Page 33 of Reaching Gavin

Chapter Twelve

By the time we left,we’d earned enough for a pile of candy. We ate it shamelessly on the drive home, scattering wrappers all over the floor of his Tesla. It was the strangest, and somehow most fun, date I’d ever been on. Except it wasn’t a date. It was two friends— no, colleagues—hanging out together. With the colleague’s kid sister. The trouble was that the term colleagues didn’t cover how I felt about him. I wasn’t certain what did. I wanted to have sex with him. That was the one thing I was certain. It was also why when we pulled up in front of the condo, I didn’t ask him to come inside. I was hopped on Skee-Ball victories and sugar, I couldn’t be trusted to make decisions.

Before I could get out, Gavin jumped out of the car ran around to my door. That was a date move. It was in the dating handbook on page one. Maybe I should ask him in for a drink. Except that even if this was a stealth date, asking him in was a couple chapters later. Instead, we lingered on the steps, making idle chit chat.

“I had a lot of fun tonight.” I meant it. I’d never had that much fun outside time with friends. So why couldn’t Gavin and I just be friends? Probably because I was dying to see him naked.

“Yeah? I wasn’t sure what you would think,” he admitted, running his hand through his dark hair as he leaned against the door frame. He looked like a poster of James Dean, not the CEO of a real estate development firm. No wonder my head and my heart were at war.

“I loved it. I haven’t done anything like that for years.”

“Oh man. You haven’t been practicing? Then I’m in trouble. I play every week. It’s how I blow off steam. I’m not sure that my ego can take being beat by someone who rarely plays.” He clutched his chest as if wounded.

“Give me a few more weeks and there won’t even be a competition,” I warned him.

“I don’t think there was much of a competition now,” he admitted

I hesitated, a question poised on the tip of my tongue. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know the answer. If I asked, it might change things. If I didn’t ask, things might not change. I wasn’t certain which possibility frightened me more. “Why did you ask me to come out?”

“Truthfully?”

I nodded. I had the audacity to ask and now I wanted to know the answer.

“You’ve been working so hard. You don’t think I notice, but I do. You eat lunch at your desk and then you pack up when everyone leaves and go work at the coffee shop. I thought you needed a break,” he told me.

The answer crushed me. It was sweet. Thoughtful. Just like him. But it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. He’d merely been delivering his workaholic intern from herself. Nothing more.

“Thank you,” I managed to force out. What did I want him to say? That he spent all week trying to get me alone. That I was all he’d thought about for weeks, too? Of course not. I was being silly. I fumbled with my keys, trying to get them in the lock. It was time to wrap things up before I started to cry. “Dammit, I can never remember which one it is.”

Make it look like the keys have driven you to the point of tears. That will fool him.

Gavin reached out and placed his hand over mine. He took the keys from me and inserted one into the lock with one swift, sure motion. It was the perfect fit.

“Thanks.” I turned the knob, but before I could step inside and wish him one final, definitive goodbye, his hands found my waist.

There was one brief pause as he drew my body to his—a moment where his eyes searched mine as if to say ‘is this okay?’ I didn’t know what he saw there, but he found his answer. His palm stayed on the small of my back as the other found my chin and tipped my face to his. He lowered his mouth to mine slowly, hesitating once more at the last possible second. The world stopped, everything slowed down, and I waited for Gavin North to kiss me.

Our lips met in a soft crush that was urgent, but not insistent. He lingered as if savoring the taste of my mouth on his before the kiss deepened into something more, something that could never be mistaken for anything other than what it was: want.

I wanted him, too. Now that whatever invisible boundary we’d erected had been breached, I could admit that to myself. I could relish it.

I wanted him. I wanted his body against mine. I wanted his lips on my own, on my skin, on every inch of me. I wanted to taste him and feel him move against me. I wanted to take him inside, and I wanted him to take me too bed.

Gavin pulled away, his mouth hovering inches from mine before he whispered, “Sweet dreams, Cassie.”

He left me on the stairs, still wanting, and when I went in, I noticed, with a thrill, that he waited in the car until I turned out the porch light.

My dreams were interruptedby the incessant chime of the incoming FaceTime call, which was too bad considering my dreams were mostly of Gavin and what might come after that kiss. I checked the time and realized it was only midnight. Either I was getting old or the frenzy that followed Gavin’s kiss had worked me into an early bedtime. Somehow my best friends seemed to have sensed something was up, because they were conference calling. I answered, immediately hating them for making me face them in this groggy state.

“Who’s dying?” I asked in a gruff, sleep-heavy voice.

“You if you don’t spill the details,” Jillian informed me. She was alone for once. Liam, her perpetual shadow, was nowhere to be seen. That meant serious business.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about” I said coyly. But really, how did they know?

“Oh! Spill already!” Jessica yelled into the screen. Unlike Jillian, she wasn’t alone. Roman looked up in the background, wincing at the sudden exclamation.

I waved to him. “How is Mexico?”