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He shifted on his feet. “You bet your ass the renovation is going to be the best work you’ve ever seen,” he told me, one eyebrow raised. “But I get your point. You want to be friends.”
I swallowed over a strange tightness in my throat. My head was swimming with the implications of that word.
Friends.
What did that mean, between me and Nathan? We’d never been friends to begin with. He’d been a hired contractor, and then he’d been one of the hottest hookups in recent memory.
And then he’d been a giant fucking curveball in my life, coming out of nowhere to make me feel things I didn’t think I wanted to feel anymore. Desire, for more closeness than a hookup usually gave me. Frustration, because I really had no idea what Nathan wanted from me, and I knew healsohad no clue.
But I wasn’t going to let myself get hurt.
If I was prone to falling for Nathan, it would be better if I didn’t hook up with him at all. No matter how much that pissed me off.
“Friends,” I said with a nod, wishing I knew what I meant by it, too. “Don’t know what else I would be.”
We headed inside to the kitchen, where Nathan set down the long white box. The sound of the party and the TV show filled the background, and as scenes of one of my parties played, everyone clapped and cheered as they saw glimpses of themselves on TV.
“So what’s in here?” I asked as I opened up the top of the white box, looking inside.
Inside was a cake. One of the biggest cakes I’d ever seen, in the shape of a football and immaculately decorated. It even had my new favorite, chocolate-covered pineapples, dotted all along the edges. “Congratulations, Kace, TV Star!”was written at the center.
“Maddy made it and decorated it. Took her all day,” Nathan said, looking at it proudly. “That’s half of the reason I’m late, actually. She kept fussing with the edges.”
The same nervous flutter appeared in my chest again, but this time it felt sweet rather than overwhelming. “Maddy made this?”
“I helped her with the cake itself, but the decorations are all her.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek, trying to do something to quell the weird wave of emotion flooding me. “I have a whole house full of people watching my show, and yet the thing that ended up getting me emotional is a damn cake,” I told Nathan. “Thank you guys. For fuck’s sake.”
I turned and put my arms around him, squeezing him in a tight hug. It was almost certainly a mistake, because at the very least, hugging him meant touching him, which meant getting turned on.
But hugging him also felt like a whole lot more than just being turned on. As I breathed in his scent, I realized that being “just friends” was certainly the right call. I wasn’t falling for Nathan. I alreadyhadfallen for him. Him being in my life had given me a sense of normalcy that I hadn’t felt… well, that I hadn’t felt since I’d lost contact with my family.
I swallowed past the awful tightness in my throat, knowing I had to put on my happy face again and go back out into the living room.
No time to be an emotional mess.
I could be Nathan’s friend.
Even if it hurt, wishing that things could be different. Even if somewhere deep inside, I knew I didn’t belong with him any more than I belonged anywhere. I was a pretty face. A hot body. I belonged on a football field, behind a TV screen, where people could fall in love with theideaof me instead of the real me.
I pulled in a breath, avoiding Nathan’s gaze as I led him out to the living room.
17
NATHAN
If someone had told me a few months ago that one day, Kace Tomlin would ask me to be his friend, I would have jumped for joy at the idea.
Turns out that once I’d slept next to him, the idea of being justfriendswith him hit me in a weird way.
I’d agreed with his proposition right away, because I sure as shit wasn’t going to say no to him. But then I sat there in his giant living room with him, surrounded bytonsof his friends. Friends from all walks of life. Friends he’d fucked, and friends he hadn’t. Lifelong friends and ones he’d probably just met this week. I watched Kace wink at people, clap them on the back, and laugh his ass off along with them as his TV show played in the background.
And something had curled around my heart like a vicious fucking snake. Something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Jealousy.
“Oh, I saw that one!” Brent Engles said to him now, waggling his eyebrows at Kace as he pointed at the screen. “You totally fucked that guy, didn’t you?”
