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A pained whimper escaped me before I could stop it.
“You good?” Ty asked.
I looked at him. His brown curls were damp with sweat now that he’d removed his helmet. His eyes twinkled and all of his attention was on me.
I gave a firm nod. “All good.”
It was neither the time nor the place to tell him that I was being tormented by the memory of his kiss. And that was no way to phrase it, either, but it was the closest to what I could come up with. The thing was, it had done the very thing Tyler had been trying to do all along. It had made me forget everything about Jennifer. I just couldn’t decide if it was worth the awkward silences that followed it.
The rising need to examine whatever these feelings were got the better of me as I walked out of the shower. A big towel was tied around my waist while I rubbed my wet hair with a smaller one. I slowed down as I stepped into the locker room where guys were putting their clean clothes on.
Tyler was in his spot next to mine, talking to Asher. The two shared a little laugh and Tyler rolled his bare shoulders as he turned to his duffel. He was chiseled like a true athlete. His light and creamy skin looked taut over his swollen muscles. And his mischievous smiles were disarming. His brown hair was so dark after showering that it almost matched mine.
Over the years, he’d had a lot more luck with girls than I. He had always had an easy time striking up a conversation as well as closing the deal. And his relationships usually lasted longer than mine, even if they didn’t have much happier endings.
As I watched his muscles flex in the routine gestures of pulling his underwear up his legs or dragging a T-shirt over his head, I found myself breathing in short breaths and wanting to look away because I knew why I was looking. I knew what I was looking for. And I was finding it over and over again. This feeling deep in my stomach, like uncertainty or anxiety, this fluttery sensation that came with allowing myself to look at my best friend’s body was all too familiar. It was something I had always avoided for the simple reason that I knew it was wrong. You just didn’t look at your friends with thirsty eyes and desperate hearts.
When I reached my spot, Tyler winked at me in greeting. It was no different than a million other winks from him, but it made my heart stumble anyway.
We walked out of the rink together.
“What’s the plan?” Tyler asked as if I had the answer to that.
I shrugged, pulling my jacket closer together against the wind. “I think I’ll stop at the library before it closes.”
Tyler nodded. “Cool. I could look up some books, too. I have a habit of leaving ‘source needed’ placeholders in all my essays.”
I was equally glad and disappointed when he suggested joining me. On one hand, I wanted nothing else than to sit across from him, pour over my notes, lift my gaze without knowing how much time had passed, and find him focused on his work. On the other hand, I needed to figure some stuff out without his magnetic presence distracting me. And he still had other places to be. “Aren’t you seeing Courtney? It’s Monday.”
Tyler snorted. “Don’t worry about that.” There was something tight in his voice and I couldn’t decipher it.
“Did something happen?” I asked.
Tyler shot me a significant look. Ah. The kiss, then. It was all about the kiss.
We entered the library in silence. It was bright with warm hues from overhead lights and the countless lamps on the reading desks. The library extended into several branches from a long corridor and we walked almost by instinct to the area where the literature on nutrition was.
Tyler pressed the tip of his finger to the spine of a book at the very edge of the bookcase. He dragged his finger from one spine to the next, scanning the titles, and pulled a few books out, then placed them back.
I watched him with rising feelings that conflicted and warred for dominance. I wanted to push everything else aside, forget all the implications, and see where this could lead us. Then again, there was Courtney. There was my family. There were all the years of friendship we’d be gambling with. There were so many roadblocks that I couldn’t even begin listing them all.
Tyler was looking at the back of a book, but his eyes weren’t moving. “Courtney’s been pretty unhappy with me,” he said quietly.
“I figured,” I said.
He shot me a shy smile. “And I’m having a hard time caring.”
Those words lifted my heart for one moment, then yanked it low in the next. Everything we said felt like it was double-edged. Everything came with hope and fear in equal parts.
I nodded to his words, then stepped a little closer. I had never been shy around him. Throughout the years, we had always been close, but we had never crossed those boundaries. We hadn’t done the boyish things in puberty. We hadn’t revealed those things to one another. We had never fooled around with or around each other. And yet, I felt like I knew him more intimately than I had ever known anyone.
We were best friends, for God’s sake. We were supposed to be able to say things to each other. And yet, here I was, lacking every drop of courage I’d once had.
I forced the words out with physical effort. “Why did you kiss me?”
Tyler looked at me apologetically and I regretted the question. It was torture for him, too. Yet the last two days had been a hell of a lot of confusion for me. I couldn’t keep stewing in this mess. “I was drunk…”
I shook my head. “I know that. But why did you do it? What were you hoping for?”
