“Not yet,” Cole cuts me off. His hand brushes my arm and I can’t even pretend that I don’t feel the heat from his skin radiating to every part of my body. “I think that it’s my turn to do the asking.”
“Alright.” I sound apprehensive and nervous even to my own ears.
“I only have one question for you, and then I’ll let it go.”
I balance myself. The fingers on my left hand dig into my jeans and my heart chugs uncertainly. “Okay.”
Silence.
“Did you have fun tonight?”
Cole’s question is so unexpected that I have to look at him again to make sure that I heard him correctly. He’s got a tentative half-smile playing across the lower half of his face like he knows something that I don’t.
I nod my head carefully.
Cole’s smile deepens. “That’s what I thought.”
After a minute of quiet, I comment, “You seem awfully pleased with yourself.”
Cole leans against the back the bench. He brings one foot up to rest on his knee and crosses his arms over his head. “I am. I feel pretty fucking accomplished right now. It’s not every day that I get a girl like you to smile.”
I wouldn’t be able to keep the grin off my face even if I wanted to. “The arcade got me. I haven’t done that in years and I guess that there’s something to be said for the sound of a bunch of kids throwing away their quarters with reckless abandon.”
Cole looks at me, and I mean he really looks at me. For a long, stilted moment I think that he’s going to kiss me, and my mind is wringing out all kinds of thoughts and I can’t be sure whether or not I want him to close the space between us. But before I work it out in my head, he lifts his hand to wipe the side of my mouth with the pad of his thumb and everything thundering inside of me just stops.
“You had something on your face,” he says.
I think that I nod in response but I’m not really sure because my nervous system is jammed into overdrive. I can’t seem to get enough air into my lungs.
And then Cole is talking again like nothing out of the ordinary just happened and I’m listening and trying to catch my breath. After awhile, we make our way down to the dark beach and I curl my toes in the cool, wet sand and revel in the feel of the salty water licking at my ankles. And for a few minutes, I’m not pretending—I’m just happy.
Cole drives us back in his old truck and when we’re in front of my place, he kills the ignition and turns his body toward me. “The Princess Brie,” he says.
I need a second to think of one. “Jurassic Ark.”
“War and Pace.”
“The Bile.”
He laughs and then he asks, “Hey, are you going to the football game tomorrow?”
I know that there’s a football game because Mara’s been talking about it all week and today, in a show of school spirit, at least half of the students on campus were wearing green shirts.
I shake my head. “I wasn’t planning on it.”
Cole skims his hands across the dashboard. His jaw twitches like he wants to respond in some way, but he simply nods his head and tells me that he’ll see me around.
Around?
As his truck pulls away, I hate that I’m watching, and I hate it even more that I already miss him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cole
Somehow I wind up stuck with Kate. She shows up at our house around noon wearing a green halter-top and a skirt so short that it should probably be illegal. I don’t want to look at her ass and her tits, but I do because I’m a guy and I have a pulse and a dick and apparently no self-control.
Kate acts like she belongs here and I don’t tell her otherwise when she helps herself to a beer from the refrigerator and plops down on the couch next to me. She crosses her legs and bends forward so that I have a direct line of sight to her boobs.
The girl knows that she looks good and that should be obnoxious but it’s actually sort of a turn-on. Not that I’m going there with her today or tomorrow or ever again. Kate Dutton’s hot and she’s convenient but that ship has sailed, so to speak, and I’m over it.
I try not to dwell on the reasons that I’m passing up an easy lay because when I let my brain go in that direction, it gets all jammed up with thoughts of blue eyes, the water lapping at my feet, vanilla cupcakes, and all kinds of crazy-ass shit.
Kate jerks me out of my head by placing her hand flat on my leg. Fuck me. I twitch uncomfortably. I was hoping that she’d get the hint that I’m no longer interested when I stopped texting her back and told Brady to give her a call, but I guess I was wrong.
Right on cue, Daniel makes his first appearance of the day. He’s got on a team shirt and a backward green baseball hat, and when he sees me on the couch with Kate, his eyes go a fraction wider. He doesn’t say anything but I can see it coming and I know that he’s thinking about Aimee.