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Coop drops his hands, and we each take a step back as Linc hands him a beer.
“Hey there, Carys.” Linc smiles, and I kinda want to kick him in the balls for interrupting that moment but manage to control my ragey thoughts.
“Hey, Linc.” My eyes dance between him and Cooper.
But Coop isn’t looking at me anymore. Not like he was.
The moment is lost like it never existed.
Like I’m nothing.
I stand there, stuck in the moment. Waiting. Wanting desperately to go back. But Linc says something to Coop about Chloe, and I really don’t want to hear about another freaking couple hooking up tonight. Instead, I slip out of Coop’s coat and hand it back to him.
“Thanks, Cooper.”
He tilts his chin toward me. What the fuck is that anyway? Why do guys do that? It’s stupid. Words. Use words. But as I slip through the doors and lean against the wall, inside and out of sight, I overhear words I wish he’d never used.
Linc’s voice carries through the closing doors. “Sorry, man. Didn’t realize I was interrupting something out here.”
“You weren’t interrupting anything.” Coop’s voice is followed by a pause before he adds, “She’s a little girl who’s had too much to drink. That’s all.”
Ouch.
“She doesn’t look like a little girl in that dress.” Okay, maybe I don’t completely hate Linc anymore.
“Whatever. She still looks like my seventeen-year-old stepsister.”
Linc moves closer to the glass doors, so I take another step back and lean against the wall for support.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt a door slam so tightly shut in my life.
Emerson decidedwe needed to be fashionably late to the party.
According to her, thirty minutes was perfect. We wouldn’t be the first ones there, but we also probably wouldn’t be the last to arrive. My roomie put way too much thought into this, but since I don’t have a car, she sets the schedule.
One less thing for me to stress out over, since I’ve been stressing about how tonight’s going to go all day. I hate that it only took seeing Cooper Sinclair one time, and every feeling I’ve had for him for years has been magnified and taken up all the space in my mind today.
Em didn’t even put the top down on her first love for our ride over to the party.
A baby-blue 1964 Mustang convertible.
Her car is always stocked with rubber bands, a brush, and there’s usually a baseball cap or two floating somewhere in the backseat to keep the wind from whipping our hair everywhere. But tonight, the top stayed up, so there were no hair catastrophes.
I’m eternally grateful for that. My hair is my best asset. My ass is a little too flat, and my boobs are a little too small. But my hair is a shiny dark brown, with natural red highlights that flows in waves down past my shoulders. However, it doesn’t hold a curl for shit, since it’s also super thin. And I spent way too much time making sure it looked nice tonight for it to get messed up in the wind before we get there.
Once we park in front of the address, I run my hands over my hair to tame any last-minute fly-aways and check my makeup in the mirror one more time. I’m not a heavy makeup kinda girl. My lashes are long and black with a swipe of matching eyeliner to make my green eyes pop. And other than some pink lip gloss, that’s it for my makeup routine.
I turn toward Em. “You ready?”
She adjusts the barely there top she paired with painted-on white skinny jeans. It’s a beautiful soft black shirt with skinny straps that’s held together by a few well-placed black ribbons connecting the back. I made it for her a few months ago, and it’s pretty perfect, if I do say so myself. I love to design pieces with ribbons. There’s just something I love about the idea of them being untied by someone special. And let’s face it, you should be wearing lingerie to either make yourself feel confident and sexy or to make someone drop to their knees before they rip it off you.
The shirt Em’s wearing tonight was one of the last pieces I made before I fell in love with designing lingerie instead of clothing. Sometimes you’ve got to try out everything before narrowing down what works for you. I like designing clothes, but I love creating lingerie.
Once we get out of the car, she turns toward me and tugs at her shirt. “Is everything where it needs to be?”
I make her spin so I can adjust her ribbons before giving her my stamp of approval.
Then she tugs my white boho shirt off my shoulders and down a little further in the front. “That’s better. Nothing wrong with showing a little clavicle, CC.”
