“Says you.”
His mouth was back on mine then, and the doorframe was digging into my back as our bodies were pressed so tightly together that I could feel every. Single. Inch. Of. Him.
Oh, holy hell.
“Colin. Really.” I freed my mouth long enough to repeat, “What are we doing?”
That was the exact second we heard Jack’s keys in the lock, so we jumped apart. I blinked fast, as did he, and he said, “Let’s not make this weird, okay? We were both excited and kind of forgot ourselves. No big deal, right?”
I nodded and touched my lips, trying not to look at the bare chest that’d just been pressed against me. “Right.”
Jack came in, slamming the door behind him as he carried a bag from Taco Bell over to the table. He barely shot us a glance as he sat down, so I murmured a “G’night, you guys” and slipped away into my room.
Colin
Holy shit. Had that really just happened?
I changed out of my clothes and threw them on the chair by the window, too wired to be bothered with putting them away. I paced my room like a caged animal, freaking out over my stupid punk-ass move.
I’d kissed Olivia.
I had kissed the little sister of my best friend like a total asshole. Why? Oh, yeah—because she had hugged me. I was such a big dumb oaf that the smell of perfume on her neck and the feel of her hands on my shoulders had made me lose my shit.
Fucking weak much?
Jack would kill me if he ever found out, and that would be the total right move, by the way. I’d seen him go apeshit over harmless little pricks sniffing around his sister’s back when she was in middle school, and I knew it’d be no different today.
Hell, if Olivia were my sister （praise Jesus that she wasn’t）， I’d react the exact same way.
The worst part about it was that even as I cursed myself for my stupidity, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d kissed me back. Because it’d been exactly the way she’d said it would be when she’d texted Mr. Wrong Number. She liked it hot and heavy and up against the wall, right?
Her kiss was definitely a preview of that unholy hotness.
After another hour of mentally kicking my own ass, I laced up my shoes and went for a run. Clearly my mind wasn’t going to get tired, so maybe if my body did, sleep would eventually come and save me from my thoughts.
10
Olivia
“I cannot believe what I’m hearing.”
“I know,” I said, carrying two glasses of prosecco over to the table. Sara was unboxing our food—fried ravioli and a loaf of focaccia from Caniglia’s—and staring at me as if I’d grown a second head. I gave her a sheepish grin and murmured, “I can’t quite believe it myself.”
She’d called last night, right after the kiss and smack-dab in the middle of my mental freak-out, to see if I wanted to grab food and catch up sometime. I said something desperate like “can we tomorrow, please?” and thankfully, she was down for a quick happy hour. I hadn’t planned on telling her about the kiss, but the minute she’d walked into the condo and asked how I was, I’d blurted out the whole thing over our first bottle of wine.
“So, um,” she said, looking like she wanted to laugh as she opened the carton of ravioli that the delivery driver had just dropped off, “does this mean there’s something brewing between you and Mr. Beck?”
I sat down and picked up a ravioli. “No, no, no, I was excited so I hugged—”
“Stop.” She shook her head and snagged a few ravioli for herself. “In no normal situation does a friendly hug end in dry humping against a doorframe. Try again.”
That made me snort. “It was way sexier than dry humping, Sara.”
She coughed out a laugh and said, “For real, though—you know I’m right. There has to be something crackling if you were both sober and a yay-I-got-the-apartment hug turned into foreplay.”
“Okay.” I dropped the ravioli back onto the plate—it smelled weird—and reached for my wine instead. I said, “I suppose there’s . . . an awareness between us all of a sudden. Sexual chemistry, I guess. But I also know that he doesn’t really like me.”
Her eyebrows went down. “What?”
“I mean, I guess he likes me now,” I said, taking a sip and picturing his heavy-lidded gaze from the night before, “but that doesn’t mean he respects me. He just sees me as a shitshow dipshit.”
Sara took a bite of one of the breaded appetizers and just looked at me while she chewed.