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“Now, I’ll go.” He inhales, chest rising, pushing against mine.
A switch flips in me. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“I probably should.” He raises a hand, and it travels over my abdomen and upward, over his T-shirt that I’m still wearing, but still, even with that fabric between our flesh, he’s managing to sear his touch on me. His hand rises even more, feathering past my nipple, making it tighten, making it pull on my body, touching nerve endings he isn’t actually touching. He cups my chin.
“Cassie. It’s you. Still.” With that, he turns and goes back to his truck. The truck that replacedourtruck.
I’m left holding the bracelet, clutching the panties in my hand, with an out-of-control heart rate, and a twinging bolt of lightning coursing through my body with desire for him.
Another thing I’m left with and don’t want to face right now, two nosy roommates who I’m sure are, at the very least, doing their best to eavesdrop if they haven’t actually been spying.
I do my best to take the stairs quietly, entering the still-open door. Graham’s on his phone, texting, emailing, or whatever it is that rich, pretentious brats do. I really should give him a chance, but there’s just something about him that rubs me wrong.
Kara and Riley are in the kitchen, behind the breakfast bar, pretending to make small talk while their eyes are riveted to the entrance—and now—on me.
Graham looks up from the phone. “I need to go. Bjorn’s waiting for me.”
He offers his cheek to Riley. She plants a kiss on it and then closes the door behind him.
“Okay now, missy.” She leans against the door, kicks her shoes off, then straddles the back of the couch like she’s riding a mechanical bull. A tattered, lifeless, cat-scratched, hand-me-down mechanical bull. “Fess up.”
Kara plops herself into the beanbag, tiny Styrofoam balls puff out of the short rip in the seam. “One minute, we’re at that bar where he works, and she doesn’t know him.” She gives me the eye. “Never says jack about him. Then the next thing I know, she’s going outside for air and vanishes. And come to think of it, I never saw him again. This morning she comes waltzing in, sporting his boxers and T-shirt.” She pauses to breathe. “He’s panty-soaking hot. Hot. Shit. He’s more than hot.”
I can’t argue that point.
Riley cocks her head. “So, how did you go from not knowing about this new bartender tothis?” She waves her hand up and down, indicating the tee and boxers.
“I used to know Josh back when I was in high school,” I confess, mentally crossing my fingers that they won’t probe too much. One day I will share, but right now, I want to relish and sink into the memories of the night.
Kara gives Riley a conspiratorial look. “You know what Shakespeare said, right?”
“Oh, please, like I ever paid attention in that class.” Riley shakes her head. “What did he say?”
“The lady protests too much,” Kara says. “Only he said it much better. Probably much classier, too.”
I drop down on the bean bag with Kara. “No way. No way was he classier than you.” I hug her, the panties still clutched and hidden in my fist. “Josh was my boyfriend in high school. It didn’t end well.”
“What you’re wearing says it’s starting back up pretty well,” Riley summarizes.
“There’s some history. It’s safer to say, we’ll see.”
32
BIRTHDAYS AND BOMBSHELLS
CASSIE
Two weeks pass. Not a word from Josh. Nothing during the last few days of winter break. And now school’s started. And still nothing. I’m feeling played. I’m probably getting pissed. Of course, I think all kinds of things, and one of them is Billie and her pregnant belly. Maybe she had the baby. Maybe they are a thing. More of a thing than I’d thought.
So what the hell was I thinking anyway, being with a guy who was going to have a baby with someone else? Well, I suppose what I thought was that they were both adults who’d ended up pregnant and that they were being grown about it for the baby’s sake and that none of it would affect him and me.
Wait, what? What kind of logic is that?
Exactly. Clearly, I wasn’t thinking.
But back to him. And not hearing from him. And how pissed I was about not hearing from him, and knowing that he lives about twenty minutes away isn’t much consolation. Knowing where he lives and works doesn’t help. It’s a constant battle that I have to fight, to not drive by his place, to not drive by the bar.
The last three times that Kara and Riley asked if I wanted to go to the bar he works at, I’ve passed on that. I’m not going to hunt him down. I’m not going to pursue or stalk. In a show of solidarity, they haven’t gone there either. They’ve picked another place to go for a night out. A rarity, since Kara doesn’t go out, and I quit going out more than a year ago. I even quit drinking, which is probably what made me drunk so fast that night. Not to mention the Jäger shots.
