“Total drawback,” I managed. “Very impractical.”
His eyes crinkled, the ghost of a real smile haunting the edges. For half a second, we were standing there in the hallway with a shared joke instead of a shared disaster, and it almost felt easy again.
Almost.
I took a step back, my heel brushing the first stair. “I’m gonna, um ... change,” I said, gesturing vaguely upstairs. “Get warm.”
“Yeah,” he said, pushing off the doorframe. “I’ll make coffee.”
We moved at the same time and had to do that awkward little shuffle to get past each other in the narrow space. His shoulder brushed mine. The side of my hip clipped his thigh. The contact was quick and fully clothed and somehow still made my stomach swoop.
I didn’t look at him as I climbed, but I could feel his gaze on my back, hot and questioning and careful, like he was trying to memorize the distance we’d just agreed to put between us.
At the top of the stairs, I paused, fingers curving around the banister for a second longer than necessary.
My lips still felt swollen. My body still thrummed with the echo of his hands.
Friends,I reminded myself.
Right.
My heart rolled its eyes and continued doing cartwheels as I walked down the hall, careful like the floor might crack if I stepped wrong.
I shut my bedroom door with more force than necessary and pressed my back to it, like I needed the solid wood to keep me from sliding straight down to the floor.
The house was quiet again. No sleds. No shouting. No wild, reckless laughter ripped out of Wes Vaughn like the sun finally remembered how to rise. Just my heartbeat thudding in my ears and the echo of his mouth still humming under my skin.
I pushed off the door and crossed to the bed on autopilot, dropping face-first onto the covers. The comforter smelled like laundry detergent and the faintest hint of hay from Elodie’s farm, familiar and safe in a way my body absolutely did not feel. I flipped onto my back and stared up at the ceiling, trying very hard not to replay the last hour and failing almost immediately.
Snow spraying up around us. His laugh cracking open the cold. The weight of him beneath me, solid and unyielding. The way his hand had fisted in my coat and dragged me downwithout hesitation. The low, wrecked sound he’d made into my mouth like kissing me was both a relief and a problem.
Heat curled low in my belly. My thighs ached in a way that had very little to do with climbing the hill. I pressed the heels of my hands over my face and a soft, helpless noise escaped into my palms anyway.
“I told him it was a terrible idea while I was still tasting him,” I muttered, disgusted and a little impressed with myself.
Hayes’s face flickered in my mind—how he looked at Wes, the way he carried his guilt like it was welded to his bones. The thought of being the reason something cracked there made my stomach flip. I thought of Greg too—his quiet judgment, his colleagues’ mocking comments about my work, the way I’d ignored every red flag until they were the only color left. One failed engagement under my belt and here I was, catching feelings for a man who was healing from the kind of trauma that rewrote a person.
Every time I tried to focus on the reasons this was a bad idea—Hayes, the accident, Wes’s recovery, the fact that I lived across the hall from him like some walking temptation—my brain cut back to the feeling of his tongue sliding against mine. His hand on my neck.
We’d made an agreement. We’d been very mature and rational in the mudroom. Adrenaline. One-off. Brain malfunction. Roommates. Friends.
I rolled onto my side, then onto my back again, the wordfriendsrattling around in my chest like it had no idea where to land.
Friends,I told myself again.
Friends weren’t supposed to feel like that.