Page 62 of Best Kind of Trouble
“You want me to?” I ask incredulously—and also because the thought makes me hot.
Her cheeks burn, but she nods before leaving, then closes the door with a click behind her.
I don’t waste any time before I tug myself out and glide my palm over my flesh, thinking about the little noises Briar made and the way her lips and tongue felt. Thinking about those little rotations of her hips and how badly I wanted to tear her clothes off and take her here in her office.
Thinking about all the things I want but can’t have.
I clean up afterward and leave the office.
There’s no sign of her anywhere, only a little Post-It note affixed to one of the tables in the tasting room?—
I’m going home. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Before I leave, I look for our list of rules for success and write down a new one, the taste of her still in my mouth.
I’mon my way home when my sister calls me. A sick feeling creeps over my skin. I did exactly what she asked me not to do, and if she finds out I made out with her friend and then jacked it in her office…
She’s not going to find out. Briar and I agreed it was a mistake that can’t happen again, end of story. Plenty of people kiss without it meaning anything. Of all the kisses happening now, at this exact moment, at least eighty percent of them are meaningless. Sure, I pulled that statistic out of my ass, but that doesn’t make me any different than most people.
There’s only one problem: it was more than a few kisses.
I can still feel Briar’s soft lips against mine and the brush of her hair on my neck. Her little moans are echoing in my chest.
The call cuts off, but my phone immediately starts ringing again, because my sister has never been patient.
On edge, I answer it on my Bluetooth.
“Hey!” Hannah says. “Want to grab dinner with Travis, Ollie, and me? We’re going to that place in West Asheville where they let kids make their own pizzas. Ollie already sketched out the design for his.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, well aware that I wouldn’t be getting an upbeat dinner invitation if she knew how I’d spent my afternoon.
I’d tried to do what my sister had asked for. I’d done my best to ignore Briar. If she were only beautiful, it would have been easy enough, but she’s interesting. She’s got so many damn good ideas…
I head home before dinner and find an impossibly long golden hair attached to my shirt. Idiot that I am, I wind it around my finger. I leave it like that for a moment, smiling at the golden sheen. The soft perfection.
Yeah, no question. I’m in big trouble.
“That’s it,” I say out loud. “Quit itnow.”
I force myself to throw the hair away, instantly feeling a pang of loss in my chest.
Fifteen minutes later, I grab the Christmas gift I got for Travis’s son, Ollie, because I’m not sure I’ll see them again before they leave for New York next week. I’m about to exit the apartment when I pause and pull my phone out of my pocket.
It takes me approximately thirty seconds to reactivate Tinder.
Do I want to sleep with a random woman?
No. I don’t have the slightest desire to even look at the app.
But it feels like I’m proving something to Hannah, and maybe myself, by having the app on my phone. If I’m on Tinder, then I’m definitely not interested in fucking my boss.
I getto the pizza restaurant right on time—and I’m shocked to find Hannah, Travis, and Ollie actually beat me there. Hannah’s giving me a smug little wave from the side of a booth across from the front door. My sister, who’s so chronically late that everyone in our family always tells her to meet us fifteen minutes before we need her. Then again, Travis is anon time is lateperson, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
As I approach their booth, positioned beneath an oversized chalkboard listing the restaurant’s draft beers, I grin at Ollie, who’s wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sweatshirt, and hold up the present I brought for him.
“Is that for me?” he asks, his eyes fixed on the green-wrapped box as I sit down beside him and set it on the floor next to the booth.
I bump his small fist with mine, feeling a rush of warmth. Otis reminds me of my little brother when he was a teenager, but Ollie reminds me of him when he was this age, just seven—akid old enough to want independence but too young to have much of it. “Nah, man, I just carry it around everywhere I go to confuse people.”
