Page 121 of The Incredible Ordinary

Milán coughs into his fist like he’s trying not to laugh, and I send him a dirty look.

Dad quirks his brow at me before he shakes his head. “Well, I’m off to bed.”

“Night,” I call out.

A few moments later I hear his bedroom door closing.

I look at Milán.

A slow grin spreads across his face, and I can’t help but laugh.

“Close call,” he says.

I laugh again. “Sorry.”

He leans his cheek against the back of the couch and smiles at me. “For making out with me?”

“For the interruption.”

“It was probably a good thing. You’re ridiculously hot, and I was three seconds away from making some bad decisions.”

Heat creeps up from my chest, to my neck, then to my face.

He squeezes my thigh, fingers brushing over the inseam of my pants. My whole body reacts, and I’m ready to throw myself at him again. There’s a part of me that wants to rush, take everything he’s offering right here and now. But there’s a calmer, sensible part of me, the more mature side, that knows how to appreciate this. The slow buildup. Taking our time. Enjoying the ride.

Because we have time.

Lots of it.

“I have a proposition,” I say.

“I’m all ears.”

“I think you should kiss me some more. Skirt the edge of those bad decisions.”

He smiles.

“As it happens, that’s what I do best,” he says, leaning forward.

And then he kisses me again.

JORDAN

We’re keeping it simple,and it’s surprisingly easy to do that. I expected there to be some kind of awkwardness for a while, but there’s been none of that.

Mostly we’ve been hanging out as usual, except now there’s the fact that whenever we get a rare moment when it’s just the two of us, it inevitably ends up with our gazes clashing and then us on top of each other on the nearest flat surface.

He makes it feel easy, and I gradually stop overthinking because we’re still just us. Now we’re just the kind of us where we also happen to make out like teenagers whenever we can.

It’s the kind of easy, sexy, exciting, low-maintenance sort-of-relationship that I’ve never experienced before.

He’s my best friend.

A best friend I desperately want to kiss.

I stop trying to dissect things and come up with a name for what we’re doing. What’s the point? I don’t need to slap a label on what we’re doing, and he’s even less interested in that than I am. The only reason we’d need to define the relationship would be other people, I suppose, but we’re keeping this thing between us. It’s new, unexplored territory, and I don’t feel the need to invite anybody to visit. I want to keep it to myself, learn all thequirks and pitfalls and magical views of my new surroundings first before I let anybody else in here.

The buzzer lets out a quick,vibrating beep, and I pull the door open. The elevator hums, and I watch the floor numbers change excruciatingly slowly. My fingers thrum against my thigh. My heartbeat thrums in my ears.