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“Since when did you start eating so much?” I asked.
“Since I started working out,” he answered, flexing his bicep.
“You should hit the gym with us,” Ryan offered, and he nodded.
“So what did you tell her?” Prism asked, steering us back to the actual topic.
I shook my head. “Nothing. I gave Win a come-save-me look.”
“Well, she didn’t seem upset,” Ryan said, glancing thoughtfully across the diner. I didn’t turn to see if she was there.
I glanced at Rory. “What do you think?”
“Maybe she was just surprised, and that’s the first thing she thought of. But like Ry said, she didn’t seem upset. At least you were upfront and told her.”
I glanced at Madison, and she nodded encouragingly.
Doubt clouded my resolve to face everything head on. I mean, sure, I told her. It was the right thing.
But why did it feel like she didn’t really listen?
18
Max
I was in a shit mood.
Which, to be fair, was my usual state, but this morning it was shittier than usual. Wrenching open the door to Shirley’s and seeing everyone squished around the booth like it was some kind of kumbaya moment over waffles plummeted it past shitty to outright foul.
I was off-kilter after this morning’s talk with Win, how he just sort of announced he knew all about the underlying currents between me and Wes and he didn’t care. He basically called me out right there in the kitchen, then told me he approved.
I’m sorry, but what?
Did he not see all the kinds of problems this could cause?
We can be a drifting family strung together by promises or a family bonded by love.
I scoffed at the echo of his words in my cranium. I’d like to see how he’d act if it was his heart on the line. No, not just his heart. His everything.
A head filled with mussed brown hair lifted, chocolate eyes widening the second they landed on me. He glanced away quickly, the tips of his ears turning pink. No one else noticed my arrival, only Wes, something that I tried not to observe, but I failed miserably.
Abandoning his fork, he wrapped his fingers around his mug, anticipating my arrival. It made me want to walk slower like one of those killers in an ‘80s horror movie. I thought deliciously of dragging out his awareness of me, of watching him squirm in that booth among people who had no idea he was slowly climbing out of his skin just waiting for me to arrive, just waiting for me to see what I would do.
Oh, I was fucking tempted. I was also fucking tempted to dig my fingers into that mop of hair on his head, yank it back, and smother his lips with mine. Right there in front of everyone.
This is who he belongs to.
Instead, I stalked over to the booth spilling over with Elite, stopping behind Win’s shoulder and clearing my throat. Everyone looked up but Wes. He didn’t need to. He was already very aware of me.
“Max,” Win greeted.
Reaching into the pocket of my leather jacket, I tugged out the reason I was there and laid it on the table beside Wes’s plate. “Here.”
Releasing the death grip on his mug, he rotated toward me while laying a hand over the new iPhone. “You got me a phone,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
“And I told you I could get it myself.” He might have said that, but the way his hand curled around the new device said something else entirely.
