Twins (20 page)

“Aren't you freezing?” he whispered sweetly. “You're shivering like crazy.”

Gaia froze from sheer embarrassment though she was not the least bit cold. Her eyes froze over as well, with a momentary attack of deer-in-headlights syndrome. “Oh … yeah,” she stammered. “The window. Good idea.”

Ed reached over Gaia in the bed and dragged his bedroom window shut, cutting off what was left of the city street noise at five in the morning.

She actually would have much preferred to keep it open, but what was she supposed to say? Was she supposed to tell him the truth? That she was shivering from his kisses, and his soft lips on her neck, and the feeling of his palms and his fingertips running along her waist? That the shivering was some kind of involuntary physical manifestation of how inconceivably
happy she was at this moment, on his bed, in his arms, in the abnormally bright mix of ocean-blue moonlight and stark white New York streetlight?

No. That was unquestionably something to be felt and not to be said. Like a million other things she was feeling now, staring back into his eyes.

The brief window exchange had finally pulled their lips and bodies apart after twenty-eight minutes, and Ed leaned back to his pillow, running his finger along Gaia's cheek.

Just twenty-eight minutes. Gaia couldn't believe it. Twenty-eight minutes since she'd confessed—at least, in her own way—that she loved him. How could this version of them be only a half hour old?

But that really wasn't true, was it. Not if Gaia wanted to be completely honest with herself. Not if she wanted to dig past the paper-thin labels and relationship rules set up by the
pre-When Harry Met Sally
generation. The fact was, that movie was not just for liberal Upper West Side yuppie men and women over thirty. In truth, if all seventeen-year-olds could speak as honestly as Harry Burns and Sally Albright, then they too would have to confess that there was probably
something
else going on under their “best friendships” with members of the opposite sex.

“Friends” may have been the label for Gaia and Ed, but given the particularly honest mood she was in at this moment, Gaia had to admit that in some way, she
and Ed had sort of been “courting” for the last year. In spite of all the love and tragedies they'd experienced apart from each other. In spite of a million other things, Gaia and Ed were a constant.

Maybe that was why, once she'd admitted what she was feeling, it was suddenly so easy to be so close. Almost as if they'd been together this way the entire time. Twenty-eight minutes into this relationship, and Gaia had found herself with a boyfriend whom she knew inside and out and trusted even more than she did herself.

Ed cocked his head to the side and searched Gaia's eyes with a mildly bemused smile. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” Gaia responded instantly. Man, did she need to work on the spoken honesty thing.

“You're still working on the spoken honesty thing, aren't you,” Ed said.
God, he's good.

“No,”
Gaia squirmed. “I just …”
Oh, Gaia, cut it out. You've got nothing left to hide now.
“Yeah,” she admitted. “Yeah, I'm having a little trouble in that category.”

“Okay,” Ed said purposefully, jamming his elbow into his pillow and leaning his head on his hand, “let's do a little exercise in honesty, then—”

“Oh, hell no,” Gaia interrupted.

“Come on,” Ed laughed. “It's five in the morning. Who's going to know? What, are you afraid?”

Oh, he didn't want to go there.
Gaia
didn't want to go there. That was the question of the hour.
The
question. Was her uncle's injection a phony or not? Was fear now a part of her life or was that all a hoax? Was her fearlessness genetic, or part of some governmental excuse for a science project put together by her father and a bunch of freakazoid CIA doctors? No, sir, she would not be going there. Not on this beautiful dark morning in this safe bed with her glorious new “everything” looking into her eyes. Whether she was now capable of fear or not, in this bed, with this boy, she was not afraid of anything.

“No,” Gaia assured him. “I am most definitely not afraid.”

“Fine, then you just have to answer a few questions honestly.”

“Fine.”

“Fine. Okay. Question one: Do you find me …
attractive?”

“Okay, I quit,” Gaia said, turning towards the window.

“Kidding,” Ed laughed, pulling her back towards him.

“You've got one more shot,” she said, with a comical glare.

