“Thanks, J,” I told him, taking the phone from his hand. “Hey, you and Lou need to go ahead and get ready for bed, all right? It’s past ten.”

The entire time I’d been talking, his lip started to snarl a little but he nodded, reluctant and shit. “You want me to tell Mr. Dallas to go?”

No, I didn’t want him to kick out the neighbor, but I couldn’t exactly say that. “Don’t worry about it. You and Louie get ready for bed. Dallas can leave when he’s ready.”

Josh nodded and turned to walk out of the kitchen as I brought the phone to my face.

“¿Bueno?”

There was silence before my mom’s voice came over the line, slow and crawling. “Who is at your house?” she asked in Spanish.

I hated rolling my eyes seconds into our conversation, but I couldn’t help it. “My neighbor.”

“You have a man at your house?”

She was hissing. Fantastic. “Yes, Mamá.”

“It’s ten o’clock at night!”

“I know,” I told her, drawing the letters out in frustration. “Did you need something?”

“Is he alone with the boys right now?” She was still speaking in quick, angry Spanish.

Fuck. “Ma, did you need something?”

“¿Qué piensas? Qué estás haciendo?”

“I know what I’m doing, Mom,” I told her as calmly as possible even though the reality was, I never had any idea what I was doing. Ever. “What do you need?”

“Diana,” she grumbled. “Is he going to spend the night?”

“Oh my God,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “Mom, tell me why you’re calling. I still need to put the boys to sleep and I have to go to sleep.”

“Que Dios me bendiga. ¿Donde te fallé?”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head in exasperation. She had just asked where she had failed me. God help me.

“It’s the man with the tattoos?”

I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, already deciding I needed to find my Pop-Tarts and stick two of them in my mouth at once. “Si. What do you need?”

The most dramatic noise ever made in the history of bodily sounds came through the phone and my eyes tried to go find my brain again.

“Mom, I like him and you’re going to have to live with that. So tell me why you called, please.”

She started mumbling words in Spanish that I was pretty sure made up a prayer I hadn’t heard in decades, since my First Communion. There was something about God helping her and something after that about paying for her sins. Planting one hand on the kitchen counter, with the other one holding the phone to my face, I dropped my head back and fake sobbed.

“Mom.”

She wasn’t listening to me. Like always.

I only fake sobbed more.

Then I heard the soft laugh behind me. It was Dallas with his hip to the counter, those muscular arms crossed over his chest. He looked way too amused.

Had he heard me say I liked him?

“Mom, Mom, just call me later, okay? You’re not paying attention anymore. I love you, tell God I said hi.” I waited a second, and when she still hadn’t acknowledged me, I sighed and hit the red button on my screen.

“Mom troubles?” Dallas asked.

“Like always.”

“The boys went to get ready for bed just now,” he said, taking a step forward.

“Okay.” Why did I feel shy all of a sudden? “Are you leaving?”

“Not yet.” He took another step. “I’ve missed seeing you.”

He missed me?

I gulped. “I live across the street.”

“I know, Di,” he replied with a smirk on his pink mouth. “I’ve been trying to give you some space to think about things.”

“Think about what?” I gulped again, watching him slowly creep closer to me.

“What happened in my truck.”

Luckily, I knew that the wrong thing to ask was “What happened in the truck?” Instead, I had this deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on my face and muttered, “Oh. That.”

His eyebrow went up. “That?”

“Yeah. That.” Stupid, stupid, stupid, Diana.

Dallas took two more striding steps forward until he stopped directly in front of me, so close the upper part of his stomach brushed against my breasts. One of those big hands came up to my face and he pet my cheek again with the backs of his fingers, his voice low and steady. “I’m gonna kiss you again.”

I sucked in a breath as he dipped his head closer to mine. There were a million things I should tell him. Maybe even two million things. But instead of telling him I wasn’t sure where his mind was at or what he wanted from me or telling him that I thought he’d hung the Milky Way, all I did was nod.

I didn’t even ask him why he liked me or since when. When?

What I did do was stand there as his hands curled over my hips and his breath hit my skin.

His lips brushed across my forehead from one temple to the next and back again. I swallowed hard.

The soft skin of Dallas’s mouth went from my temple down along my ear and halfway across my jaw. Gentle. Barely a touch. I held my breath.

When he went up the path he’d come down, back across my forehead and down the same route along my ear on the other side, I closed my eyes and still didn’t breathe.

The hands on my hips tightened, and either Dallas took a step closer or he pulled me to him because our lower bodies were suddenly pressed against each other. And then, and then, his lips hovered over mine for all of a heartbeat before they covered my own. From one instant to the next, his mouth slanted over mine and the gentleness was nowhere to be found because it had gotten replaced by something I could only call hunger. Starving, I-can’t-get-enough-now-and-it-feels-like-I-might-never-get-enough hunger.