and open, with his hand coming up under my jaw, and I heard myself moan into his mouth.

I walked him backward until his hips hit the desk.

Papers slid off it and I did not care where they went.

"Take that off," I said, and pulled at his hoodie.

He yanked it over his head in one move.

Under it he was lean and warm and covered in the small scars of a man who had fallen off things.

I put my palms flat on his chest and felt his heart slamming under them.

"You're shaking," I said.

"You've been shoving me around for a week."

"You like it."

"I really do."

He tugged my cardigan off my shoulders and let it fall.

His hands slid under my shirt, rough and sure, up my ribs to my bare breasts, and he groaned.

"No bra," he said, hoarse. "Jesus, Juno, you've been walking around like this?"

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