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He takes another step closer, his hand tucking my hair back like he did earlier. “I like you.”
I blink at him. “Excuse me?”
He smiles, his hand dropping to my shoulder and sliding down to my hand. He laces our fingers together. “I like you. As a person. Not just a walking wet dream.”
My heart thumps, but I’m holding on to my anger like it’s a lifeline as I pull my hand from his. “And this is how you tell me?A walking wet dream?”
He frowns. “Okay, that sounded bad, but—”
“You think?” I snap.
“Not when I’m around you.” The smile on his face isn’t a happy one. “And that’s the problem. I can’t get you out of my head. I like you and I don’t know what to do about it. We still have an end date. I need to focus on my career, not on a relationship. But we have eleven weeks.” His palm presses against my stomach, his fingers curling until he has a fistful of my shirt. One yank brings us together, my hands flying to his chest to stop myself from face-planting into him. “Ash,” he says, his voice soft, twisted with emotion. “What are we doing?”
My breath catches. He’s asking for more. Not directly, not yet. But he likes me. He wants me. He wants to know what I want.
I grab the collar of his shirt and hold him. “You like me?”
He skates a soft kiss across my lips. “Very much. Everything about you.”
What, everything? I’m so stunned I tell him the truth. “I like you too.” My throat goes tight. I can’t believe I said that.
“I hope so.” His hands move to my hips, pulling me flush against him.
The feel of him hardening against me makes me light-headed. I really like this part of him. “The sex is—”
“Amazing,” he interrupts, dropping kisses along my jaw on his way to my neck. I bite back a moan when he nips my skin and soothes the bite with his tongue. He’s right, we’re amazing together.
“You want a fling,” I say softly.
Gabe freezes. “Yeah.” He breathes a sigh against my skin.
I turn my head to brush my lips over his ear. “You want to spend the next eleven weeks fucking each other senseless while we fake a relationship. You’re sure you want to complicate this?”
“I want the fucking,” he whispers, and his words make me ache so sweetly. I want that too. The fullness of him buried deep inside me—I want it so bad I clench and the emptiness hurts. “And we’re already complicated.”
Nothing worth having is ever simple, in my experience.
But.
When I speak, there’s steel in my voice. “That option was there when I offered to blow you and you didn’t want it. What changed?”
Gabe pulls away, and I let him go. He shoves his hands into his hair, messing it up. “You scare me, Ash, and I don’t know what it means that I like it, but I do. When I saw how much I hurt you, I realized you care about me. So maybe…maybe I’m safe. With you. I won’t lose sight of who I am.”
Understanding clicks, tightening in my stomach. “I won’t tarnish you too much.” I hate it. I hate it so much I want to scream.
“It’s more complicated than that,” he says defensively, then sighs because, of course, it’s what he means. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” He pulls me tight against him. “I wasn’t supposed to like you.”
“I’m not happy about it,” I say into his T-shirt. Because he’s right. This wasn’t supposed to happen, I wasn’t supposed to like him either. It’s not supposed to hurt when he rejects me or believes I’ll destroy his reputation, but it does.
His arms tighten around me. “We can’t be real. You understand that, right?”
“I understand.” I do. We’re supposed to have an amicable breakup, where he leaves me and I’m brokenhearted but still wish him the best. We can’t be friends because people will speculate. Our future is one where we’ll bump into each other at a party or professionally. We’ll make small talk about the weather, make a polite excuse, and leave the conversation.
Gabe tips my chin up and his dark brown eyes are soft. “Can you walk away, if we do this? Because I want to spend the next three months sinking into you.”
You don’t know how to stop.My cousin’s words, but they’re still true. What if I can’t walk away? Do I want to risk a future where I trade longing for Nic for longing for Gabe?
But I’ve walked away from relationships before, when I got bored or when I thought I might have a chance with Nic. There’s no reason to think I can’t walk away from Gabe.
