Page 38

I scowl at my phone for a few moments before tapping out a response.
Me: So what?
Tess: Quit being a dick.
You and PP—did it happen?
PP. Predictable Patrick. I look over the foot of my bed, at the wall Patrick’d had me pushed against last night, his face buried between my legs. I can still feel him pressed against me. Moving inside me... not even Nostradamus could’ve predicted that.
Me: yes
Tess: OMG!! FINALLY!! I want details.
Scratch that. I deserve details! Plus, you
owe me lunch. I can take my break around
2.
The last thing I want to do is go into detail with anyone about what happened last night. Any other guy—sure. But this isn’t any other guy. This is Patrick.
Me: K. Meet me down stairs?
Tess: c u @ 2
I won the bet!!
I set my phone back down and get out of bed because if I lay here for one more second, thinking about him, I’m going to go crazy. I reach for my robe, actually tried to put it on before I remembered what had happened to it. I lifted it to my nose and breathed deep. It smells like him. Like us.
Hanging the shredded robe on its hook, I pull on a pair of boxers I stole from Patrick’s laundry a few weeks ago. They were blue paid, worn thin and soft. I don’t even know why I’d taken them other than the fact that they were his.
Adding a baggy white T-shirt before throwing my hair into a quick ponytail, I finally gather the courage to open my bedroom door. The apartment is quiet, Patrick’s bedroom door firmly shut. He’d been drunk last night. Drunk enough to bring one of Gilroy’s cocktail waitresses up here for a quickie.
I want to be mad at him for it but I can’t—not really. I’m the one who’d pushed him after all. Maybe if I’d just been honest about what I wanted instead of agreeing to play Tess’s head games, things would’ve happened differently.
Or maybe they wouldn’t have happened at all.
Irrational me rears her ugly head, urging me to justify the damage I’d done. The delicious ache between my legs helped convince me that irrational me is right. I got what I was after. Sure, Patrick was angry but he’d get over it. I just have to find a way to apologize and set things right.
In the kitchen, I make coffee before poking around in the fridge for a few minutes. Finally finding a yogurt, I shut the fridge just as I hear the front door to our apartment open. A quick glance over my shoulder tells me that Patrick isn’t hungover and he isn’t sleeping. Despite tying one on last night and everything that happened after, he looked normal—like he did every morning.
He looks fantastic.
“Morning,” he says, stopping just inside the door to kick off his running shoes.
Knowing he left after what happened, I expected to catch him doing the walk of shame in last night’s rumpled clothes, I’m surprised to see him in workout clothes, like it was any other Saturday morning. “Good morning,” I say in a voice that’s surprisingly steady considering I suddenly can’t get the image of the two of us pressed against my bedroom wall out of my head.
Moving across the living room in my direction, he snags the hem of his fitted tank and drags it up over his head, tossing it into the basket of dirty clothes he has parked by the coffee table. It’s all a part of his Saturday routine. Workout. Laundry. ESPN until his eyes glaze over.
Predictable Patrick.
“You’re up early for a Saturday,” he says, giving me that same easy, gorgeous smile he’d given me yesterday morning and every morning since the day I moved in. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
Last night he’d been angry. Unwilling to talk about what happened. Unwilling to let me explain. Less than twelve hours later, it’s like it’d never happened.
I want to ask him when he came home—if he came home—last night but I don’t. I’m not his girlfriend. We fucked, once. One mind-blowing, earth-shattering time. Who he was with and where he went afterward is none of my business. Instead, I turn around, yanking open the silverware drawer for a spoon. “No—” I say, my face hot. Had I dreamt it? Had he been so drunk last night that he doesn’t remember what happened? Thinking about it, the ache between my thighs grew warm and heavy. “Tess texted me.”
“Oh.” He laughs while squeezing into our tiny kitchen, his smooth, muscular chest bare and slick with sweat, brushing past me on his way to the fridge. “I bet she’s chomping at the bit to know what happened last night.”