“Pierce!” Colin nearly flies out of the armchair he’s sitting in. His bad foot is resting on the ottoman, but he lets out a wince of pain as he tries to move it. I put my hand up to stop him.
“Sit down,” I say to Colin. Then I turn toward Pierce. “This is a conversation for you and your partner.”
“He’s already told me you’ve slept together. I just thought it would be fun to hear the dirty details. He won’t tell me those,” Pierce says with a wink.
“Then neither will I.” My tone is dry, and my expression is flat. Everything about this guy rubs me the wrong way. He seems to think he is at the center of the universe, and Colin and I are mere satellites in his orbit.
I can’t wait until this weekend is over and I never have to see him again.
“Oh, come on!” Pierce begs, taking his entire glass of whisky in one shot. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a jealous man. In fact, I think it’s incredibly hot, and I just want to hear what you two were like.”
“Don’t you see how personal that is?” Colin asks as he rubs his forehead.
“Personal?” Pierce asks, sounding offended. He looks at me and then back at his fiancé. “You told me it was just sex.”
My gaze snaps over to Colin as I wait for his response. He looks up sadly as he says, “It was.”
That really should not hurt as much as it does. Being served a dose of my own medicine. Isn’t that what I once told him? It was just sex.
It wasneverjust sex.
I wish I could scream that at him right now. But he’s using those words against me, and I know it. I can’t argue with him, not here and not in front of Pierce, but if he wants to know how it was never just sex, I’ll tell him. Let his bloody fiancé hear howjust sexit was.
“Oh, come on, Shakespeare,” I say. “Did you tell him how I was your first?”
Colin shoots me a surprised expression.
“Here we go,” Pierce says with an excited smile.
“Yes, I did,” Colin replies softly.
With a crooked grin, I continue. “Did you tell him about that night in the gymnasium when we were running from those rugby pricks?” I ask, never taking my eyes off Colin. His eyes are warm as he waits for me to continue.
“The night you put your mouth on me for the first time. I never would have believed you were inexperienced. Or the night in Dublin when you let me crawl into your bed. How you begged me to call you mine. Do you remember that night?”
“Of course I do,” he mumbles. His tongue darts out to lick his bottom lip before tugging it between his teeth.
“How many times did we havejust sexin Amsterdam?” I ask to make a point. Colin tries to bite back a smile, but I see it fighting to come through. “Twice a day, was it? No, maybe more.”
“Definitely more,” he says with a blush to his cheeks.
“We were both quite inexperienced, weren’t we? But we learned together.”
“Yes, we did,” he says. The connection between us is visceral, and I wonder if he can feel it too. “The houseboat wasn’t the only thing docked that week.”
A cackle flies out of my mouth, and he snickers to himself at his little pun.
This is dangerous. I don’t know why I’m doing this, reliving old memories and bringing up how good we used to be together.
“I bet you two were hot,” Pierce says, and it’s like being doused in ice-cold water. Suddenly, I realize he’s here, and it shakes me out of my reverie.
Standing up, I go back to the bar and pour myself another. Neither Colin nor I speak for a moment because we both got caughtup in our memories. And Pierce thought we were sharing those moments with him. I would never invite him into those memories.
“Sounds like us when we first met,” Pierce says, and the saccharine-sweet tone of his voice makes me sick. “Fucking like rabbits all day. I had you collared so fast, didn’t I?”
I nearly spit out my drink. “Collared?”
My Colin…collared?
