Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 46202 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46202 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
I remember how nervous I was making that naked-run joke, even introducing that as a topic, how my body tingled, and my sex most of all.
I had shivered as though he was telling me we would be naked together.
Soon.
Even if I’m not sure I’d be able to handle him.
“Plus, he told me he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
Anna watches me closely, a frown on her lips.
“What?” I ask.
She sighs. “I just don’t want you to get hurt, Dee. Maybe he read your texts and is interested, but is cooling off. Or maybe he’s just a family friend who’s busier today than he was on Saturday. I just don’t want you building this up in your head and then…and then slamming back to reality if he doesn’t feel the same. I’d hate for that to happen.”
I smile at her, trying to take her words onboard.
But that silly glimmer inside me – my freaking core – tells me that’s impossible. It tells me we were made for each other. I read the texts exactly how he meant them.
He is cooling off, and it’s my job to get him fired up again.
“Anyway,” Anna goes on, “isn’t this for the best?”
“For Dad?”
“For your relationship with him. How would he react if this really happened?”
I swallow a ball of tension. “I’m trying to decide if he’d disown me or pretend to be okay with it but secretly hate me.”
“Your dad would never disown you,” Anna says.
I look down at my coffee, finding it difficult to meet her gaze. I know I’ll see the pity there, even if she’s a good friend, and would never come outright and say I’m acting in a pathetic way.
But I can hear my voice, the desperation in it, as I try to reshape the world into something which makes sense.
I can want Damien so badly it hurts. There has to be a way.
“I guess not,” I mutter. “But I’ve never done anything like this to him before, have I?”
“But Dee, you haven’t done anything.”
Yet, I fill in silently, but I hold the words back.
I haven’t told her how I almost touched myself thinking about Damien…or all the other times, fueled by my crush, I’d indulge in similar kinds of fantasies.
“But even thinking about it,” I go on. “Damien and Dad have been friends since they were kids, Anna. They met when….”
“I know,” Anna says softly. “It’s a horrible story.”
Damien was involved in a hit-and-run when he was a kid. His single mother was killed, and two years later, his estranged father died from a terminal disease. At thirteen years old, Damien was left alone and sent straight into the system.
“Dad says he was nothing like he is now,” I say, remembering when he told me. “He was small. He hadn’t had his growth spurt yet. He was shy…and angry. But he and Dad saw something in each other. They were best friends, are best friends…they have been since before I was born.”
“I know,” Anna says softly.
“That sort of connection runs deep. I mean, heck, how would I feel if you and my Dad started dating?”
Anna laughs. “I think Lacey, not to mention Aaron, might have a problem with that.”
I laugh with her, though it feels forced, the same way it has every time I’ve laughed since starting to text with Damien.
Unless I am texting Damien, then the laughter comes easily, as though my mind is finally letting me relax because I’m right where I belong.
With my man.
“Did you know you wanted to be with Aaron immediately?” I ask.
They’ve been dating for two years now, and their relationship seems quite casual, at least from the outside. But I don’t have any other frame of reference.
I suppose I could look it up online, but what would I search?
I am dangerously obsessed with my Dad’s best friend. Help me.
“No,” Anne smiles softly. “We’ve had our ups and downs. I think we’re on an up right now. But it wasn’t a crazy love-at-first-sight kind of thing.”
So she didn’t want to have a family with him straight away.
Her core isn’t bursting with the desperate, hungry need to start a life with him. To be with him every day for the rest of their lives, for him to protect her and for her to care for him, to help him however she can.
“Have you sent him the marketing stuff yet?” she asks after a pause.
“No,” I tell her. “It’s all ready, saved as a draft.”
“So….”
“I’m not sure I can….”
Go back to talking about nothing but work, I leave unsaid.
We’ve only had a few text conversations, on-the-edge stuff, things I could justify to Dad if I had to. But even that idea, having to justify anything to him, makes me want to end this right now. And yet that’s a lie.
The notion occurs to me. I know it would be the right thing to do.