Chapter 2
Zander
“What do you want to accomplish tonight?” she asks me with no clue what she’s doing to me in that outfit, and what she’s been doing to me for the last few weeks.
“Get drunk.” It’s only partially a lie.
“Sloane messed you up that badly, huh?”
I’ve had five weeks—and three days—to digest everything, but since she’s just hearing it, I nod. And I want to let her think that for now because I don’t think I’m ready to tell her where I’m at. It’ll change everything. But then I see her cute, pouty mouth waiting for more from me.
“I thought she was…the one—” I cut off the sentence, second-guessing myself. Sometimes I overshare, we both know that, and I can’t just throw this all on her. I can’t tell her everything just yet. I grip the back of my neck while my stomach coils, not loving this restraint I’m choosing.
“I didn’t realize it was that serious.”
“Ya. I don’t think I appreciated it for what it was either.
” Normally I’d tell her everything. I’d just spit it out.
But this time it’s different. This time it involves her.
It’ll affect her more than anyone, and I just need to brace myself a little more to tell her.
And it’s not that I think she won’t listen.
She’s one of the best listeners I know. She makes people feel heard, which is ironic since no one listened to her way back when.
Then again, maybe that’s why she’s so good at it. She knows what it’s like not to have it.
I huff out a large breath. “Let’s get creative with these suckers, shall we?”
Her bright smile is back and it carves something in my heart. “Let’s do it.”
It takes all of two seconds for us to find our natural groove. Then we make jack-o-lanterns like no one has ever made jack-o-lanterns before. At least, that’s what we say while we’re carving them up.
We’re nearly done our pumpkins when I peek over at her. Of their own volition, my eyes drop to the red lace hardly holding her tits in place.
My cock twitches again. The same way it did when she first derobed.
I shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts about her for so many reasons.
She’s my friend, and friends don’t lust after each other.
She wants to go after another guy, and I should respect that.
And lastly, I just got out of a relationship.
But that’s part of the reason I am thinking all these thoughts about Evie.
I can’t get what Sloane said to me out of my head.
It’s like hearing it for the fifth time was the charm.
It’s permanently sunk into my brain. I had to give myself five and a half weeks to let it sink as far as it did, but it’s in there.
I’m in love with my best friend and I have been for a long time.
And now that she’s here, I can’t drag my eyes away from her tits, swaying ever so lightly against the jacket. I wonder if the friction is turning her on—
“Ow. Shit.” I look down and see blood oozing out of my finger.
“Oh my God, Zander. I can’t believe you cut yourself.” She reaches for something on the island and shoves it in my face. I think it’s paper towel, but I’m too stunned to notice.
“Sit down,” she instructs, and my legs must have ears because they heed her words.
She’s moving about the kitchen as I watch her, and then suddenly she’s stepping between my legs with a wet cloth.
“Here.” I drop my uninjured hand to my thigh after she removes the paper towel from my locked fingers and presses the cloth to my finger.
She’s shaking her head at me. “What the hell were you doing, you goof?”
I can’t tell her what I was thinking. That’s clear.
“Just distracted.”
“Good thing we were almost done, then.”
I hear the words she’s saying, but my fingers are so closer to her bare thigh, that I just have to touch her.
Slowly, I wrap my hand around the back of her knee, pulling her a bit closer. One of her hands falls to my shoulder.
I’ve touched her before. Held her hand. Touched her bare thigh, I’m sure. But everything inside of me has shifted. Without her. I know I’m paces, hell, miles ahead of her.
This is the first time that I’ve ever felt like I’m in a different place than she is, yet she’s right here in front of me. I’m touching her, but she’s not within my reach.
I want to slide my hand up the back of her thigh and pull her onto my lap. I want to tell her how I feel.
But I can’t.
I’m the one who makes her feel safe.
And after everything is said and done, friends are safe. Intimacy isn’t. If I try to go there with her when she’s not ready and it fails, I could lose her.
“You okay, Zander?” Her voice begs me to look up at her.
I crane my neck and feel her fingers twitch on my shoulder.
It’s the third time she’s asked me the same question tonight, and I realize that she’s probably asking it again because I’m not giving her a truthful answer for the first time in our friendship.
“I’ll be fine.” I give the back of her knee a squeeze, somehow thinking that makes the gesture platonic. “Let’s go to this party.”
She puts a bandage on my finger because she insists on doing it herself. She’s the doctor. Ya, I can see that. She’s all I can see. I just wish that she had some kind of bandage to protect my heart.