“Keep your eye on Eleanor,” said the woman on the right, closest to the stage. “She’s an unrepentant cheat.”
“You just shut your mouth, Paula,” hissed Eleanor over the barrier. “You’re still bitter about me winning that Dutch oven two weeks ago. Well, you can shove that high-and-mighty attitude where the sun doesn’t shine. I won fair and square.”
“Sure,” Paula muttered. “If fair and square means cheating.”
“Is it even possible to cheat at bingo?” Hannah asked Fox out of the side of her mouth.
“Stay neutral. Don’t get involved.”
“But—”
“Be Switzerland, Hannah. Trust me.”
They were still holding hands under the table. So when Eleanor leaned across the table and smiled sweetly—bitter accusations apparently forgotten—and asked how long Hannah and Fox had been dating, Hannah’s answer sounded somehow fabricated. “Oh. No, we’re just”—her gaze locked with Fox’s fleetingly—“friends.”
Paula was openly skeptical. “Oh, friends, huh?”
“This is what they do now, this younger generation,” Eleanor said, straightening her cards unnecessarily. “They don’t do labels and no one goes steady. I see it with my grandkids. They don’t even go on dates, they do something called a group hang. That way there is no pressure on anyone, because God forbid.”
Now Paula just looked disgusted with the both of them. “Youth is wasted on the young.” She prodded the table with a bony finger. “If I was fifty years younger, I’d be labeling the heck out of anything that walked upright.”
“Paula,” Eleanor scolded through the barrier. “We’re in a church.”
“The good Lord already knows my thoughts.”
Hannah looked at Fox, both of them practically shaking with unreleased laughter, their hands squeezing the blood out of each other under the table. They were saved from any further commentary about the downfalls of their generation when Charlene turned on the microphone, sending a peal of feedback through the church hall. “All right, you old buzzards. Let’s play bingo.”
*
It wasn’t a date （or a group hang）。
They were just two friends playing bingo.
Just two friends occasionally holding hands under the table, his knuckle brushing the inside of her thigh here and there. At some point Fox decided the hall was too noisy to hear Hannah properly and he’d yanked her chair closer, pretending not to notice her questioning look. What the hell was he doing?
Was he one of those idiots who wanted something twice as much because he couldn’t have it? The director had asked her out. Pretty soon, they would be back in LA, and Sergei would have all the access to Hannah he wanted, while Fox was in the Pacific Northwest, probably staring at his phone waiting for her daily text message. Which is exactly how it needed to be.
And yet.
Every time Fox thought of Sergei holding her hand instead of him, he wanted to swipe an arm across the bingo table and upset everyone’s cards. Scatter them all over the floor. Then maybe kick over the church bulletin board for good measure. Who the hell did this motherfucker think he was to ask out Hannah Bellinger?
A better man than him, probably. One who hadn’t been cheapening himself since approximately one day after his balls dropped. Like father, like son. Wasn’t that why he wore the bracelet that was currently resting on Hannah’s thigh?
“Sweet Caroline. This is so addictive,” Hannah whispered to him. And he heard it easily, because he was sitting way too close, trying not to stare at those little curly wisps of hair that the rain had created around her face. Or the way she sucked in a breath every time she got to blot out a square. Or her mouth. Dammit, yes, her insanely lush mouth. Maybe he should just lean over and kiss it, the hell with the consequences. He hadn’t tasted her since that night of the cast party, and the need for another hit was unbearable.
“Addictive,” he rasped. “Yeah.”
Hannah’s eyes shot to his, then down to his mouth, and the thoughts that ran through his mind were not appropriate to have in front of his mother. Anyone’s mother, really.
This need for Hannah never went away, but it was especially heavy right now. Having her there was more comforting than Fox could have predicted. He forced himself to go see his mother occasionally, not only because he cared about her, but because that involuntary flinch validated his existence as a responsibility-free hedonist.
But Hannah . . . she was starting to pull him the opposite way. Like a gravitational force. And right now, stuck between Hannah and the reminder of his past, going in her direction seemed almost possible. She was here with him, wasn’t she? Playing bingo, singing with him in the car, talking. Decidedly not fucking. If Hannah liked him for more than his potential to give her an orgasm . . . if someone so smart and incredible believed he was more . . . couldn’t it possibly be true?