“Okay,” Ed agreed, staring into her eyes again. He shifted onto his stomach and moved closer until their noses were nearly touching. But he really shouldn't
have done that. Not if the goal was to have a conversation. It had already been established in the last twenty-four hours that when the two of them got this close, talking was not the first inclination. “Okay …” he began again. “All right …” Ed seemed unable to produce a full sentence as his eyes had refocused on Gaia's mouth. “Okay …”

His mouth was so close to hers, she could feel the consonants rolling off of his lips. And the shivers had started again. First lightly in her toes. Then sudden heavy trembles in her stomach. His lips … what was it about his lips? Before she could answer her own question, she'd found that her hand had drifted up to his mouth to investigate. Without any specific orders from her brain, her fingers had begun to gently trace down from his lips to the corner of his mouth.

“Um,” he uttered, inching his face closer. “Do you …”

“What…?” she whispered, doing her best to cover the shivers.

Ed seemed utterly dazed by her fingers. “Do you want—”

“Yes.” Gaia pressed her lips against his, channeling all the pent up energy of her trembling into her kiss. Ed responded with equal force, wrapping his hands tightly around her waist. But Gaia's T-shirt had ridden up slightly when he grabbed her, leaving Ed's wide palms suddenly pressed against her bare back. This
sent another bolt of electricity up her spine that in no way helped to calm her shivers.

Ed's shirt had also apparently hiked up slightly, and when Gaia's hands drifted down to his waist to hold him, her fingers ended up grazing along the bottom of his exposed abs, sliding up along his muscular back and clinging to his bare shoulders under his shirt. It may have been an accident but it only led to higher voltage trembling.

And with her lips on his lips, and their hands clinging to each other's backs, Gaia slowly began to realize that the moment when her brain or her body would bring things to a halt did not seem to be coming. She didn't want to stop. There was no reason to stop. Not when she loved him this much. Not after building a year's worth of totally untainted trust. All she wanted now was to be closer to him. As close as was humanly possible.

Her hands on his bare back did not have to be an accident. Not if she didn't want it to be. So she simply let her hands follow through. Without rushing or tugging, Gaia let her arms continue to slide upward, lifting Ed's T-shirt higher and higher off of his chest, until he'd raised his arms and let her pull the T-shirt off.

She slid her hands across his bare shoulders and kissed him again as he returned his palms to the
exposed small of her back. Now she could feel just how quickly his heart was beating.

But Ed pulled back momentarily, bringing his hands up to Gaia's face and giving her a kind but penetrating stare. “Gaia,” he said between increasingly rapid breaths. “Are we about to do what I think we're about to do?”

ONE CRISP SUN-DRENCHED MORNING, two grande lattes, and Josh Brown. There could be no finer combination. At least not as far as Heather was concerned.

It was what Heather liked to refer to as a
“Mary Poppins
morning.” One of those mornings where the spirit of Walt Disney had not just taken over Times Square, but all of New York City, even below Fourteenth Street and down to the Astor Place Starbucks. The trees seemed to be politely stepping out of their way for her. All the ruffled unshaven bohemians seemed to lock arms and dance a two-step down lower Broadway, while cartoon birds seemed to flitter down from the bright blue sky and
perch on Heather's finger, winking at her and exchanging whistled melodies as she hovered her way into Starbucks.

Of course none of the above had taken place, but something far more dreamy and miraculous had: Josh's unheard of and all-too-daring
Morning Follow-up.

Heather still couldn't believe it. She and Josh hadn't finished their last coffee rendezvous until midnight last night. But at the end of that unbelievable evening, Josh had actually suggested that they meet again
the very next morning.
Nine hours. Nine hours between coffee dates. That kind of dating proximity was generally reserved for either deep insatiable love affairs or desperately lonely people. And considering Josh's inhumanly beautiful appearance, loneliness was simply not a possibility.
Not
that Heather thought he'd developed a deep insatiable love for her after one spilled coffee encounter and one semi-impromptu Starbucks chat. But nine hours? Even Romeo could wait more than nine hours to see Juliet. Things were looking awfully good.

