Chapter 12 #2
“You’d be surprised how often driving a van with heavy shit inside is actually a compulsory skill for an archaeologist,” he says, as they’re unloading the boxes back at Chloe’s place.
There’s a service elevator in her building, thank God, which saves them the potential disaster that would be trying to lift everything up the stairwells, since the normal elevator is absolutely too small.
“You two get started on that,” Xavier says, once they get the bed, in pieces, inside the apartment. “I’ll go get the rest.”
Bianca follows him out, leaving Chloe reading the directions.
“I don’t think I said it before,” she says, when she catches him waiting for the elevator. “Thank you, for this. I know you could be doing literally anything else and instead I sort of bulldozed you into this and . . .”
“Hey,” he cuts her off, “if I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be, okay? Some things are more important.”
“Furniture assembly?”
“No,” he says, but he doesn’t elaborate. He just holds her eyes with his and with every second that ticks by, an inch of space between them disappears.
Was it just last night when she woke up in his arms, the full length of his body pressed against hers, when he told her exactly what her body does to him, when the only thing that kept her from kissing him was the niggling thought that she probably had morning breath, and not any of the other incredibly legitimate reasons why she shouldn’t be kissing a man that’s going to disappear from her life, probably forever, in a couple of months?
And now, even that reason doesn’t seem good enough, because he’s spent the day helping her support her friend through an awful moment – hell, he volunteered to do it – and it was all for her.
Ducking his head, a dark lock of hair falling into his eyes, he leans forward, but not fully, not closing the distance entirely. His eyes are asking for him, so clearly she can hear his voice in her head. Well, boss, what’s it gonna be?
She wants to kiss him, she’s desperate to feel the press of his lips against hers, to feel the nip of his teeth against her bottom lip, to have his arms wind around her body and pull her in close and let the hard edges of muscle and sinew press into her softer curves, let his hands map them out with reverent touches, but . . .
DING!
“Uh, hi, did someone call for a locksmith?”
Chloe’s giggles are absolutely worth recounting just how close Bianca was to the locksmith, who is currently hard at work swapping out the front doorknob and bolt with a new one, witnessing her absolutely mauling Xavier out in the hallway.
“Okay, but enough almost s. You need to spill actual details, Dr Dimitriou. You’ve been incredibly silent about it up until now and don’t give me that I don’t kiss and tell bullshit. I know for sure you absolutely do. Remember Gavin Walsh?”
Bianca laughs at that. Gavin Walsh, the absolute hottest guy at camp, and the only thing she and Chloe ever fought about.
It had been a late-night underground game of spin-the-bottle in one of the cabins after their counselors had snuck out, probably to party way harder than twelve-year-olds could possibly imagine.
And Bianca’s first spin had landed on Gavin, an athletic blond who was rocking that terrible Justin Bieber bowl haircut with swoopy bangs that was standard at the time.
It was a terrible kiss, obviously. Neither one of them knew where to put their noses or how to breathe and his braces had cut her bottom lip a little.
It was also the greatest moment of her life, up until that point.
Until they went back to the cabin and Chloe refused to talk to her that night and then the whole next day, where Bianca’d actually had to participate in archery since she didn’t have anyone to sneak off with.
She’d apparently missed that the camp-wide crush on Gavin had snared her friend way harder than it had her.
“I was so pissed at you,” Chloe says, shaking her head. “And then I had to kiss Ian Tuthill. He always smelled like old Doritos.”
“And tasted like them too, didn’t he?” Bianca teases, focusing on screwing one side of the headboard into the bed’s base.
Chloe shudders, holding her end of the headboard steady. “Ugh, so bad, I nearly gagged against his lips. But enough, spill. You’re not getting off easy just because you bought me furniture. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“It’s . . .” she trails off, “different.”
“ Bianca ,” Chloe says with a snort. “The man calls you boss. I mean, are you guys like . . .”
“No, not like that,” she insists because it’s true. That’s never been quite her thing. “He just . . . I think he really gets off on consent.”
Chloe nods. “I mean, hearing someone wants you, knowing it, is incredibly hot.”
“Exactly,” she agrees, finishing up the final screw, “and it sometimes feels like a, I don’t know, a feedback loop? Like he gets turned on by my consent and I get turned on by him wanting that consent. And it’s just . . . a lot. All the time.”
“And on top of that, he is extremely your type.” Chloe shakes the headboard, testing the job they’ve done. It holds firm.
“Wow, you’re the first person to notice that,” Bianca says, rolling her eyes.
“I’m just saying, I’m glad you decided to go for it after pretending for so long that you weren’t interested. He’s pretty much the only guy you’ve mentioned at all in the last five years and he clearly adores you. You deserve someone who loves you like that.”
Bianca swallows down the guilt that even a nearly full set of apartment furniture can’t quite overpower. “You deserve that too and you’re going to find it, you know that, right?”
“Of course I deserve it,” Chloe agrees, with a heavy sigh, sitting down on the mattress and then flopping back against it. “I just don’t know if I’m ever going to find it. You’re lucky. You weren’t even looking, right?”
Bianca shakes her head and then joins her friend on the bed, staring up at the ceiling with her. “I wasn’t, but then he was just there in front of me and it was like . . .”
“Like what?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I absolutely can’t promise that.”
“Ugh, fine, it was like,” she thinks back to that first class together, after the one she missed, which he was clearly pissed about even though he probably thought he hid it well, “like magnets snapping together. It was like that from the first day. He had an answer for literally everything I said, would find the one weakness in my argument and exploit it, twist it around, and by the end I’d be making his argument for him.
But somehow we’d end up with the same conclusion, just coming at it from different starting points. ”
“Of course you got off on academic debate.”
“I got off on the extremely hot archaeologist debating me,” she corrects.
“Fair enough.”
“And he lives up to the looks and the banter?”
“Exceeds them,” she admits, “like, exponentially.”
“In English for the human resources manager.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve never . . . It’s never felt like this before. Sometimes I feel like I might lose it just from him looking at me.”
And that part, it’s always been true. She’s never had to fake how attracted to him she is.
“Those eyes are something,” Chloe says with a nudge of her elbow.
“Ugh, his eyes, and in the low light, they’re just . . . I’m still not exactly sure what color they are, but when he’s turned his focus on me, it’s . . . God, I sound ridiculous.”
“No, you sound in love.”
“Exactly,” Bianca teases. “Ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous,” a deep voice that is definitely not Chloe adds from the doorway, “is that we have been working our asses off for hours and there was no pizza, but don’t worry, I made an executive decision about twenty minutes ago and now there’s pizza.”
Bianca sits up and takes him in, leaning against Chloe’s bedroom doorframe, filling it almost entirely, in his white t-shirt and well-fitted jeans, that one curl from earlier still dancing against his forehead, teasing her, like it knows exactly what she was talking about before he walked in.
Wait, when exactly did he walk in?
His eyes are bright and twinkling at them, but that could just be because of the pizza.
She follows Chloe out of the bedroom, worrying her bottom lip, replaying in her head the conversation they were just having, trying to remember exactly what she said, when he falls into step beside her and rumbles out a whisper, “Exponentially, huh?”
Shit.