“Um. Yes. You.” He arched an eyebrow. “Am I wrong?”
I glared at him, then huffed. “I didn’t have to do them too often.”
“So, you learned, is what you’re saying.”
“Fuck you.”
He just snickered and sipped his coffee again. “I figured. So tell me more about your horse days.”
I did, filling him in on the hijinks and mishaps of that era of my life. Talking about it did nothing to quell my itch to get back in the saddle.
It also did nothing to distract me from how much I wished Eric was sitting over here instead of all the way over there. I wanted him leaning into me with my arm around his shoulders while we sipped coffee and talked.
If being with you is this easy and effortless, even knowing all the reasons we’re both single… shouldn’t that tell us something?
Yes, Jesse. It should tell us that we’re good at being friends.
There was that. We functioned well as roommates. We enjoyed each other’s company. We had fun together. All elements that pointed toward a great friendship.
The only complication was how much I wanted him, not to mention just how well I knew that sex with him wasspectacular.
It wasn’t that I was incapable of being friends with someone I’d been intimate with before. I was still friends with more of my exes than not, including the boy I’d lost my virginity to in high school and the first girlfriend I had in college. Sex didn’t have to complicate things.
Then again, the sex wasn’t what was complicating things with Eric. Not entirely. It was how we’d been so effortlessly intimate, and now we were back to arm’s length, and that distance felt sowrong. I really felt like we should’ve been on the same bench,cuddling against each other while we watched the fire and the sunset.
But he was over there. And I was over here.
And I didn’t know what to do with that.
CHAPTER 19
ERIC
Bang! Bang! Bang!
At first, I thought I was dreaming. Like I’d heard the sound in my dream, and it startled me so hard I woke up. But then, as I was blinking my eyes into focus in the thin morning light…
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“What the fuck?” I croaked.
One of the few coherent synapses in my brain connected, and I realized it was someone knocking furiously at the door downstairs. Maybe a neighbor in distress? Maybe there was a fire somewhere?
My pulse shot up and I flew out of bed. I pulled on a pair of sweats and hurried out of the room.
Jesse’s door opened as he came out too. “Is someone knocking?”
“Sounds like it. I’ll go find out.”
I headed downstairs with Jesse on my heels. Shame this place didn’t have a Ring camera, which was something to mention to the owner after I got back to Pittsburgh. Besides, it probably was just a neighbor, or someone who’d gotten lostlooking for another cabin. I didn’t smell any smoke, so that was a good sign. Hopefully.
I turned the deadbolt, opened the door, and?—
“You asshole!” My ex-fiancée shoved her phone in my face, the camera pointed directly at me. “You cancel our wedding and then run off to my dad’s cabin with your new boyfriend! You cheating son of a?—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I put up my hands. “Selena, you cheat?—”
“And there he is!” She pointed the phone past me, and when I glanced over my shoulder, Jesse was staring at her with wide eyes.
