It’s In His Kiss

She opened up the driver’s door, knelt one knee on the driver’s seat and reached in to bring out the bags she had stored in the passenger-seat foot-well and the air squeezed out of his lungs as his gaze dragged over the soft white denim of her skinny-jeaned derriere.

He didn’t get it.

She had always worn her hair long and he knew he’d seen her in those exact-same jeans before and not felt this wall of lust rise up to block his every attempt to find his way back to platonic.

Was this to be his punishment, then?

One white lie and his friend was his friend no more. Instead she was an accessory to the crime. One who got his pulse racing and his blood thickening so that it pounded in his ears, while his body hardened to the point where surely she would notice?

All this and she hadn’t even taken her clothes off yet.

Maybe he wouldn’t let her take them off after all, because it now seemed as if situation- helpful was turning into situation-most-dangerous-ever.

‘So, I brought a few different sets with me,’ Sephy was saying, as she walked towards him with the Seraphic bags swinging from one hand and her car keys clutched in her other, along with her travel mug. ‘I’m nearly sure which ones I want photos of. I guess it depends which suit me better. I’m not exactly model material.’

He begged to differ and immediately made an exerted effort to stop his thoughts straying down the path clearly marked ‘trouble’. Neither of them needed this backfiring on them.

‘I guess if we try lots of different things,’ she hurried on, walking past him into his house, ‘then we can run it all past Frazer when he does the shoot proper. If it goes well today, I’ll get Nora to ring him and set things up for Monday. Would that work for you? Wow,’ she came to an abrupt stop and turned in a slow circle. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t been here before. It’s really big.’ She turned to face him as she said the last words, her eyes looking him up and down and snagging on his jeans zipper before she flushed scarlet.

Luke shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and prayed to God he wasn’t doing the same.

Sephy turned away to take in the carved wooden staircase and started rambling like she was on the ultimate caffeine high again. ‘I was thinking on the drive over how strange it was that I’d never actually been here before. I think that’s strange. Don’t you think that’s strange? I guess it’s always been easier to meet at mine because of D –’

‘You want to take a breath?’ Luke interrupted, deliberately making his voice as moderate as he thought he could get away with.

He knew that Sephy hated feeling like she was being manoeuvred, but he figured she was about two steps away from hyperventilating and although he was kind of pleased to see her so unsure of her footing, he knew she would bolt if panic hit full on, and then blame herself for ruining her opportunity to fix her ad campaign.

‘What are you talking about?’ Sephy said, turning back to face him. ‘I’m breathing. I’m totally breathing. I’m –’

‘How many of those have you had?’ Luke asked, dragging his hand out of his pocket to point at her giant travel mug.

‘Oh. This is my first one. I didn’t want to be too, you know.’ She flapped a hand about between them, rolled her eyes and shrugged, and as easy as that they were both smiling at each other.

‘Okay. Well, given that I never ask guests to bring their own coffee, shall we go into the kitchen and I’ll make us a fresh batch. We can talk.’

‘Talk?’ Sephy asked.

‘Catch ourselves up.’ Tell her about his family situation, he thought, deliberately ignoring the flash flood of trepidation he felt.

‘Oh. Okay. Good idea. We could do the house stuff first and the other stuff…after.’

‘Drop the bags here, then, and we’ll take them up to my bedroom later.’

‘Bedroom?’ Suspicion hit her huge brown eyes.

‘You can get changed up there and I’ve got full-length mirrors. I thought you’d want to see –’

‘Of course. That’s fine. So are you going to show me this kitchen of yours, then?’

Luke stepped to the side and gestured for her to precede him into the room off to the right.

They were friends who were helping each other out.

That was all.

So they’d talk, have a little lunch and then by the time it came to ‘practice’ they would both feel more like what they were doing really wasn’t such a big deal.

Which it wasn’t, he counselled.

He couldn’t help wishing he had never thought practicing first would be a good idea, though. In his mind he had associated non-professional models with awkwardness and that, coupled with the very real worry he was going to feel as if the photographer was exposing his soul for others to gawk at, or something, had him suggesting rehearsing. But now he wished for the sterile white lights of the photographer’s studio. The flash and noise of photographer and camera. Keeping it all professional would have had the distancing effect that it turned out he really needed.