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She didn’t believe that. But she left him to his deflection and asked an equally important, more pressing question.
“What do you want?”
Maybe she was only a hot fuck to him. Or maybe he got some kind of he-man rush out of banging women who liked women. Hehadleft her apartment while she’d slept, after all, like he’d gotten from her all he wanted.
She didn’t think it was so simple as that for him, any more than it was for her—he had, after all, come back. But she needed to remember how little she knew of him.
When he answered her question, he said only, “You.” Then he leaned down and kissed her.
Unable to resist the soft heat of his mouth, and the way her mind quieted again at once, Petra fell into the kiss. She snaked her arms around his neck, pressed her bare chest as tightly to his as she could, and let this moment overtake every inch of her sense.
But when his hands dropped to take hold of her ass, and she felt him begin to lift her up again, Petra pushed back from him.
“I can’t go again, not here. I need to get back to work.” That, and she needed to make sure Dre was holding steady.
“Okay,” he said, but he didn’t let her go.
“Do you want to leave?” she asked, not knowing how else to ask the question but directly.
Jake studied her for a few seconds, confusion, or something like it, still carving a line between the assertive slashes of his dark brows. Then, slowly, he shook his head.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked after a beat.
Not knowing exactly what all this meant, and not ready to investigate, Petra shook her head just as slowly.
The line between his brows shallowed. “Good,” he breathed. Relief fluttered through the syllable.
“I need to get back out there. Do you ...” She paused, wondering how to form all her thoughts into a question, and what question that would be. “I’m going to just be straight and not try to play guessing games, okay?”
“Yeah. Good.”
“When you say you don’t want to go, are you saying you want to come home with me?”
He nodded. The glib young man who’d strutted in the front door here a few days ago was a very different person from the quiet man she experienced in private. But somehow, they were both contained in the same very attractive frame.
She wanted to ask if he meant to sneak out again, but she couldn’t figure out a way to ask and not seem petulant about it, or demanding, and despite her assertion that she’d be straight, that question seemed like something she could kick down the road a bit.
“Do you want to ... I don’t know. Hang around the bar? Or, if you’d rather, you could camp back here. Or leave and come to my place later?”
Wow, this was incredibly awkward.
“Is it okay if I hang at the bar? Am I ... I guess ... allowed?”
Utterly charmed by his obvious uncertainty, Petra smiled and brushed his hair back. “Gertrude’s is a lesbian bar because lesbians hang out here. It’s not a club or a clique. The only rules we have are about not being an asshole.”
Dre would argue—and already had—that Jake violated all the asshole rules, but that was Dre’s issue more than Jake’s.
Honestly, Dre was the biggest reason for Jake to stay in her office or come to her apartment later. But Petra didn’t want to shove him in the shadows to indulge Dre’s jealousy. Maybe nothing significant was happening between her and Jake, maybe it would never be more than a booty call or two, but if itwasmore, she didn’t want to build on a foundation like that.
He finally smiled. “Cool. Then I’ll keep you company at the bar.”
“Excellent.” Rising onto her toes, she kissed the shallow cleft in his chin before she pushed out of his embrace and got busy getting dressed.
As she gathered her jeans and underwear and slipped into them, she finally noticed the mess they’d made of her office. Though she kept things organized, she’d had a stack of bills, a file organizer, an antique brass lamp, a few knickknacks—including a collection of pens and pencils in a mug from Café du Monde in New Orleans, which she’d picked up on a vacation with Dre, during the peak of their romance—and her MacBook.
Fortunately, the lamp and laptop had remained on the desk. Everything else was on the floor. The pens were scattered, and the mug shattered.
Pulling her top on as she stared at the broken mug, she sighed.
