“Didn’t answer my question.”
I like that he cares, and I duck my head with a smile, caught off guard by that thought. Wilde has always been the closed-off protector, but since he started his relationship with Hudson, I’m getting glimpses of another side to him.
A side that might have answers.
“Wilde … what’s love like?”
That shocks him so much that his gray eyes fly wide. “Love?” His expression closes off, like he’s far away, something brewing behind his eyes that’s the complete opposite of what fills Kennedy’s when he talks about it. “Love is pain and disappointment. The second you love someone, you have something to lose, and more often than not, you’re going to lose it.”
He shoves through the Cutty front door, and I watch him go, wondering if he’s ever voiced those thoughts to Hudson. I can’t imagine anyone related to Kennedy would feel the same way.
Then again, what would I know?
Wilde was speaking from experience, and given the mix of good and bad highs I have with Kennedy, he might be right. I can’t say the way I feel about him doesn’t hurt sometimes.
I join the others, sharing Viv’s plate of cookies and letting their voices wash over me. My gaze flows from one of them to the next, trying to guess who out of us has been in love before.
And knowing that there’s no way I’ll ever ask.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
KENNEDY
“It still makes absolutely no sense to me,” I confess. When Ziggy didn’t show up the day after our, uh,moment, I was worried we were back to him avoiding me, so when he walked in this morning, I didn’t play it anywhere near as cool as I should have.
Ziggy trails his finger back along the wire, then points at where one of the lights will be. I’ve still got nothing. I widen my eyes at him, trying to convey my confusion without words. Communicating without talking really isn’t as easy as he makes it look.
Case in point: thereally?look he sends my way.
I give him a halfhearted shrug that I’m hoping says,I’m clueless, what can you do?
He studies me for so long I worry that he didn’t read me right, but then his gaze dips back to the red wire, and he runs his finger down the length again. “It’s a trail. Leading the electricity from one point to the next.”
“Ohh …” There are a lot of trails though, and while Ziggy obviously knows what he’s doing in here, I’m clueless.
Hammering comes from next door, where Hudson is working, and I think he’s picked up enough to know that when Ziggy’s here, he shouldn’t be. I’m hopeful that it won’t always be like this, but after how they met, there’s a distinct change in Ziggy when Hudson’s around. Like he closes himself off even more.
This, right here, is the Ziggy I like the most. Confident and teasing. It’s killing me not to know the thoughts going through his mind after the other night, but he’s doing exactly what we agreed to. Back to friends. Totally normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except that’s a fucking lie because every time he’s not looking at me, I’m looking at him. And I’mlookinglooking. He doesn’t give much away under his clothes. They hang off him, almost like he’s raided Wilde’s wardrobe and never bought a thing for himself. The T-shirts hang off him like a sack, and his pants are bunched up and pulled in tight at his waist. Even that doesn’t stop me.
Because I can still glimpse the smooth dip of his neck every time his hair shifts, can still see his capable hands and remember the way they felt wrapped around my dick. And whenever I catch a glint of that tongue piercing, it’s like I can feel the smooth metal rolling over my cockhead. For a man who was certain that friends were the way to go, my brain has a lot to answer for.
Especially when he groans, hands pressed to his lower back as he arches it, and all I can see is the way his hips tilt forward and picture the cock I know is nestled inside.
I really need to get over this. I yank my eyes away from him and pace toward the back of the house, looking out toward the hill towering over the town. The hill is pretty. Special. Lots andlots of trees. A very great, wonderful thing to look at. That isn’t Ziggy.
Because I’ve gone and overestimated myself. I might have been able to be friends with him for this long because I didn’t know he was interested in me, but now I know, it’s like the chains are off. Everything he does is designed to make my brain get stuck on him. He’s beautiful, inside and out. The kind of man I could see myself settling down with and?—
No.
No, no.
Fucking stop it.
I’m half a second away from thumping myself in the forehead to wake up any sleeping brain cells. I always do this. There’s interest, so that must mean it’s forever. I’m not diving into those thoughts again.
