Page 80 of The Friend Zone

Fucking Brandon. His penchant for understating things was killing me. I was completely unprepared for this guy.

So that’s why the Ice Queen liked him. I looked like a damn fuckboy next to Tyler. No wonder Kristen didn’t want anything serious with me.

“He wants me to marry him. We’d move overseas.” Her eyes flitted up to mine.

My stomach lurched. “And you said maybe?”

“I said I would think about it.”

I scratched my cheek, trying to act like none of this bothered me while inside I was losing my fucking mind. “What are your reservations?”

She didn’t answer me.

“Sloan would miss you if you moved,” I said. Not to mention what it would do to me.

But she just took a deep breath and looked away from me.

She gazed out the window, and I stared at her watching the road. When she turned back to me, her eyes were full of tears. Then she unbuckled herself, slid across the seat, and climbed into my lap.

My heart jumped at the unexpected affection. I pulled her in and tucked her head under my chin, breathing in the smell of her hair. The feel of her small, warm body in my arms was like home. There was no other word for it.

She was home.

It was hard to see how much he affected her. This was the second time I’d seen her crying and both times had been over him.

The jealousy was almost more than I could handle.

This woman was mine. She was mine, not his. Why couldn’t he have stayed away from her? Let her just get over him?

But then I realized the truth. She wasn’t mine—she never was.

I’m hers.

And it’s not the same thing.

I’d been fine being patient, because I was just waiting for her to come out of it. I hadn’t been braced for him to come back into her life. And now, faced with the reality that I might lose her altogether, I realized what I’d known for weeks.

I’m in love with her.

And now this guy that I couldn’t even begin to compete with might take her from me.

I felt helpless. Panicked. A fight response triggered inside and it had nowhere to go, because I couldn’t do shit about this. All I could do was be me, and that wasn’t good enough.

A sex thing. It will only ever be a sex thing.

She raised her head and planted a soft kiss under my chin, and it almost broke my fucking heart. She was never like this with me. And as much as I loved it, it was all fueled by her feelings for someone else. He hurt her and I was here, so I got to be the one to comfort her.

But it was something. At least I could do something for her beyond just scratching an itch.

She was with me, holding me. Letting me hold her. I needed to enjoy the moment because I didn’t know how many more of them I’d get.

I squeezed my eyes shut and forced down the lump in my throat, tried to focus on her breath on my neck, her cheek pressed to my collarbone—the vulnerability she was giving me that I only ever saw when she was sleeping curled up next to me on those nights when she let me in.

I vowed to make tonight fun so she’d forget.

And so I’d have something to remember when she left.

TWENTY-FOUR