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“I can, um, help you with that,” she says shyly, and holy fuck, I want that. I want her help, and I want it right now, and?—
And what in the name of hell are we doing?
“Maybe we should…”
I’m not even a hundred percent sure what I was going to say. I think I might have been about to say, Maybe we should talk about this. And suddenly I have sympathy for all the women who’ve ever tried to say that to me, all the women to whom I’ve said, I’m sorry, but I just don’t do relationships. I thought I made that clear, and I’m really sorry if I didn’t. Or some kinder, gentler version of that.
“It’s like you said,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It’s just that, I mean, it does seem like kind of a shame that we’re getting married—and divorced—and no one even gets laid out of that. Right?” She blushes even deeper. “Well. I did just come really hard. God,” she says and throws her head back against the pillow.
I groan. “You did.”
“I was not expecting this,” she says. “I thought when you went to LA it meant you regretted kissing me. I thought it meant you weren’t into me that way.”
“Uh, no, not exactly,” I say with a sigh. “It meant I was afraid I was going to do it again, and then”—I gesture at the two of us on the couch—“do this. And a whole lot of other stuff. You have no idea what I want to do to you. With you. In you.”
“Shane,” she breathes.
“Yeah. Exactly. But.” I summon every last ounce of my willpower because Ivy is way too good a person for me to fuck around with her feelings. “I think it’s probably a terrible idea.”
She scowls. “Are you saying you didn’t enjoy yourself?” She gives the tent in my jeans another meaningful glance.
“Hell no! I am most definitely not saying that. Christ, woman, if I’d enjoyed myself for another three seconds, we would be cleaning up the mess right now.”
She grins at that. I like Ivy like this—playful, sexy, enjoying the back-and-forth between us. I want more of her.
“We could,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows.
“Make a mess. Both get laid. All the things. It feels like the least we deserve given all the work we’re doing.”
Oh, fuck me, I want that. I want her, I want what she’s offering, I want more dirty words in her mouth. I want to lick them out.
I don’t want to hurt her.
“I don’t sleep with costars,” I say. It’s just one of many rules I have for keeping things simple. Clear cut.
“I’m not actually your costar.”
“I don’t sleep with friends.”
“Are we friends?” she asks, delighted, and fuck me again if that doesn’t make my chest hurt. Because I guess we are, and that’s a thing in short supply for both of us. An even better reason not to do this dumbass thing she’s proposing.
“Yeah,” I say. “We’re friends.”
She thinks about that a moment, that smile still on her lips. “Huh,” she says finally. “Well?—”
I don’t get a chance to find out what she’s going to say next because my phone rings.
“It’s Hanna. She never calls.”
“Take it,” she says.
“Hey, you okay?” I ask my sister.
“I’m not harmed or dead. But in all other senses, I am not okay,” she says.
Ivy watches me.
