“Yes, you do,” he says with a playful smirk. “Last night, you kept saying, ‘Oh, Shawn, oh, you’re so hot, I want you so bad—’ ”
My jaw drops in a gasp. “You’re so full of shit!” When he starts laughing, I smack at him until he wraps me in his arms and tugs me back against his chest. I laugh along with him, delighting in the way his body shakes against my back, until I’m smiling out over the roof again.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he asks of me after a while, and I can hear him smiling too—it’s shining through his voice.
“I like ketchup in my macaroni sometimes.”
His thumbs stop tracing over my arms when I say the first thing that pops into my head, and the night is silent when he says, “Damn. That changes everything. I think you should go back inside.”
I laugh, and his thumbs start up again, keeping me still in his arms.
The smile is still in his voice when he says, “Tell me something else.”
“It’s your turn,” I argue.
“What do you want to know?”
“Have you ever been to a party like that?”
“Like that?” With my head nestled in the crook of his shoulder, he says, “Nah. I’ve been to some crazy parties, but none like that.”
“If you’d sign with Victoria’s dad, you could have them every night.”
“Why would I want to?”
I spin around and face him, bending my knees over his thighs. “Isn’t that the dream?”
He rests his hands on the worn knees of my jeans, twining his fingers into the threads. “You mean having someone else tell us what to do?” When I wait for him to elaborate, he says, “It’s not worth it. I never want someone telling me what to write or what not to write or how fast we have to put stuff out there. Cutting the Line is good, but compare them now to how they sounded five years ago.”
I know exactly what he means. “Their first album was amazing.”
“And Van knows it.” His fingers continue navigating every slit and fray in my jeans—every single one, like he needs to touch every inch of my exposed skin, even though I doubt he realizes that’s what he’s doing. “He loves the life, but he hates what he has to do to have it. Vicki’s dad has him under his thumb. That would kill it for me and Adam, and I know Mike and Joel wouldn’t like it either.” His fingers glide into a slit behind my calf, and I pretend not to notice, not to love the way he’s touching me as much as I do. “What about you?”
“I like things the way they are.”
His smile warms the chill of the wind on my cheeks. “They’re going to change, either way. It’ll just be slower this way.”
“I like slow.”
“I’m starting to like slow too.” His eyes drift to my lips, and the breeze itself seems to still. “Like now . . . I really want to kiss you.”
“Why don’t you?” My voice is shallow, hollowed by breath he steals.
“Because I like this.” His fingers crawl back up my legs until they’re twining into the ragged threads stretched over my knee again. “Tell me something else.”
“Like what?”
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
My attention lifts from his fingers to his eyes. “Jeez, you couldn’t have gone with something easy?” He grins, and the adorable line that sets in his cheek makes me want to answer anything he asks. “I don’t know, hopefully still playing music.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the only thing I can say for sure.”
There are things I know I want—like Shawn, every single bit of him—but I don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow, much less five years from now. And when I try to guess, it just hurts. Because five years is almost six years, and six years is such a long time.
He nods with understanding, and I ask, “What about you?”
“Definitely still playing music. Hopefully with you.” He smirks, and I smile. “By then, maybe we’ll be on a label.”
“I thought you didn’t want to be on a label?”
“Not right now,” he explains. “I want to be big enough that when we draft the papers, they have to kiss our asses instead of the other way around.” I chuckle and shift closer to him, listening as he continues. “And I don’t know. Adam and Peach will probably be married or something by then, so I’ll probably be homeless.”
I laugh and joke, “I’d let you live with me.”
“So there then,” he says with one of his unguarded, bright smiles. “We have a plan.”
I look away, at a piece of gravel next to my boot, and I can feel my own smile dimming as I pinch it between my fingers. “Part of me never wants this tour to end.”
“Why?”
I lift my gaze back to his, my eyes making a confession even as my mouth asks the question my heart has been too afraid to. “What happens when we get home? To you and me?”
Do we pretend the kisses we shared over coffee on the tour bus never happened? Do we keep fooling around in secret? What happens when he meets someone better than me, prettier than me?
“What do you want to happen?” he asks.
“Don’t do that,” I plead.
“Do what?”