And Josh was looking awfully good. His black T-shirt left no distractions from his perfectly sculpted angular face and arms, and his slightly spiky, still-wet-from-the-shower jet-black hair.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, ducking
his head down in disbelief after Heather sat down at their sun-warmed window table.

“What?” she asked, widening her eyes with concern. Had she done something wrong before she'd even sat down?

Josh brought his head back up and stared at Heather, his eyes reflecting in the sun like blinding purple neon. “You can't look this good at nine in the morning,” he said. “No one looks this good at nine in the morning.”

“Oh,” Heather smiled, feeling her feet melting into her Clergerie shoes. “Well, I….” She could do nothing other than smile and look like an idiot. Was there any possible response to that? Probably there was, but not when Josh said it there wasn't.

“You're one of
those,
aren't you?” he said.

“One of what?” she replied shyly.

Josh leaned forward on the table. “You're one of those girls who looks equally as beautiful when she gets out of bed in the morning as she does on a Friday night at seven-thirty.”

“Okay,
stop,”
she giggled, averting her eyes from his murderously gorgeous grin. She silently prayed that he would not stop.

“No, really,” he went on. Her prayers had been yielding unprecedented success these last twelve hours. First he'd shown up at Starbucks last night after her wishful semi-stalker-like stakeout. Then
came his suggestion of Morning Follow-up coffee. And now this. “Really. I bet you look like this the second you climb out of bed.”

Now her legs had pretty much melted as well. When Josh said the word “bed,” Heather found it somewhat difficult to breathe, let alone put together a verbal response.

“I'm sorry,” Josh said with an embarrassed chuckle as he leaned back in his chair. “Did that just come out ludicrously inappropriate? I didn't mean—”

“No, it's fine,” she assured him with a nervous laugh. “It's just not true, believe me. I'm sure you look a hell of a lot better than I do in the morning.”

Was that the right response?
Stay cool, Heather, you're losing your touch here.
Heather considered herself to have something of a Ph.D. in Flirtation, but Josh made it next to impossible for her to keep her feet planted on the ground. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that he'd already melted her feet. And her legs for that matter.

“Look, I'm sorry,” he complained, shaking his head. Heather had no idea what he was sorry about, but she immediately felt her heart droop down into her stomach. Good Lord, this was bad.

“What?” she uttered, trying to mask her concern.

“I'm sorry, I just have to ask …”

“Ask
what?”
she whined inadvertently.

“Okay,” he said, planting his elbows on the table with a confrontational glance. “When I found you here last night …”

Oh, God. Busted. Totally busted. Heather grabbed her lukewarm latte and guzzled half of it down, looking for a calming jolt of caffeine. He knew she'd been waiting for him. He must have known that she'd been on a five-hour stakeout for him. She might as well have had a huge pair of binoculars hanging around her neck, a pith helmet, and a group of resentful natives carrying her supplies. She'd fallen down into the ranks of the hunter-explorer girls. The millions of non-self-respecting stalker-skanks across the nation who lived for no other purpose than to entrap some unsuspecting
dude
and seduce their way into “last resort late night hook-up” status with him.

“I just don't understand,” Josh went on as Heather cringed internally.
Go on. Say it. Just say it.
“I don't understand what a beautiful girl like you could have possibly been doing alone at Starbucks last night.”

Heather's head suddenly felt much lighter. Another compliment. Not the end of line. Could she be any more sensitive? Any more of a full-blown loser?
Relax, girl. You're Heather Gannis for God's sake. Never to be confused with the pathetic Hunter Skanks of the world.
She tried to shake off her panic as quickly as possible, hoping it hadn't shown through her long-rehearsed emergency smile.

“Come on, tell me the truth,” he said with a sly grin. “Did you
just
break up with your boyfriend or something?”

She was so relieved to be undiscovered that she didn't even bother holding back with her answer. “Well, not exactly,
just”
she said, without even thinking. She guzzled some more latte to ease her sudden dry mouth. “It was a little while ago, but,
after
we broke up … he kind of moved on to this other girl I know.”