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My mouth was abruptly dry. I nodded mechanically, still in a daze. Feeling his voice more than hearing it, as Zane finally leaned back to his side of the counter.
And then, without even thinking, I blurted:
“How come we never dated?”
~ 23 ~
ZANE
The question came out of left field, like a fly ball to the face. There was no catching it. No waving it off.
Shit, by the look on her face I think it surprised her too.
“Wha—” I began stupidly, trying to buy time. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you and me as a couple. Together.” She glanced down at her hands. “We’ve hooked up a few times, but we never, you know…”
I took a long sip of my coffee, probably to buy more time as I considered the question. Eventually I found myself scratching at the side of my cheek.
“Well for one, Tyler and Axel would break my arms and legs,” I replied. “In fact—“
“Other than them,” she cut me off. “There was a time when they were both away at school, both out of town. It was just you and I and nobody else. We could’ve done anything.”
“We did do anything,” I grinned back at her.
“Oh, I know,” she said, returning my smirk. “But we never really dated, and I want to know why.”
Ariana leaned forward, plopping an elbow on the counter. As casual as our relationship had been, it was suddenly obvious she’d thought about this for a long while. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her feelings.
“In that case, I guess it was timing,” I conceded.
“Timing.”
“Yeah.”
The answer was weak as shit, and I knew it. Ariana knew it too.
“Alright, maybe it was more than that,” I agreed. “Timing was always bad for us, though. We dated on opposite schedules.”
Her cute little eyebrows crashed together. It was just one of a hundred adorable things she did.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Whenever I was single, you had a boyfriend,” I explained. “And then when I’d get a girlfriend, you were suddenly single again. Over and over again, we were on opposite schedules. The timing was never right for us. We kept missing our window.”
She nodded blankly, thinking back. “I… I guess that’s true.”
“Should there have been a window?” I inquired.
I honestly didn’t know what kind of answer to expect from her. Ariana was moving her arm busily, wiping down the same little square of counter for the tenth or twelfth time. She was almost out of breath from the exertion. Her skin was flushed pink.
“Hey…” I said, laying a hand over hers. She stopped scrubbing. “Look at me.”
Finally, she did. There was confusion in her eyes.
“Did you want something more?” I asked gently. “Because if so, you never let on. What we had together was fragile, delicate, like feeding a baby deer. I didn’t want to spook you away. I didn’t want to lose it.”
Begrudgingly she shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t want to lose it either.”
