5
Veronica
What. The. Fuck?
“Lane!” I scold while pushing away from him. You can’t just kiss someone like that. What the hell was he thinking? One second we’re talking about Evan’s new garage and the next he cuts me off.
In the next second, I’m yanked up from my seat. I look to the hands gripping my waist and trace them back to the owner. It takes me a second to recognize the face but as soon as I see him my outrage morphs into curiosity. “Hayden?”
Everything happens so quickly, I think my head starts to spin.
“What the fuck, Hayden?” Lane cries angrily, standing from the other side of the table.
I look back and forth between the two men, piecing together their words. “You two know each other?”
“Yes,” Hayden grunts.
“From high school.” Though Lane’s smug smirk isn’t directed at me, his words are and I quickly assume there’s some kind of hidden meaning behind them. This doesn’t surprise me; Lane was a handful back then. He was popular because he was on the football team, not because he was likable.
“Wait, high school? I don’t remember him from high school.”
Our school was big, Lane was a couple of years ahead of me, but there’s no doubt in my mind that if Hayden ever strolled the halls of Bellemont High, I’d have noticed.
“Hayden went to Naperville High; he was their quarterback.”
Ah.
The meaning behind Lane’s words explains a lot more than the words themselves. It gives me a rough extent of the animosity between the two. Hayden was on the opposing football team - Bellemont’s rivals.
The Batman to our Superman.
“What are you doing here, Carmichael? You stalking Veronica?”
Hayden says nothing, only continuing to glare at Lane. I roll my eyes.
Honestly. Men.
I try shrugging out of the hand that is still wrapped around my wrist. That’s when I remember that Lane fucking kissed me. I momentarily forget about Hayden’s hold on me to turn on Lane. He doesn’t even notice because he’s locked in the testosterone match of the year.
My hand snaps out to slap him across his face, finally getting his attention on me - the woman fuming in front of him. At five-foot-seven, it’s not often that I feel any kind of small, but as I stand between Lane and Hayden, I’m just a bush between two trees.
“You kissed me!”
“I know.” He sulks, pathetically trying to sound like he’s actually sorry. I know he’s faking it because he did the same thing the last time he tried kissing me. It was back in high school as he tried to make his then-girlfriend jealous. I slapped him, warned him that if he ever did it againthatwould happen, and then I slapped him again for good measure.
This time I’ll let him off with just one. There was no tongue.
I turn back to Hayden with a crinkled brow. “It’s funny, I was just thinking about you.”
I don’t tell him that I was thinking about him as Lane kissed me, or that for those few seconds I was comparing notes. His kiss scored off the charts. I don’t know how he’s still single for that matter, with a mouth like that I can only imagine the female attention he must get.
Well, shit. Is he single?
That never came up during our one-night stand.
“Let’s go.”What?
Uhhh. “Excuse me?”
