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"I was not being irrational!" Alex insisted.
"How did I know that she meant you, even without her saying it?" I asked, shooting Alex a teasing smirk. We had bonded over many a Sunday dinner since she settled down with Paine's best friend Breaker.
"Hey, I am perfectly reasonable," she said, lips twitching with her lie.
"Only when everyone else agrees with you," I shot back.
"Well, duh," she laughed, moving over to drop down on the bed on the other side of me. "And you never answered the question."
"Which question?" I asked, head spinning a little with the multitude of new voices and faces around me.
"How you got Cy to settle down," Maze reminded me.
"Oh, ah. I don't know exactly. It wasn't like I, you know, tried to rope him in or anything like that."
"Again, duh," Alex said, nudging my shoulder. "We just want the story, Ree. The curiosity is killing us all."
"We met at She's Bean Around after he did a set. He came up and talked to me."
"Laying it on thick, I'm sure," Lo said, smirking.
"No. Not at all, actually. He said that he wanted to be friends because he knew he wasn't supposed to, ah, touch a girl like me. So, then we were friends."
"Oh, come on! This is Cyrus we're talking about here," Bethany said, shaking her head.
"Actually, though," Kennedy chimed in, "I can totally see him offering you friendship. He's a pretty good friend."
"He totally was."
"Except," Lo prompted.
"I had a crush," I admitted with a shrug. "Then one night, he came to see me at work..."
"She is a librarian," Elsie supplied for me.
"And he picked up one of the books," I started, leaving out that the filthy erotica was mine, "and started reading an, ah, explicit scene aloud."
"Oh, a fucking scene?" Lo asked, eyes going bright.
"Lo loves romance novels," Janie explained, scrunching up her face.
"And Janie is a book snob," Lo shot back, small-eyeing her friend. "Anyway, continue..."
"Then we, um, almost kissed. We were interrupted, though. And he ran off... and I didn't hear from him for five weeks."
"Wait... what?" Mina jumped in for the first time. "Five weeks? What was the possible reason for that?"
"I guess because he felt like he didn't..." I trailed off, unsure how to word it in a way that didn't make me sound kind of arrogant or something.
"Deserve a girl like you," Elsie supplied, giving me a smile. "To be fair, I'm not sure he actually does."
"Well, you might get sure if you hear what he did over the weekend for her," Kennedy said, smiling at me. "Reeve blabbed to Pagan, and Pagan told me," she explained.
"What'd he do for you?" Elsie asked, head tipped to the side. "I thought Kenz said she was watching your fish so you could go to some book convention."
"Yeah," Alex piped in. "But when has Reese ever gone out of town on her own before, Else?"
"Fair point."
"He took you to Bookjam, didn't he?" Lo asked, clearly a reader, as was Janie, which, well, made them awesome people in my book.
"He did," I agreed, not able to hold back the smile that made my cheeks hurt. "And he didn't complain once as I browsed around all day. And he took me to all the cool spots in the city. And, yeah, it was the best vacation ever."
"Cy did good," Lo agreed, nodding. Likely, as a book lover herself, understanding how awesome it was to spend a whole day around books.
"So this is like super new," Bethany concluded. "This is your first day back, right?"
"Ah, yeah."
"This is pretty cool, I gotta say," Maze said. "To watch him go all moon-eyed? I know the guys were ribbing him something fierce for a month about it. I guess we all know why now. He was missing you. And that's just the cutest damn thing."
Okay, maybe I shouldn't have been, but I was totally happy to hear that. Quite frankly, I had been on an emotional rollercoaster that entire month-plus, and it almost made me feel better about it knowing that he hadn't been out living it up either.
"Aw look at Maze going all sappy," Janie teased, giving her a smirk.
"So," Elsie announced, slapping her hand down on my knee, "you've met her. We heard about how they got together. We can leave her alone now, right?"
True, there was a small part of her argument that likely had a lot to do with needing to get to work, but a bigger part of it was her simply trying to stand up for me, knowing I wasn't a 'crowd person,' and that even if I did have to face them, I preferred to be prepared.
"We barely got to know her," Maze complained.
"Well, she can come Sunday, and you guys can grill her," Lo offered, giving me an apologetic smile, knowing, it seemed, that they would be doing just that. Grilling me.
