A corner of my heart aches. If he cares about me being in his life so much, why isn’t he attracted to me? No. Uh-uh. Not going there. I refuse to be that girl. We’re friends and I’m happy with that. Grateful for it. And maybe one day, life will toss me a man who loves me back as much as I love him. Either way, I’m good right now.
“Well, I didn’t exactly help things. I probably shouldn’t have come over here this early and let myself in.” I take a big bite of my chocolate donut. “I should implement better boundaries.”
“Probably,” he says, sounding gravely serious. But when my eyes jump up to his, Nathan is grinning—right dimple popping and all.
I playfully shove his arm. “What! If that’s the case, maybe I should take away your key to my apartment. Implement some boundaries there.”
He takes the last bite of his donut, grin still in place. “Good luck. I’m never giving it back.” His arm brushes against mine as he passes by me, and I wonder if it would be a breach of these boundaries if I plastered myself to his body like a barnacle.
I think I need this run more than he does, and for completely different reasons.
Sweating and worn out from our run, Bree and I dump ourselves onto the floor in front of my giant white couch. To my left is a floor-to-ceiling three-million-dollar view of the ocean, but to my right is the view I would give my soul to see every day for the rest of my life. Obviously, Bree doesn’t know I feel this way about her.
I knock the back of my knuckle against her knee, right beside the jagged scar that changed the course of her entire life. “What are you doing later? You want to come meet me for lunch at CalFi?”
CalFi is my team’s stadium. It has a recently added training facility where we practice and work out during the week, complete with a cafeteria catered by some of the best chefs in the business. And I, in case you are wondering, am an overeager puppy, begging for Bree to play with me—to always play with me.
She rolls her head so her soft brown eyes lock with mine. Bree is all honey-brown, long, wildly curly hair and a wide, gorgeous mouth with dimples the size of my thumb on either side. She has a Julia Roberts smile—one so unique and stunning that once you’ve seen it, no other smile even comes close. With our heads laid back against the couch, our foreheads almost touch. I want to lean in an extra inch. Two inches. I want to feel her lips.
“I can’t. I have a toddler creative movement class at 11:00 today.”
I frown. “You never teach on Tuesday mornings.”
She shrugs. “Yeah, well, I had to add another class in the mornings twice a week to cover the studio’s rent. My landlord contacted me last month and said property taxes went up again so he had to raise my rent by a couple hundred bucks.”
Bree tries to stand, but I hook the T-back strap of her tank top and tug her back down beside me. It was borderline overly flirtatious, and I instantly know it was a bad move when she looks at me with wide eyes. I quickly continue the conversation to cover my tracks. “You’re already teaching too many classes a week.”
Bree employs one other instructor at her studio who teaches tap and jazz, but really, she needs to add another to help with the load. Her studio runs in more of a non-profit capacity, but her overhead doesn’t reflect it because every studio space in LA is enormously expensive. It’s unfair because there’s a large population of people in this city who are low income and under-resourced whose needs are overlooked. Bree’s desire has always been to provide a place for kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to receive dance instruction, allowing them to attend her studio at minimal cost to their family.
Problem is, the tuition is too low for her current business model. She knows this but feels stuck, and I hate that her chosen solution to the problem is to teach more classes and trade more of herself to cover the deficit instead of accepting my money.
“I teach the normal amount of classes for the average instructor,” she says with a clipped warning tone. Bree’s warning tone, however, sounds as threatening as a cartoon baby bunny. Her eyes are big and sparkly and make me love her more.