This is Huck’s bed.
I want to leap up and gather the blankets to my chest, but I can’t feel what I’m wearing or not wearing and also I have a rip-roaring hangover that makes the idea of bolting upright especially repulsive.
“Oh my god,” I groan into the pillow. “What am I doing here?”
There’s a featherlight dip of the bed beside me, and I wrench my neck around to discover that Huck has placed a breakfast tray on the other side of the extremely rumpled sheets.
“You’re going to eat breakfast in bed,” he says, as if this is the most obvious thing in the entire world. “Good morning, sunshine.”
3
Huck
She’s all rumpled, with pink cheeks and bright eyes, and the last thing I want to do is have sex with her. Definitely not. Definitely not now, in my employee bungalow, after an evening of watching her in that dress. Like a bride. She really did look like a bride. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way she looked in the glowing morning light in that dress, standing on the dock like something out of a wedding photographer’s commercial. They’ve been doing a lot with drones lately, which is frankly fucking ridiculous, but I wouldn’t mind some permanent drone footage of Katie standing on the dock.
Anyway.
She runs her fingers through her hair, flipping it to the other side of the pillow and giving me a full view of the half of her face that’s not pressed into the pillow. Rumpled wasn’t the right word for it. She’s tangled in my sheets like the sheets themselves dragged her down from heaven. Katie wore a slip underneath her dress last night, and it’s the only thing between her skin and the bedding, from what I saw last night. Only now she’s unselfconscious, blinking up at me, just surfacing from sleep. My heart thumps like a too-fast car skidding over potholes and my palms burn. My palms. “You totally didn’t have to do this.”
“My last name is Bliss. Do you think I’m allowed to slack on…” I wave vaguely in the air.
“Hosting?” Katie’s voice is waterlogged with sleep, and she clears her throat.
“Yes. Hosting.” It’s true. I have never been allowed to slack on hosting, and the thought of doing it forever is what’s been keeping me out in a kayak most mornings since I’ve been back. I’ve heard tell that if you never quite dock at the shore, you never have to go into an office and spend the rest of your life in a family business that you didn’t really choose, but— “And I’ve already cooked.”
At this moment, the family business has granted me with a rent-free bungalow, and Katie is in my bed. She lifts her head from the pillow to look at the cereal and toast on the tray. I watch her expression flicker through a combo of bemusement and surprise and hangover that gets me, straight through the heart.
“It’s right, isn’t it?”
She glances back up at me. “Yeah, a hundred percent. Totally right. I can’t believe you remember how I like my toast. Either that or your toaster sucks.”
“My toaster is top of the line.” She laughs. “Maybe. I wasn’t really paying attention. It came with the unit.”
“Came with the unit,” Katie echoes. “You didn’t want to pick out your own toaster when you came back?” She drops her head back down on the pillow and closes her eyes. It’s ridiculously intimate, dangerously intimate. We were best friends from middle school onward and I’ve never seen her like this before.
Not until last night.
“I didn’t know if I’d be staying.” I sit down on the edge of the bed, and my entire body—every inch of my skin, every muscle—pulls tight to the concrete-hard knowledge that I could have slept here, this bed, last night.
I could have slept here all night.
I did sleep here, in the beginning, because I was worried she might be sick. I wanted to be close by. But the hairspray and silk lingerie smell of her—with the one-of-a-kind sunshine scent of her skin underneath—made it fucking impossible. Maybe if I’d been drinking, too, but like an idiot I was stone-cold sober. And breathing her in all night like that pulled me dangerously close to a line I’m not going to cross with her.
I can’t cross it with her. The couch in the living room sucks, is what I’m saying. It looks nice on the surface but underneath it’s nothing but hard cushion and springs.
She opens her eyes again. “What do you mean, you didn’t know if you’d be staying?”
“Just…” I shrug one shoulder. “Just considering all the options. For after the summer.”
Katie purses her lips. “I don’t believe you. And it’s already fall, so…”
“Your cereal is getting soggy.”
