Excerpt: Entangled Moments by Dori Lavelle

The Entangled Moments manuscript is currently with the editor but I thought I should give you a taste.

***

When Nick lowered his lips onto mine, I didn't flinch. His kiss was a whisper at first, as if he was tasting me, or testing me to see if I'd fight him. Then it turned much more passionate—teeth nibbled, tongues probed and breaths were snatched away.

My stomach swirled and somewhere in my head a tiny voice reprimanded me but I pretended not to hear. I listened instead to how my body felt, as if it had been plugged to a source of electricity and now buzzed with life. I returned his kiss fervently. Nothing felt wrong with this, in fact, nothing had ever felt so right.

From a distance people talked, someone slurped a drink, coins jingled and Garth Brooks sang one of my favorite songs, Learning to live again. If only this moment could last forever.

I wound my arms around Neck and he buried his hands into my hair, unraveling my long, bone straight hair from its ponytail.

Then Nick pulled away even if his gaze stayed glued to mine.

My pulsing lips parted, longed for more.

Nick helped me to my feet again but his arms remained encircled around my waist. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."

"It's...it's okay," I bit my lip, relished the remains of our coffee kiss. I stepped away from his touch, his lips.

His arms dropped to his sides and he pushed his hands into his pockets, as if to restrain them. "I never do things like that. You are so...beautiful." He shook his head. "I apologize. That should never have happened."

Words I couldn’t speak out loud stayed lodged in my throat. That I didn’t regret what happened. That he'd made me feel alive again, even for a moment.

Though the kiss had invigorated me, the shame of kissing a total stranger, like a teenager unable to keep their emotions in check, washed over me. It was just that when he'd caught my body, he'd also caught my life from crashing down into depression, as was always the case on this day each year and lasted a few days afterwards.

"I should go." He lifted his suit jacket from the back of a chair and put it on. "It was nice meeting you." He strode out of the café, leaving me standing there with one hand clutching the edge of the table for balance.

Something clicked inside my head and I remembered Oasis, breakfast, the Residents. I had to go, too. I glanced at the clock above the jukebox. I had been away for at least an hour.

I grabbed my belongings and hurried past the banana peel that had caused my fall, and the waitress who stood in the middle of the restaurant, mouth open. She had obviously observed everything that had happened between Nick and I.

Why did she look so shocked? Things like these happened all the time, surely. Maybe not to me, but to a lot of other people. When it came to dating and relationships, I had always been the type of girl who took things slow. Chris and I had gone on three days before I allowed him to kiss me on the mouth. In fact, he had been the only man I'd been with, in every way. The love of my life. But although I'd found him extremely attractive the first time we'd met in the parking lot of Shop n Carry, the attraction hadn't felt like a bolt of lightning. He hadn't made me feel the way Nick just had.