She smiled. “Maybe. You’ll have to wait and see.”
“This is definitely a side of you I’ve never seen.”
“There’s a reason for that. We’ve always been such good friends. I mean, we still are.” Her tone grew a little frantic. “Right?”
“Of course we are.” I tucked her hair behind her ear. “In fact, I’m really glad to hear you say that.”
“Why?”
“I can’t promise anything more.”
“Because you suck at relationships?”
“Hey.” I tugged at her hair, and she burst out laughing.
“Sorry—couldn’t resist,” she said. “But don’t worry, I can’t promise anything more either. To be perfectly honest, I suck at relationships too.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it. I mean, I’ve never dated a Zlatka, so no one has ever told me that to my face, but my sister Millie said something today that hit pretty close to home.”
“What did she say?”
Felicity played with my chest hair again. “She said the reason I’ve never had a successful long-term relationship is because I break up with anyone who says ‘I love you.’”
“Is that true?”
“One hundred percent.”
I’d expected her to deny it, so her honesty made me laugh. “And why is that?”
She didn’t answer right away. “I don’t really know. I’ve just always been that way. I suppose I figure things are going to blow up at some point anyway, so I might as well light the match.”
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to know it probably had something to do with her real mom abandoning her when she was so young, especially having overheard the fight with her dad, but if she wasn’t ready to talk about it, I wasn’t going to make her. Nothing worse than someone trying to be your therapist when you just needed a sympathetic ear—something my sister did not seem to understand.
“Well, I think Zlatka is into women too,” I told her, “so if you’d like to date her, I’m sure she’d be glad to tell you exactly why you suck at relationships. Although, she’s not likely to tell you she loves you—at least, she never said that to me—so maybe things would work out with you guys.”
Laughing, she slapped my shoulder. “No, thanks. I don’t need Zlatka in my life pointing out all my flaws.”
“You have no flaws.”
“Ha! I’ve got plenty. But I’m actually sort of glad for one of them tonight.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes, if I had better impulse control, I might not have told Mimi we were engaged, and then I would not have just experienced the best two orgasms of my life.”
My chest puffed up with pride.
She snuggled closer to me. “Tell me something about yourself that I don’t know.”
“Like what?”
“Something from before we met.”
I thought for a second. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball player.”
“You did? I didn’t even know you played baseball.”
“I quit right before we moved up here.”
“Why?”
“I had a really bad game. Struck out three times in a row and cost my team the league championship.” It was a memory I hated, so I tried never to go back there.
“Oh.” Felicity rubbed my shoulder. “I’m sorry. That had to feel terrible.”
“It did. I never played again. But it’s not like I was going to play professionally anyway. I was talented, but I wasn’t that good.”
“Well, I’m glad you told me. The childhood baseball dream seems like something a fiancée would know.”
“What did you want to be when you were a kid?”
“A hundred different things. A scientist. An astronaut. A pastry chef. A school librarian. I thought it would be cool to spend my days around kids and books.”
“You’d be great at that, Miss MacAllister.” Immediately I indulged in a hot fantasy about her. “Would you be a naughty librarian?”
She giggled. “Only for you. Hey, this is what we should do every night.”
I reached down to her ass and squeezed it, pulling her against me. “I could not agree more.”
“I don’t mean that,” she said, laughing. “I mean—yes, that too—but what I meant was that every night we should tell each other one secret. So that we know each other better than anybody else.”