“Hey, I read a lot. Anyway, you went away to a romantic occasion with Noah. I didn’t get so much as a text message telling me you met some other hot guy. Throw in the fact you look like you only slept a few hours, and that tells me you banged your best friend.”
You banged your best friend.Words she’d been saying to herself over and over, although she usually threw in ayou dumbassat the end just for kicks.
“Well?” Zoe prompted when she didn’t say anything. “Am I right?”
“Yeah.”
Zoe’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“Aren’t you the one who just broke down how ithadto be Noah?”
“Well yeah, but I assumed you’d have some other reasonable explanation because...you and Noah? That’s just weird.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No, you tellmeabout it. Was it as weird as it sounds?”
Carly wasn’t sure how to answer that. Since she hadn’t even sorted it all out in her own mind yet, she didn’t have much hope of verbalizing it in a way that made any sense. “It was amazing.”
“And what now?”
That was the hard part. Admitting the sex had been amazing was easy enough, but visualizing what came next wasn’t. But they’d made a deal and she was going to stick to it. “It was just a weekend. What happened on the Cape stayed on the Cape.”
Zoe snorted. “Sure. Okay.”
“What? We talked about it. That’s what we decided.”
“So it’s going to be totally fine when Noah shows up to watch a ballgame or something at your place with a new woman on his arm?”
Carly’s mind shied away from those images so sharply, she actually jerked her head to the side so she wasn’t looking at her cousin. No, it wasn’t going to be totally fine. She wanted to be okay with it because it was inevitable, but she wasn’t.
“Don’t even answer that,” Zoe said, “because I can see on your face it won’t be fine, but you’re not going to admit it and I don’t want you to lie to me.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Is it going to be weird—or even hard—for a while? Yes. But we’ll get through it because we’re best friends and we’re not going to let a weekend of sex get in the way of that, no matter how awesome it was.”
“Why don’t you two just admit you’re meant to be together but you’ve both been too stubborn or too stup—uh, too blind to admit it.”
“It’s not stupid to do whatever you can not to mess up a lifelong friendship.”
“I notice you didn’t address being stubborn.” Zoe snorted. “Anyway, it sounds like you’ve probably already messed up the lifelong friendship, so you may as well surrender to the inevitable and just marry him already.”
“Gee, that sounds romantic. And the last thing Noah wants to do is get married. Toanybody.”
“Amazing sex can do a lot to open a guy’s eyes to his own stupidity. And at some point I’m going to want to hear more about the sex, so I can live vicariously through you because I’m not getting any.” Zoe paused and then frowned as she picked up a pile of books. “Okay, maybe not. It’s Noah, and that would be vicariously weird.”
“Let’s get ready to open,” Carly said because she was done hearing how weird her relationship with Noah would be now. She knew it. She was living it.
And it hurt for reasons she was afraid to say out loud. It was simple to say her heart hurt because she may have screwed up her friendship with Noah. But she also had to face the possibility she was hurting because her friendship with Noah would be okay...but never be anything more.
Carly wanted more.
For more years than she could count, she’d imagined herself standing on her grandfather’s dock with the lake in the background. In her imagination, she was wearing a simple white sundress and carrying a bouquet of wildflowers tied with a white ribbon. And, of course, Noah was standing at her side.
But she’d always taken for granted he was the man of honor.
Chapter Nine
Jim being on his honeymoon kept Noah busy as hell at the office. He would have welcomed the distraction if he was sleeping worth a damn, which he wasn’t. Those hours he should have been sleeping were spent thinking about Carly.