“Oh, isn’t it always?” She rolls her eyes, an exasperated smile curving the corners of her lips.
“Hear me on this.” I put a hand out and rest it on the ridge her hip. It’s meant to be as non-erotic as possible, but the sensation of her leg beneath the blanket…oh, jesus. I can’t be this person. Can’t, can’t, can’t. “If your cereal is constantly milk-logged and disgusting, either you don’t know how to prepare cereal of you’ve bought something that’s seriously off.”
“Ha.” She pushes herself upward—god, stop it, you’re killing me—and stakes a second to fluff the pillow behind her. Then she sinks into it and reaches for the tray. “You’re staring.”
“It’s a complicated cereal maneuver. I’m standing by for technical support.”
Katie snorts. “You are the last person I’d go to for technical support.” There’s a strange tension in her voice, and I feel it all through the air around us.
“Good call.” I’m not the kind of guy who got an erection every time he went to the computer lab in college. Sure, I can appreciate a set of nice computers, with all their nice fans and other bullshit, but I’m not one to talk specs on hard drives and memory. “You should still eat it, though. Soggy cereal is gross.”
“Thank you,” she mouths at me. Katie plucks the spoon from the tray and dips it into the cereal, lifting a full bite between her lips.
Nothing about watching another person eat cereal should ever be sexy, and yet, when her lips close around the spoon, goose bumps coil from my ankles to my knees and up until they give my balls a reminder of being dumped in the water yesterday, only…in reverse.
“Okay.” My best friend in the world—keep reminding myself that, and I’ll be fine, I will make it through doing this normal and human thing for her without fucking it up—puts the spoon back on the tray with a tiny plink. “Did we do something last night?”
The question hits me, a faux blunt object that smacks me right in the chest. “Do something?” I waggle my eyebrows, my mouth dry. “Like…in bed?”
“Yes.” Katie’s expression is absolutely level, her green eyes on mine. She looks like she’s about to walk into a test and dominate that fucker. “Did we have sex?”
“No. Jesus, no.”
Katie shakes her head, her cheeks going a darker shade of pink. “You don’t have to say it like that, jackass.”
“Hey.” I reach out and pat her on the head, a gesture she swipes away with one hand. “You were drunk. You were, I dare say, wasted.”
She glances down at the tray again. “Accurate assessment.”
“Wasted enough not to remember last night?”
With a tip of her head back against the pillow, Katie gazes up at the ceiling. “The last thing I remember is asking you to dance.”
I laugh out loud, and Katie’s eyes are instantly on mine, a smile on her hungover-yet-still-somehow-gorgeous face. “Asking me to dance might be the biggest understatement of the year.”
“I did ask. I remember it.”
“You said you wanted to dance, and then you practically ripped my shirt off dragging me up to the bar. Mike was laughing his ass off. My shirt looked like a deflated condom.”
“What?”
“You twisted it in your hand, and—” I motion to the front of my shirt. “It was crazy. You lasted about a half an hour, and then it was time to go to bed.” This is putting it mildly. After h
alf an hour, Katie had her arms draped around my neck and her face nestled into my shoulder and was trying to slow dance with me to some electronica atrocity that Mike had the good sense to turn down. Beau had shown up by then, because it’s his gig to plan out parties like that one, and when he saw me, he doubled over with laughter.
I would have punched him if Katie hadn’t been hanging off me. If I hadn’t been treasuring every fucking moment of it.
She picks up the bowl of cereal and takes another bite, this one less sensual and more thoughtful. Was she…trying to get me to pounce on her with that first bite? Seriously? Could that have been a thing.
“You could have just taken me to the suite, you know. There are rooms for us there.”
“I could have,” I say diplomatically. “But that didn’t seem like the best option.”
“Why not? At least you wouldn’t have had to wake up with a train wreck in your bed.”
The moment coils between us, the nonchalant words falling one by one to the blankets stretched over Katie’s leg. I catch the flicker of a glance from underneath her eyelashes.
