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“Yeah,” he said, nudging her with his elbow.
She looked at him and wrinkled her nose, and for some reason, he found his eyes drawn to the freckles there.
They were cute. Just a little sprinkling of them that went from her cheeks over the bridge of her nose. They highlighted her green eyes somehow. Beautiful eyes. Slightly feline. She wasn’t wearing makeup tonight, so her lashes were pale. Often, she wore a real dark mascara that made her eyes feel like a punch in the gut. This was more like a slow, spring sunrise. A whole lot of green and gold.
That tension had returned.
“All right. Get the movie going,” he said.
“Gladly,” she said, pouring a glass of wine and handing it to him, before pouring herself one. He lay back on his sleeping bag and decided to pay attention to the movie, instead of the color of her eyes.
Four
She was just so aware of him. Of every inch of him. The way that he was lying on the sleeping bag, the way that his arm shifted, the way his whole body shifted when he went to take a drink of his wine.
When he grabbed some cheese off the cheese board.
She was starting to feel light-headed, and she had a feeling she needed to go get some more food, so she wasn’t off on her alcohol-to-protein ratio. But she found herself drinking a little bit faster the more her nerves flared up in her gut.
This was ridiculous.
But the problem with choosing movies that they had gone to see together in high school was that it reminded her of being in high school with him. That was when her little crush had started acting up. Oh, it wasn’t when she had realized that she wanted to sleep with him—that was a more mature realization. But the butterflies over his arm brushing hers when they sat together in the movie theater... Yeah. That had been pure high school.
And she really wasn’t nostalgic for it. And here she was, alone with the man in an empty house—unless there were ghosts, there could be ghosts—as an adult, having those same feelings.
It was almost funny.
It wasalmostfunny, that now they were adults, absolutely alone and unsupervised, adjacent to a bed, and she wasstillin no danger of Jace Carson trying to pressure her into sex. No. She was much more likely to try to pressure him into it.
The idea made her feel lit up from the inside out. Entirely too warm. She did her level best to look back at the movie.
The next one was not her favorite. It was too mind-bending and she didn’t like it. She liked things that had resolved endings, at least. She would prefer a happy ending. But the ambiguity of it all made her itchy, and she started to get restless.
“I’m going to go downstairs and get another bottle of wine,” she said.
“Another bottle of wine?”
“Yes. I think that sounds like a pretty good idea, don’t you?”
“Yeah. All right.”
She knew it wasn’t a great idea. She was already feeling a little bit wobbly and loose, and she was in such a weird precarious place with him it...
Well, she had been friends with the man for thirteen years. It wasn’t like she was just suddenly going to break it.
She pondered that when she went to get the package of cupcakes, and the new bottle of wine.
Something crashed to her left and she whipped her head toward the sound and she stopped.
She waited to see if she heard another noise, waited to see if anything else shifted, but all she could hear was her own breathing. Ragged. Too fast.
“For heaven’s sake,” she muttered to herself.
She was such a mess.
She was being ridiculous because she was tipsy and anticipating ghosts and strung out on Jace. And maybe more wine was the wrong thing, but maybe it was the right thing because she needed to calm down. Maybe if she could loosen up, she’d get her equilibrium back.
She waited a few breaths more and didn’t hear anything else, so she took the cake and wine back upstairs.
