Page 61 of How To Not Need You

He kissed me once more and left. I stood there for another few seconds, wearing his shirt, drinking from my apparently-assigned mug, in his kitchen.

Then Hades meowed.

“Don’t.”

He stared at me.

“Don’t judge me.”

I was very fucking aware of my current situation, as well as my lack of sticking to my own boundaries.

I've known this man for two fucking months, and somewhere along the way I've fallen completely in love with him.

Which feels deeply irresponsible.

My roller slows. The smile happens without my permission, pulling at the corner of my mouth while I stare at a wall.

“You’ve got that smile again.”

Harper’s voice cuts through the haze. I blink. The room comes back into focus, paint cans, drop cloths, Freya’s drill still going, and Harper is watching me from her ladder with her head tilted, brush paused mid-stroke, that look on her face that means she’s been right about something and is sincerely enjoying the fact that I’m proving her point.

“I don’t know what smile you’re talking about,” I say flatly.

Freya, without looking up from the shelf bracket she’s tightening, says, “The Jake smile.”

The room erupts into laughter again. Elsie laughs from behind her damp cloth, a bright, startled sound that bounces off the half-painted walls. Luca nearly doubles over on his stool. Natalie grins, looking between me and the empty space where Harper’s accusation still hangs, and says, “She's doing the Jake smile?”

Luca stands from his stool like he’s accepting an award. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present to you: Liv Carter, certified emotionally compromised, caught in the act of smiling at a wall because she is thinking about a man who…”

“I’m going to murder you,” I say, turning the roller towards him with more force than necessary and splattering some paint on the floor in the process. “In your sleep. With this roller.”

“Promises, promises,” he teases as he dances out of my reach, narrowly missing the stray drops.

Elsie moves straight for the drops and starts to clean whilst decidedly NOT dropping the subject. “So is it serious? With Jake?”

“I’m painting a wall. We have better things to do than discuss this.”

“We can do both,” Luca points out. “You know, paint and discuss the interesting world of Liv’s love life.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s been what, a month?” Harper asks, and the satisfaction in her voice is so thick you could spread it on toast.

“Two months,” Elsie corrects.

“Two months and she’s smiling at walls,” Luca says to nobody in particular. “I give it three months before she’s picking out china patterns.”

“I will throw this roller at your face.” I turn back to the wall before anyone can see how hot my cheeks have gone.

“Violence! The last refuge of the emotionally exposed!”

I keep my eyes on the wall. I keep painting. Unfortunately, my face refuses to cooperate and the stupid smile comes straight back.

Fucking Jake.

The teasing rolls on. Luca starts singing something about the stages of my emotional thaw to a tune I vaguely recognise from a musical. Elsie asks if Jake knows about my “no moving in together” rule, which earns her a look that could freeze hell. Natalie laughs and says something about how Tilly clearly runs the show, which is so accurate it makes my chest hurt.

I tell them all to mind their own business. They ignore me completely.