Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 79155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
I turned and put my arms around him, squeezing him in a tight hug. It was almost certainly a mistake, because at the very least, hugging him meant touching him, which meant getting turned on.
But hugging him also felt like a whole lot more than just being turned on. As I breathed in his scent, I realized that being “just friends” was certainly the right call. I wasn’t falling for Nathan. I already had fallen for him. Him being in my life had given me a sense of normalcy that I hadn’t felt… well, that I hadn’t felt since I’d lost contact with my family.
I swallowed past the awful tightness in my throat, knowing I had to put on my happy face again and go back out into the living room.
No time to be an emotional mess.
I could be Nathan’s friend.
Even if it hurt, wishing that things could be different. Even if somewhere deep inside, I knew I didn’t belong with him any more than I belonged anywhere. I was a pretty face. A hot body. I belonged on a football field, behind a TV screen, where people could fall in love with the idea of me instead of the real me.
I pulled in a breath, avoiding Nathan’s gaze as I led him out to the living room.
17
NATHAN
If someone had told me a few months ago that one day, Kace Tomlin would ask me to be his friend, I would have jumped for joy at the idea.
Turns out that once I’d slept next to him, the idea of being just friends with him hit me in a weird way.
I’d agreed with his proposition right away, because I sure as shit wasn’t going to say no to him. But then I sat there in his giant living room with him, surrounded by tons of his friends. Friends from all walks of life. Friends he’d fucked, and friends he hadn’t. Lifelong friends and ones he’d probably just met this week. I watched Kace wink at people, clap them on the back, and laugh his ass off along with them as his TV show played in the background.
And something had curled around my heart like a vicious fucking snake. Something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Jealousy.
“Oh, I saw that one!” Brent Engles said to him now, waggling his eyebrows at Kace as he pointed at the screen. “You totally fucked that guy, didn’t you?”
I shifted on my feet, leaning against the wall near the bar, crammed in one of the only empty spots I could find in the room. The TV had just shown a scene of Kace attending an event at some famous rapper’s house where he’d been cozied up on a couch next to some famous gay actor I’d never heard of.
“Absolutely not,” Kace said, shaking his head. He had a beer bottle in his hand, and he was sitting on the floor, surrounded by a circle of people. “I kept my dick in my pants that night.”
“For once,” someone else joked.
I had a roiling heat in my chest every time one of his friends joked about his playboy ways. Some strange part of me wanted to pipe up, to shout across the room and tell all of them they had no idea that I’d been the one getting up close and personal with Kace. That we’d even slept in bed next to one another. But in this room, I blended into the background like I was nobody. Nothing. I was just a bland, older guy in generic clothes, among a sea of hot, insanely fit people from a younger generation.
I held the possessiveness inside me like a shameful secret as the next TV episode started playing.
Kace wasn’t mine.
But sometime in the last few days, my brain had sure as hell gotten those wires crossed.
I was startled when I heard a familiar voice over the speakers as the next episode began. I looked up and saw Charlie’s face, big across the screen. I glanced over toward where Charlie was now, sitting on the floor by the windows, and he gave a little excited clap.
“Now, there are only two things I care about tonight,” the big Charlie on screen said, hamming it up completely in front of the camera. It was a shot from the night when we had all been in Jade Brewery, and I recognized the modern industrial wood of the brewery behind him. “And those two things are: maintaining what little is left of my dignity, and getting Kace Tomlin to dance on the dance floor with me.”
The whole living room erupted in laughter now. I saw someone turn to Charlie, asking if the guy on screen was him and giving him a high five. The episode continued on, and it ended up featuring Charlie fairly prominently throughout.