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I didn’t have time to ogle; Hayden’s fingers slipped through mine and hauled me inside.

“Wait, what are you-”

“I need a friendly face to keep me company for a little while,” she said with a shrug. “And yours is the only friendly face I wanna see right now.”

Despite myself, my heart fluttered, my breaths turning short and desperate. “You’re drunk,” I managed to say, tearing my eyes away from the seductive glint in Hayden’s green eyes.

“Just a little,” she admitted, holding up her thumb and forefinger to show me. “Not drunk enough to hang out, though.”

“Hang. Out?” I tested the words on my tongue. They were foreign, tempting.

Way too tempting.

She dragged me into a sprawling living room, the walls lined with abstract paintings and sculptures that imitated flowing water. But my eyes remained fixed on her swaying back, my body all too aware of our linked fingers in front of me.

She fell onto a luxuriously soft sofa and pulled me down with her. Almost immediately, she lay her head down in my lap, her eyes slipping closed with a sigh of contentment. My breath caught in my throat as I stared down at her, hands hovering a few inches above her body because…

What the hell was I supposed to do?

Hayden had made it clear time and again that she wasn’t interested in being with me. And I’d told her I wasn’t interested in one night stands.

But her curls fanned out across my thighs, her head tipped back slightly, lips parted on a quiet sigh. My heartbeat quickened and heat pooled in the pit of my gut.

“See?” Hayden murmured. “This isn’t so bad, right?”

How could I refuse when she looked so… peaceful.

For the first time in the many weeks since our meeting, the tension that clung to the space between her brows and the outside of her eyes had smoothed out.

“I guess you’re right,” I breathed. I lifted my hand to brush a few curls from her face but thought better of it, laying it across the back of the sofa instead. “So, are you gonna tell me why you went out to get smashed and ended up at the store?”

She shrugged a little, her eyes still closed. “It’s been a rough couple days,” she muttered, her lip curling in annoyance. “I thought a drink might take the edge off, and one drink led to two, led to…”

“I get it.” I chuckled, shaking my head. “Do you want some water or, I don’t know, black coffee?”

Hayden’s face pulled into a frown. “I don’t like black coffee,” she grumbled. “Just stay and talk to me.”

“Okay,” I murmured, settling back into the sofa. “I can do that.”

Again, the creases of tension in her face smoothed out and the corners of her lips twitched.

Hayden

The very first thing that told me I’d made a mistake was the dull pounding in the back of my skull.

The second: light seared right through my closed eyelids, burning my retinas and forcing a hiss through my teeth.

The third…

“Are you awake yet?”

Against my better judgment I peeled my eyes open, and found myself staring straight into Frankie’s eyes.

Every frantic nerve and jarred muscle in my body went still. Her thighs were soft beneath my thudding head. Ringlets of molten lava curled around her face, pink with sleep, her eyes soft as they stared down at me.

My chest squeezed and I lifted my hand, pressing it to her cheek. “You’re so beautiful,” I murmured, my limbs melting under her gaze. The pink in her cheeks flushed darker, her eyes darting away shyly.

“Are you still drunk?” She chuckled, her lashes brushing the tops of her freckled cheeks.