Less

I kiss him then, like there isn’t someone reading one of the Bridgerton novels five feet away, like we’ve just found each other on a deserted island after months apart.

Impossible. No one could want anything the way he wanted her. Take it, he willed. Please, God. Kiss me.

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two.

She broke off as he bent slowly and touched his lips to hers, as if her laughter were something he could taste.

But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

I understood that happiness is within our grasp if we reach for it.