“The drunk version of you was more interested in staying with me.”
“Oh, yeah?” Her tone is so nonchalant I almost don’t believe it, but then again…maybe Katie knows what a disaster it would be if we got together. She has to. She has to know it at least as well as I do, which is why we never dated in the first place. “What did I say?”
“‘I’m not asking you to marry me, Huck. I just want a place to sleep for the night.’”
“I said that?” Katie snorts. “How incredibly romantic and sweet. I can’t believe you didn’t whisk me off to Vegas and marry me immediately.”
“I thought about it.”
“Ew,” Katie says, but her face…
I’m reading too much into her hungover face. That’s what’s happening here. Because there can’t be a blush, there can’t be a hint of hope.
I won’t ruin what we have for my dick. That’s never going to happen.
So I ignore the ache in my hands that wants me to peel back the sheets and crawl in next to her. I ignore the weights around my shins that try to pin me to the floor, to keep me next to her. And I ignore the urge, like a cartoon lasso around my gut, to lean forward and kiss her temple. “Sleep it off if you need to, okay? I’ll see you down at the boathouse.”
4
Katie
“What exactly do you mean when you say the words I spent the night at Huck’s?” Libby’s voice is gravelly. It sounds just like it did our senior year in college after our once-monthly bar nights. The fact is, both of us loved going out, but both of us also wanted to graduate college. After we moved in together off-campus we made a pact to limit things to once per month, and that weekend usually ended in Libby stumbling out of her bedroom at 2 PM with a voice like a pack-a-day smoker and the hangover of someone with a weak stomach, which she has.
Currently, we are both late for the last wedding event—a sendoff brunch that started ten minutes ago in one of the meeting rooms at Bliss. I’m not a brunch because I’m at my house making myself look presentable, and I have no idea why Libby isn’t at the brunch.
My head throbs, but something in my chest throbs harder. Motrin. I need Motrin, which is why I’m late for the brunch.
“I mean, I woke up in his bed this morning. What happened?”
Libby groans. “Do you think I have any idea what happened last night?”
“Some friend you are,” I huff. “It was part of the bridesmaid vows to keep and eye on each other.”
“Not fair.” Fair curls into a yawn that sends prickles of suspicion tiptoeing down the back of my neck, followed quickly by a wide paintbrush of what feels like nostalgia. “If I let you go anywhere other than the suite, it was because you were with Huck. Nothing could possibly happen to you with Huck.”
Part of me bristles at that, a weird defensiveness rising like a gate in my chest. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Of course But Libby’s tone was more tentative than anything else—almost a question. “I’m pretty sure nothing did go on between us. I woke up in my slip.” I offer the detail and immediately feel like a side character on Law & Order, all hamfisted and obvious.
“O….kay? So you took off your dress, climbed into his bed, and…nothing happened?”
“I didn’t ask him.” My thoughts jumble up against one another like cheap bumper cars in a too-small arena and heat wraps itself around my neck. I could swear I was wearing a sweater tied over my shoulders, only that kind of thing doesn’t usually give me hot flashes. “He brought me breakfast in bed, and then—”
“Excuse me. What? Breakfast in bed? Are you kidding me, Katie?”
“I’ll still be able to eat brunch,” I grumble into the phone, then pin it between my face and my shoulder so I can dig through my purse. “It was just cereal and toast.”
“And?”
“…and?” My hand closes around a tube of chapstick, an old makeup brush, and a hair tie before I finally find what I’m looking for—the mini-bottle of Motrin. It’s light. Too light. Something rattles around inside, and I pop it open to find a single pill.
“Did he get the toast right?”
The toast, the toast. Barely toasted at all, yet not a hint of butter in solid form on the surface. Blood surges to my cheeks, riding on the whirlpool in my gut. It’s either the hangover or butterflies in my stomach, and the line between them is as thin as it’s ever been. About six people in the world know about my toast preferences. About half of those have ever gone to the effort of making it just so for me. “Yeah, he got it right.”
