His body gets tight again, the air between us suddenly thick with tension. “Is that what we are, Sera? Friends?”
“Yes.” The word is inadequate. I wish I was brave enough to look him dead in the eye and say something seductive like If you want more, big boy, you gotta show me what you mean. But Harry Potter knows I don’t have the ovaries for that. “We have some unbreakable vow thing going on now that I have saved your life twice.”
Hunter narrows his eyes, and moves back so that his back is now flush with his chair. “Men and women can’t be friends. It’s a proven scientific fact.”
“Bullshit. They can to. I have tons of guy friends!”
The light in his eyes banks down to an ember. Smoldering and waiting for a chance to ignite once more. “How many do you have?”
I roll my eyes, squirm in my seat. I wince when my cold panties hit me, and my whole body shudders again. I’m going to need coffee stat as soon as the meal comes to warm up. “I may have exaggerated. I exaggerate eighteen hundred percent of the time, just so you know.” I get a grin. “I have four guy friends.”
“Are they single?”
I straighten my spine, square my shoulders. “Yeah, they are,” I say flippantly, except one, but seventy-five percent is almost a hundred.
Hunter shakes his head with an authority I’m sure Sherlock Holmes would envy. “They’re not your friends.”
I may have snarled. “What the frak do you know? They are my friends. Buddies. People I can trust. What does it matter if they have a Y chromosome or not?”
“Are any of your boys gay?”
“No,” I say, truthfully. “It wouldn’t matter if they were.”
“Baby.” There it is again, that word. Like a caress, I feel my dumb body relaxing. I love that word, and that he wants to call me by it. “No one would just want to be friends with you.”
I bark out a laugh. Poor guy doesn’t know, he just doesn’t know. “And I’m telling you, baby,” fraking sexiest word ever, “that they are my friends. Plain and simple. They’ve never put moves on me. Ever.”
We’re close, like kissing close. His eyes and face are all I can see. The din of plates and forks and knives tackling each other in the fight of food-to-mouth is gone, snippets of conversation from nearby tables might as well be had in Siberia all the good it does to register them. Hunter is it, he’s made the world disappear with his crazy questions. He’s made me forget about everyone else in the room.
The food comes. Something flashes in those baby blues but it’s gone before I can give it a name.
“You know, you can meet the boys, if you want. Matty thinks they’re cool.” I say around a bite of panini. “We can even all go hang out – as friends.”
I watch Hunt cut a perfect square out of his steak, making sure each surface has an equal amount of peppercorn sauce or whatever kind of sauce a New York steak comes with. I watch him bring it to his mouth, wrapping his mouth around the tines. I’m jealous of a utensil. Someone end my life.
“If you think they’re your friends, then fine.” Hunt chews, swallows, licks his lips. I can’t look away, or ignore the way I’m burning and tingling. “I don’t want to be your friend, Sera. Ever since that first day in the elevator-” I stop chewing, my eyes bugging out. “with Aly.” Click. The mysterious Alysha. Got it.
“You’d moved in a couple of days before that.” Hunt smiles at the memory.
“You were wearing one of your shirts, something about Ponyboy Curtis?” I nod slowly, afraid to break the spell.
“I saw you reading a thick-ass book, and you were reacting to it, freaking out at what was written there. The shirt made me smile. You made me smile, when it felt like I hadn’t smiled in years. You made my day better.”
I resume chewing, letting the chicken panini distract me from the implication of his words. “But you’re with her, Alysha, I mean.”
“Aly... Alysha never reads and she doesn’t wear shirts that only a few people would understand. She’s not like you. Never could be like you.”
My brain is full of white noise. I pinch myself, and feel the shot of pain in my arm.
“Aly and I had an arrangement that ended. Looks like she’s been talking to my mother.”
“I don’t know why you’re telling me this.” I release my hold on my sandwich, setting it down on my plate. My heart’s beating loud, blood swooshing in my ears. I watch his mouth move, God, that mouth. Why couldn’t I just have a taste? Just a tiny one?
Because you’ll want more. He’s not for you.