Page 33 of Effortless

“Does that mean you know why she won’t answer a text from me?”

“You’re making it really difficult to like you, Tom.”

“I like Cam, Cross.”

“Well, that was your mistake to make. Camilla’s feeling-phobic. She’s got some kind of commitment issues burrowed so deep, nobody’s digging them out. A guy looks at her too long, and she bolts as fast as she can before the feelings catch and spread. Get it?”

“I think you’re being—”

“I’m really not overstating it,” Cross interjected. “She’s never had a boyfriend, Tom. Not once. Not in school. She took her best friend to prom. She’s never taken someone home to meet our parents. The girl just doesn’t do relationships. I told you that from the start—this is on you, really.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“Still not news, Tom.” Cross waved at the comfortable reclining chair beside the couch. “Take a seat, man.”

He fell into the chair, but the tension in his muscles didn’t relax. He felt like a bag of fucking rocks. Hard and uncomfortable. Painful.

Cross was right.

Tom had been warned.

It still kind of fucking stung that Camilla wouldn’t even tell him to screw off somewhere. At least that was closure to everything. This was … something else entirely.

He didn’t like it at all.

Cross sat up straight on the couch, and used the coffee table to hook his Doc Marten boots one over the other at the ankles. The two friends had a staring contest with the blank screen of the television before Cross spoke up first.

“What is it, man, lovesick or pussy whipped?”

Tom rolled his eyes upward. “It has to be one of those two? It can’t be something else entirely?”

“Is it?”

“I don’t really know her, Cross. I know enough to know I would like to know more.”

“That’s a lot of knows in one sentence, man.”

He ignored Cross’s joke, and considered his own words.

“Maybe it’s a mixture of everything,” he said after a stretch of silence.

Tom didn’t even know himself, and he felt like a foolish fucker for even admitting it silently. Damn, though, there was something about Camilla that just got under his skin in the best way—the right way to make him take notice.

Females were females. Tom had never found one interesting enough to really make him want to get to know her beyond a physical or shallow relationship.

Camilla did that.

She did it with demure eyes, sex on her tongue, and a killer smile. She sealed it with quick wit, a filthy mind, and one of her winks.

She barely had to try.

This wasn’t fucking fair.

“So you think you’re love sick, pussy whipped, and confused?” Cross asked. “Because that mess makes me confused.”

“I’m about to sound like a fool.”

Cross cocked a brow. “Do I get the option of leaving before you do? I’ve never met a guy who went a round or two with my sister, and then suddenly grew a fucking vagina. Really not interested in meeting one now.”