Chris’s eyes widened. “Oooh, look at Mr. Big Shot standing up for what he deserves. I like it. You should do that more often.”
I laughed, feeling lighter than usual. Instead of taking his words as a jab, I took them as encouragement to continue standing up for myself.
Chris let go of my hand and sat back in the booth, taking a slow sip of his beer and studying me. “You seem to be in a good mood. Did you do something fun last night?”
I thought back to my night. The word fun was woefully inadequate.
“Yes.” I couldn’t help but smile like a lunatic.
“Spill,” he said with a laugh. “This isn’t like you. Did a new Star Wars movie come out or something?”
“I…” I hadn’t intended to tell him. In fact, I’d been relishing keeping FlyGuy all to myself. But when Chris mentioned a new movie as the probable excitement in my life… well, I couldn’t stand not correcting him. “Last night I had sex with the hottest guy ever,” I blurted.
We stared at each other across the table for several long beats before the server arrived with the giant wings platter.
“Enjoy, fellas,” she said before racing off again.
I reached for a little plate from the stack and began selecting wings from the platter to put on it.
“You… what?” Chris asked with an awkward chuckle. “Dude, you never talk about your sex life. I was beginning to wonder if you were even getting any.”
I shrugged and bit into a piece of chicken. “You know me. I don’t kiss and tell.” I met his eyes to see if my words meant something to him. To see if they reminded him of the time we’d made out at Wesley Kincaid’s house the night of his older brother’s pool party. Chris had convinced me that telling anyone we’d kissed would ruin his future at the family business.
It hadn’t stopped him from kissing me in secret every chance he’d had. No, that had come when I’d shown up at his college dorm room to surprise him for his birthday and found he was already being well celebrated by a woman and a man in bed. I’d learned the hard way that it wasn’t necessarily my gender that was the problem, it was my desire for commitment and loyalty.
Chris simply wasn’t ready yet. And if I ever came across actual wild oats, I planned on burning them with poison fire.
“But you’re kissing and telling now,” he said. “Why the change?”
I took another bite of my food to keep from admitting the real reason, that it had been the first thing to tell. “You asked,” I said simply, realizing another truth. He’d never wanted to hear about my hookups, and now that I thought back on the past several years, I saw the truth of it plain as day.
“Are you dating this guy?” He selected another wing from the platter as if this was all just a normal conversation between bros. “Gonna see him again?”
There was no doubt in my mind I wanted to, but I’d shot myself in the foot with my insistence on anonymity. After offering the guy a chance at a complete no-strings connection, I could hardly go crawling back begging for his name and phone number now. In fact, I’d had to delete my entire account from the app just to keep from doing exactly that.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It was just a hookup.” The noise in the pub had gotten louder since we’d sat down, and there were more people crowding around the bar nearby. I began to feel oddly jittery.
“Good,” Chris mumbled between bites. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.
“What? Why?”
He shrugged. “You know how you are. You probably already have feelings for the guy. And if it was just a hookup, the last thing he’s looking for is a relationship.” He continued to eat his food while I watched him. When he realized I wasn’t eating, he stopped and wiped his hands off on a napkin before sighing.
“Teo, you have a bleeding heart. It’s one of the reasons I love you. But it gets you into trouble, and I hate seeing you hurt.”
His comment hit me like a slap in the face with a pillow. On the one hand, he told me he loved me. On the other, he was implying… what? That the man wouldn’t want more than a hookup with me?
“What does that mean, exactly? That I’m not relationship material?” I glanced around the bar out of habit to make sure there wasn’t anyone we knew there. “Because I’m pretty clear on that after ten fucking years of you sending me the same message.”
Chris’s brows shot up. “Woah, what the fuck? How is this suddenly about us?”
“I’m tired of waiting.” There, I’d said it. “I’m ready to settle down. With or without you.”
My entire body felt like it had been jolted by a stun gun. I practically vibrated from nerves now that the unintended ultimatum had been thrown out there.
Chris took his time cleaning his hands with a little wet wipe from a packet on the table before looking up at me. “Come to work with me, and let’s see how we do spending that kind of time together.”
I searched his expression for more meaning than his words were giving me. “Then what? What if we do well?”
His face relaxed into a warm smile, the same affection he’d given me consistently over the years and the expression that had always made me feel seen. “If we do well, I’ll ask you out on a date. A real one.”
He knew me well enough to know what my next question would be, so he held up a hand to stop me. “And I’ll tell my father about it. About us.”
It was too good to be true. “Really?”
Chris reached out and grasped my hand again, squeezing it with reassurance. “Really. But in the meantime, we’re just friends and coworkers, okay? I don’t want to rush things.”
“Meaning…?”
“If you and I are going to be together soon, that means this is your last chance to sleep with anyone else,” he said with a chuckle, sitting back in the booth and running a hand through his hair. When his eyes finally met mine again, he looked determined. “Because when we finally get together, I’m not going to want to share you with some random anonymous fuck from a hookup app.”
I walked out of there later that night feeling lighter than air, like I was finally on the cusp of having everything I’d ever wanted. Maybe the job wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned when I’d become a nurse, but if I was soon to be part of the Banks family, I could probably change the position to be what I wanted it to be. And it would be worth it if I finally got to be with Chris.
I fell into daydreaming about my new life with Chris and how long it would take working together before he’d ask me out. Somehow, though, before falling asleep, my mind drifted back to FlyGuy and how his large, warm hands had felt moving over every inch of my body.
I tried to replace him in my memories with Chris, but it didn’t work. When I finally fell asleep, it was the handsome stranger from the hotel room that made love to me all night long.
6
Jack
By the time I finally landed in South Bend for an overnight stopover long enough to visit my sister and Kirk in nearby La Porte, I thought I’d be over my silent hookup.
I was not.