The overhead speaker comes on for an announcement. “Crosscheck complete. Flight attendants, please take your seats.” Wow, somehow we missed the entire safety demonstration and we’re already waiting to take off.
It’s damn near midnight now, so when we get in the air, the cabin lights are turned off. I lean my head back thinking the exhaustion will overtake me since this was a bit more than a twenty-four-hour trip, but I’m wide awake.
“I don’t think I can sleep,” Nash says.
I can’t blame her after winning a championship. “I don’t expect you to. What do you want to do, instead?”
There’s something different about her. This Nash with her hair spilling around her shoulders looks like she’s ready to take what she wants. It’s making me feel too hot. I reach up and adjust my little air conditioner, pointing it straight toward my face.
I startle when Nash’s phone lands with a loud clunk on the ground. When her hand lands firmly on my thigh as she leans over me to reach for it, I go completely still. I don’t know what to do with her hand there, and I desperately do not want her to move it. It lasts about five agonizing seconds before she sits up straight and the loss of her hand feels like the loss to SanFrancisco in the playoffs earlier this year. Like I can feel everything slipping through my fingers.
“Got it,” she says with a little laugh, and it’s all I can do to smile back while I try to calm my racing heart. The glimmer in her eye makes me think she knows exactly what she’s doing right now.
“Ow. Fuck.” I grab my leg where the metal refreshments cart hit my shin, tucking my leg back inside the space of my seat and out of the danger zone.
The flight attendant—clueless to my pain—is downright chirpy. “Do you need a refill?” She points to the empty cup in my left hand.
“Yes, please.”
As she refills, she looks to Nash. “Something for you, honey?”
“Sprite, if you’ve got it, please.”
I take my drink back from the flight attendant whose nametag says Beth. Then I lean back in my seat when Nash reaches for her Sprite. Somehow their hands don’t make solid connections, and the Sprite is quickly falling…right into my lap.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” Nash is taking the measly napkin still left in her hand and attempting to pat my lap dry with it. Her hand is so, so close to where I’ve always wanted it to be. My hips fly up off the seat at her touch. When she looks at me confused, I mutter, “It’s cold.”
Beth comes to my rescue with a handful of paper towels, and I proceed to dry myself off. Could have been worse. Could have been hot coffee.
Until I realize my cock is pressing against the zipper of my jeans. That’s definitely worse.
How long is this fucking flight again?
Chapter Forty-Three
NASH
I have no idea what’s gotten into me. Nine years of friendship and all of a sudden, I don’t know how to act around this man. It’s like I closed my eyes when the referee blew the whistle on the last point of the game, and when I opened them, I saw everything clearly. Gone was the friend whom I’d toss popcorn at during a movie, and in its place was a man I’d love to toss my panties at. He’s always been there, big and fit and sexy, but when the confetti fell, I looked at him and realized this was never fake to me.
The flight attendant moves on to the next row and I stuff the ruined napkins in the seat pocket in front of me. “Sorry about that.”
“Nash,” he says, and it’s like he’s calling me to look at his eyes and see the need there. “What are you doing to me?”
Our heads are so close I can feel the whisper of his breath move my hair as he speaks. Just the stupid little armrest between us. With the cabin lights so dimmed and the whole plane near silent, aside from the steady rhythm of the engines, it’s like we’re the only people here. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t keep resisting you like this. Watching you tonight…touching me like this,” his breath is a heavy whoosh as he struggles to find words. “I want things I know I can’t have.”
“What makes you think I don’t want the same?” The words tumble out of me. The air around us bends and constricts as we take each other in. On the precipice of making a leap we’ve both been avoiding for five years since the kiss that changed my life.
Are we about to have this much-needed conversation at thirty-thousand feet? I look at Wyatt’s lips—warm and welcoming—then back to his eyes, which are as blue as the sky was when I got up this morning.
I think we are.
“When you kissed me–”
“Nash, we don’t have to do this.” The look in his eyes is pleading, like he can’t stand to hear what I’m about to say.
“Wyatt…we do need to do this. When you kissed me, it was the best kiss of my life. I laid awake all night thinking about it. Replaying it over and over in my head. Thinking about the way you felt, the warmth soaking through your shirt into my hands on your chest. I woke up the next morning, exhausted already and facing a twenty-one-hour travel day. I figured you’d be at my door the next morning, but you weren’t. I figured you’d call when I landed in Rome, but you didn’t. After a week went by and you never mentioned the kiss, I shoved all my feelings down. I put them away so that we could continue to have this friendship, a friendship that means everything to me. And that’s where it’s been ever since.” I put my hand in his where it rests on his leg. “Until tonight.”