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“What thehell?” she asks. “Is this—are you—when—oh my god. Are you two together?”
Guess the cat is out of the bag.
“Hey, Mae,” Shawn says. He looks down at me and runs his thumb across my bottom lip. “Yeah. We’re together.”
“Finally,” she squeals, and I’ve never heard her so excited about something. “Do Dad and Maggie know? Please don’t swear me to secrecy—this is too good not to share.”
“They know,” I say. “This is the first time we’re seeing them since we spilled the beans, though, so prepare your eardrums. You know Mags is going to flip out.”
I take Shawn’s hand in mine, and we walk into the apartment. It feels exactly like it did four days ago when we were here last, with the heat set at sixty-eight and the scent of a candle lingering in the air. My shoulders relax at the familiarity, at the feeling ofhome.
My best friend pops her head up from behind a cabinet and stomps toward the foyer like she’s been summoned. She puts her hands on her hips and looks between me and Shawn. “You assholes have alotof explaining to do. But, hell, I’m so happy for you,” she says, before pulling us into a tight embrace.
“Hey, Mags.” Shawn hugs her back and kisses her cheek. “We’re ready for the interrogation.”
“Thank god, because the anticipation has been killing me.” Maggie leads us to the living room. “Get comfortable. I’m not letting you leave until I know every detail.”
We take a spot on the couch, side by side, and Maven sits in a chair across from us. She won’t stop grinning, and it makes me laugh.
“I kind of feel like an animal at the zoo,” I whisper to Shawn. “Everyone’s going to point at us.”
“Which animal would you be? I kind of want to be a gorilla. Maybe a lion,” he whispers back.
“I’d want to be a sloth. There’s no need to hurry; people expect you to take eight hours to do a single task. Sloths seem so unbothered, too, which I love.”
“It’s been fun to slow down, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I grin and touch the jut of his chin. “It has been.”
“There are the lovebirds,” Aiden says as he walks into the living room and tugs a sweatshirt over his head. “I could hear Maggie yell at you from down the hall.”
“Any bets on how many times they call us that tonight?” Shawn asks me out of the corner of his mouth, and I burst out laughing. “I think at least fifteen, but no more than twenty.”
“I’m going with twenty-one. They’ve been waiting for this moment since the day you and I met.”
“You’re on, Daniels.”
Maggie and Aiden sit on the couch to our right. She leans forward and drops her elbows to her knees. “Please start talking.”
“We all know about the kiss cam kiss. That’s where all of this started. I went over to Shawn’s the day the video got out and proposed the idea of continuing to pretend to date through the holidays. We made a list of rules, and one of those rules was to not be physically affectionate with each other unless it was necessary,” I say.
“Which I was doingreallywell with, until Lacey came to my game wearing Dallas’ jersey,” Shawn says. He rolls his eyes but puts his arm around my shoulders, tugging me closer to him. “I pulled her into a supply closet at the arena, we kissed, and I thought it was a one-off, spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“Hang on. The game where you made her meet you in the tunnel?” Maggie asks, and she turns to me, grinning from ear to ear. “No wonder you looked so happy when you came back to our seats, Lace. Must’ve been a hell of a kiss.”
I touch my lips as if I’m there in the closet with him again, the moment that started everything for us. I can feel his hands on my skin and I can see the look in his eyes when he saidfuck it.
I’m so glad I wore that jersey to get a rise out of him.
“It was a very, verynotnice kiss,” I say.
“I didn’t think anything else would happen,” Shawn says. “We agreed we would still be our normal selves, and I thought that was that. We had the rules we were going to stick to, and it was a heated moment. Then Lacey came to my apartment again with a different proposition.”
“One night together,” I say, taking over. “We had chemistry when we kissed, and I thought if we had a quick hookup, we could get whatever tension and attraction was happening between us out of our systems and go our separate ways.”
“Way to go Aunt Lacey,” Maven says, and Aiden shoots her a sharp look.
“Don’t get any ideas, kid,” he says.
