Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 83085 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83085 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
I told myself I was going to Griff’s to warn him that Natalie knew. I wasn’t gonna lie to him. Yeah, she said she’d keep it to herself, but he deserved to know, and I also knew that yeah, I wanted to tell him, but that wasn’t the only reason I was going to the damn bar.
Nope. It was just…him.
It was close to ten on a weeknight, and Griff’s was fairly slow when I went inside. Griff looked up. “Welcome to—oh, hey. Didn’t know if I was going to see you tonight.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I didn’t know either, but here I am, Grumpy G.”
“Do I look grumpy to you?” He grinned, and damned if it didn’t twist up my insides. It had been doing that for months, hadn’t it?
“No, I guess you don’t.” I sat on one of the stools in the group that was basically our spot when we went into the bar. A guy and a woman sat at the other end, and two guys were playing at one of the pool tables.
“Want a beer?” Griff asked.
“Nah, I’m good tonight. I just came by to…” See him? Because I liked spending time with him? Because Natalie was right and I was different with Griff? Because he had such a big damn heart, and put other people first, and made me feel a strange hope I hadn’t known I needed?
“Natalie knows about us,” I said in unison with his, “Chase knows about us,” and we both let out loud belly laughs that vibrated my heart and I felt in my bones. I didn’t know why I was laughing so hard, and wondered if he knew why for himself. When we settled down, I sobered because the cat getting out of the bag wasn’t the same for Griff as it was for me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t tell her it was you. She figured it out.”
“It’s okay.” Griff shook it off. “It was the same with Chase. He somehow knew it was you.”
I didn’t want to think about what that meant, if it meant anything at all, so I ignored it. “What about everyone else? I don’t want to do or say the wrong thing.”
Someone got Griff’s attention, and he said he’d be right back. I shuffled in my seat, wrung my hands together, moved around again, and it hit me that I was nervous. I was anxious about what Griffin’s reply would be because it meant something to me. It mattered.
When he came back, he leaned over the counter in this way I wasn’t sure he used to do with me, and shrugged. “I don’t mind if you don’t. We don’t have to make a big deal about it, but we don’t have to hide it either. We’ll just make sure they know it’s not serious.”
“Yeah. People have friends-with-benefits relationships all the time. We’ll make sure they know that’s what this is.”
“It’s a plan, then,” Griff agreed, and I wondered if we were fooling him any more than we were fooling me. This was already escalating quickly. I was so incredibly fucked.
Griffin pointed to the toy. “You brought me my bear.”
“I did.”
He smiled and took Grumpy Bear, then turned and put him on a shelf behind the counter, so he was looking out over the bar. It was the stupidest fucking thing, but seeing the stuffed animal I’d won him at the fair, perched on his own spot in the bar, made my stomach light and fluttery. Like there was always a part of me there or something.
“Do you want to come over when you close down tonight?” I couldn’t have held the question back if I’d wanted to…and I didn’t. “I can give you a little more of last night.”
Griffin smiled. “I’d like that.”
Warmth spread through my chest.
Fucked wasn’t a strong enough word for what I was.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Griffin
It sounded cheesy as all shit, but the next couple of weeks were…well, I didn’t want to say like something out of a dream because I’d never dreamed about something like this. But it was this fantasy life I couldn’t wrap my brain around. I was spending the bulk of my time with a good buddy, whom I laughed with and ate dinner with and gave candy out to kids on Halloween with. We did shit like work on his car, fix a busted pipe in his bathroom, throw the football around his backyard, and rake leaves together. But we also had orgasms together, a whole lot of them.
I’d just be watching a game on TV or closing the bar, and suddenly Josh was there on his knees for me. He sucked me off like I was a fucking god and worshipping me was all he wanted in life. We jerked each other off or rubbed off against each other, come sticky between our bodies more times than I could count.