“So casual,” Libby teases. “That’s a big deal.”
“It’s not.” I blow out a breath and pop the single Motrin into my mouth, then wash it down with a gulp of water. I’ve been carrying the glass around since I got back to the house this morning. I ate the cereal, I ate the toast, and then I walked out of Huck’s place with heavy feet. He lives in a row of employee bungalows on the edge of Bliss property. Everything in my heart and soul screamed that I should be tiptoeing out, walk-of-shame style, but there’s no shame in sleeping over at your best friend’s place. “It’s really just toast.”
It’s not just toast.
“Then why did you call me about it?”
“You called me.” My phone started ringing the moment I stepped out of the shower, like Libs can sense the first available moment I might be free to talk. “Shouldn’t you be at brunch?”
“Yeah.” Another yawn. “I was calling to see if you were already there.”
“You’re the bride, Libs. It’s your brunch.”
“I’m hungover,” she moans into the receiver, and there’s a rustling that sounds curiously like a person turning over underneath sheets on a bed. “It’s my wedding hangover, too. How can I possibly be expected to go to brunch?”
“’Cause you planned this brunch, you beautiful fool. I’m leaving my house now. You’d better be making a fashionably late entrance when I arrive.”
“Wait—I thought you were at Huck’s.”
“I came back to my house to shower, but I’m leaving right now, and—”
“So you’ll sleep with him, but you won’t shower at his place?”
“I did not sleep with him.” In a burst of full-on adulthood, I stop at the front door of my house and chuck the empty Motrin bottle into the box of stuff I’ve been saving for the recycle center.
“But you wanted to.”
“No way. The only thing I wanted to know was how I ended up there, and it’s because you abandoned me.” A bright gratefulness surges through my chest, so intense I put my hand to my heart.
“You know, Jeff is my best friend. It wouldn’t be wrong if you—”
“No. Nope. No.” I pull the front door of the rented cottage shut behind me and take a deep breath of the midmorning air. It’s still dewy, with only a tiny edge, like the fall lost its nerve and we’re retreating back into summer. “I’m heading in to brun
ch. Do you want me to let everyone know you’re too sexed up from your wedding night to be there?”
“Ugh. No.” A moment’s pause. “Well, maybe.”
“You’re the best. You know that?”
“I really do,” says Libby. “I really do.”
* * *
I pull up into a spot behind the resort’s main building five minutes later and check myself in the rearview mirror. My makeup looks good. My hair isn’t crazy. I do need to stop pursing my lips.
The thing is, even if Jeff is Libby’s best friend, that’s no guarantee. They’re the exception to the rule that getting involved with friends is a smart idea. And I get the impression that Jeff is her “best friend” in the sense that she would say that during the wedding vows—she did say that, by the way—but if pressed she could name at least ten women who were also in that tight inner circle. Five of us were in the wedding.
Huck’s not on that level for me. He’s on another level, all by himself. You only get to that level by doing something insane, like putting yourself at risk of ostracism for the girl whose dead dad might be contagious. Honestly, college without him wasn’t the greatest experience of my life. It was still great—don’t get me wrong—but I felt the space where he used to be every day.
I’m going to feel it again, too. That’s a hundred percent guaranteed. Because I’m going to leave, and he’s going to stay, and this was just a nice summer interlude before we move on with the rest of our lives.
Like friends do.
And speak of the devil, there he is, at the back entrance of the resort in his swim trunks and the classic white t-shirt with the Bliss logo embroidered on the front.
He’s talking to a woman.
Petite. Blonde. Probably gorgeous, though she’s facing away so it’s hard to tell. She talks animatedly with her hands and at something she says Huck tips his head back and laughs.
The screws in my knees go loose like I’m a faulty robot in a movie and the same liquid numbness rockets up into my lips, my cheeks. It’s like a dam breaking, submerging everything else in my mind. It’s free now, the feeling I’ve been holding back since I woke up in his bed this morning. Free and on the loose.
Love on You: A Bliss Brothers Novel Page 2