I’m not okay. But I nod and walk toward the house, closing the gate behind me, pulling my keys from my purse, opening the door, then locking it with a quiet click. I pull my phone out and stare.
My head is so messy. I’m still reeling from the idea that I want to be with Dax. But if I tell him how I feel—especially after the disastrous end to our evening—there’s a strong possibility he won’t feel the same.
It’s a risk.
And I have never been good at taking them.
My hands hover over the keys.
Home Safe
I don’t hit send. Because as much as I don’t want to risk losing Dax, I’m also worried that if I don’t say something tonight, tomorrow will be too late. I may wake up and rationalize all of these feelings away, or, worse, he may wake up and realize I’m not worth the trouble.
I delete my last message and type, I think I might have screwed up tonight. I want to be more than your friend.
Send.
The whoosh of the message is followed immediately by a knock, knock, knock on my back door. The sound pulls my breath from my lungs.
Shaky baby-deer legs take me to the door.
I flip the lock. My insides are a storm of anxiety and hope that collide to form a cool rain of relief as I take him in, standing there, phone in hand, reading.
He looks up. “I didn’t like the way we ended things tonight.”
I step back to let him in, but he stays rooted on my doormat.
“I saw you with that guy, and I got jealous, and then I think I overreacted because you and I have never talked about…” He holds up his phone. “I think we need to talk.”
My heart is beating so hard that I can feel it in my throat. “Want to come in?”
He ducks his head and steps into my kitchen. The light from the tiny lamp next to my door leaves most of his face in shadows.
He holds up his phone again. “Did you mean this?”
I nod. “It’s arguably the bluntest and most honest text message I’ve ever sent.”
“You’re going to have to elaborate for me a little,” he says softly. “I’m suffering from a bit of emotional whiplash tonight.”
I take a deep breath and push away all of the excuses that have kept me from saying this to Dax before now.
“I think you and I might be very good together.”
He swallows. “Why am I sensing a but on the end of that sentence?”
Because there is one. A big one. I think it’s what’s always held me back from even considering the idea of Dax and me before.
“What if we don’t work out? What if we wake up one morning and one of us decides that they aren’t happy? I don’t think we’ll ever be able to go back to being friends.”
This time it’s Dax who takes a shaky breath. “I don’t know about you, but to me, we’ve never just been friends. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but we click. And I think things will go really good before they go bad—if they ever go bad. So you’re right. If we do this, it’s going to go one of two ways.”
I feel like I’m standing on a cliff. My toes are curled over the edge, and I want so badly to jump, but I can’t see what’s at the bottom.
“Could you be?” I ask him. “If we stop this here. Could you be only my friend?”
Dax closes his eyes, and for a very long moment, I’m worried he’s going to say no. Finally, he opens them. “Yes, I can. But to be very transparent, I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to either.” The words leave my mouth, and they are so achingly true that I hold out my arms, close my eyes, and I jump.
Chapter 15
He reaches for me at the same time I reach for him. My hands find his face. His hands find my waist, and our lips crash somewhere in the middle.
Half of me expected this kiss to be soft and sweet, like Dax. The other half was expecting something otherworldly, like the night at my condo where the whole room fell away for a moment.
This kiss is something entirely different. It’s hungry, and it’s heated. As if days, weeks, or even years of unsaid words and dormant feelings are exploding. Full-blown warfare of lips and tongues and groping hands making up for lost time.
My fingers curl around the hair at the nape of his neck as he backs me against the kitchen countertop. His mouth traces a line of kisses from my jaw to my collarbone, then back to my mouth again.
My hands itch to touch him, to explore the hard planes of his chest, to find the places where he’s ticklish or that make him draw breath a little quicker. At the same time, I want to memorize how his hands feel on my skin, the confident way they travel down my back and cup my ass as if he already knows how I like to be touched. He squeezes. I laugh because Dax McGuire just touched my ass. He squeezes again. This time both of us laugh, and we have to pause our kitchen make-out to catch our breaths.