Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 98652 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98652 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Fuck. She’s gorgeous.
I watched as she walked over to Jayce and his girlfriend of two months and gave him a big hug. She said something that made all three of them laugh, and then walked over to the couch and parked herself right next to me. Without turning her head in my direction, she took the beer from my hand and brought it to her lips to drink.
She spoke before drinking. “Truth or dare?”
I smirked. “Truth.”
After she took a healthy swallow from my beer, she passed it back. “Did you delete the nearly naked picture of me on your phone that I sent forever ago?”
I turned my head and waited until she finally looked at me to respond. “Nope.”
Her eyes sparkled. “How often do you look at it?”
“More truth?”
She nodded.
“Every fucking day.”
We passed the beer back and forth again. “Seeing anyone?” she asked.
“I have someone I see once in a while.”
“Is see code for fuck?”
The corner of my lip twitched. “I was trying to be a gentleman. How about you? You seeing anyone?”
She lobbed my noncommittal answer right back at me. “I have someone I see once in a while.”
I was screwing someone else, hadn’t seen or spoken to Summer in eight months—not since the night at the party when I walked away after realizing she was the girl my brother was nuts about—and yet, I had the urge to rip the head off the nameless, faceless guy she was sleeping with. Yeah, time hadn’t dulled shit.
I stood. “Going to grab another beer. You want your own, or are you planning on just taking mine the rest of the night?”
Summer flashed an impish smile. “Planning on taking yours the rest of the night, unless that’s a problem.”
“No problem here.”
I took five minutes to sort out my head before returning to the couch. I glanced over at my brother with his arm around Emily—he looked happy. He’d pined over Summer for six more months after that party. Now that he seemed to have moved on, was the ban lifted? Jayce had no idea anything had ever happened between Summer and me—and truth be told, not much had. But was it ever okay to go for a girl your brother was once crazy about, even though she’d never returned the feelings? I wasn’t sure my moral compass always pointed me in the right direction.
Summer hadn’t moved from the couch when I returned. I sat, cracked open a new beer, and took a sip before passing it to her. “My turn. Truth or dare?”
She took a long chug from the can. “Dare.”
The challenge exited my mouth without any real thought. “Text the guy you’re seeing and tell him you’re done with seeing him.”
Summer looked back and forth between my eyes before digging into her purse and pulling out her cell. She scrolled through her contacts and typed a message. When she finished, she turned the phone toward me so I could read the text she’d typed to a guy named Gavin.
Summer: Hey. Sorry to do this via text. But I need to end what we have going on. Have a nice summer break!
After I finished reading, she hit send.
I drank from the beer. “Gavin’s day just got shitty.”
We smiled at each other as her phone pinged with a response. I loved that she didn’t bother to open it and ignored the sound of a dozen new messages over the next half hour we sat together.
When the party was in full swing, Summer and I separated, each spending time talking to our friends and hanging out with Jayce. But there wasn’t a second of the day that I didn’t know exactly where she was. My eyes were like a magnet to her. And it didn’t appear I was the only one. Sometimes our eyes would meet, and we’d smile. Other times, one of us would look at the other, mid-conversation with someone else, and even though our eyes couldn’t connect, our hidden smirks said we were on the same page.
At one point I was talking to my brother when I felt her eyes on me. I still hadn’t worked out how anything between Summer and me would sit with Jayce, so I decided to feel things out.
“You and Emily look happy.”
“She’s great.” He had a bottle of seltzer water in his hand, and I noticed a shake when he raised it to his mouth, almost a tremor. Considering our mother had had Parkinson’s, it was something we both noticed.
“What’s going on there?” I lifted my chin toward his hand.
“Just a little too much to drink last night.” He tipped his bottle to me. “A little too much graduation celebration. Sticking to seltzer today.”
What college guy who lives in a frat house hasn’t had those nights? I thought nothing of it, seeing as I’d had shaky morning-afters myself. So, I went back to poking around.