Page 32 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
Ethan’s warning flashes in my mind like a red error message. She’s off-limits.
I stop completely. Tessa is kissing my neck, her fingers gripping my scalp. “Asher… don’t stop.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. It takes every ounce of restraint I possess, every bit of iron-clad control I’ve built over a lifetime, to pull back.
I pull my head back, resting my forehead against hers. We are both panting, our breath mingling in the small space.
“I can’t,” I rasp.
Tessa blinks, her pupils blown wide. “What?”
“I can’t,” I repeat, stepping back. My hands are shaking. “Not like this. Not… yet.”
“Yet?” she whispers.
“If we do this,” I say, my voice rough, “we don’t stop. I don’t stop. And tomorrow, everything is different. The dynamic changes. The work changes.”
I run a hand through my hair, frustration warring with the overwhelming need to pull her back.
“I need to calculate the fallout,” I say. “I can’t crash the system just because I want you.”
Tessa stares at me. She looks flushed, her lips swollen, her hair a mess. She looks devastated.
“So that’s it?” she asks. “You kiss me against a wall and then talk about systems?”
“I want you,” I say intensely. “Never doubt that. I want you so much my logic centers are failing. But I need to do this right.”
I need to leave. If I stay another minute, I won’t leave at all.
“Asher,” she calls out as I reach the door.
I pause, hand on the knob.
“Monday,” she says. “The stand-up meeting.”
“What about it?”
“Don’t ignore me,” she says. “If we’re stopping… Don't ignore me.”
I look at her one last time.
“I couldn’t ignore you if I tried,” I say.
I walk out, pulling the door shut until the latch clicks. I head down the hall, my jaw grinding, my groin still aching against the denim.
7
TESSA
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my first two weeks at Mosaic, it’s this: The Branson brothers aren’t a team. They’re a weather system.
Owen is the sunshine. He breezes into my office three times a day with coffee, bad jokes, or “urgent” questions about font choices that are clearly just excuses to lean over my desk and smell my hair. He’s bright, warm, and impossible to dislike, even when I know he’s trouble. He makes the long hours feel like a party, turning budget meetings into brainstorming sessions that inevitably end with us laughing over takeout containers.
Asher is the fog. He’s silent, omnipresent, and suffocating. Since the night he drove me home, the night he touched my face and told me I was soft, we haven’t spoken about it. Not a word. But I feel him. I feel his eyes on me across the office. I feel the weight of his attention when he drops off data reports on my desk without a word, his fingers lingering on the paper for a fraction of a second too long. He doesn’t flirt. He just… exists, filling the space around me with a quiet intensity that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
And Ethan? Ethan is the storm. He’s the thunder rolling in the distance, threatening to break. He’s the pressure drop that makes your ears pop.
And in my two weeks of being here, he has been completely, maddeningly invisible.
