“Oh yeah! Come on, Graveyard,” Lucca calls. “You got this.”
My friend is a little obnoxious. He, along with everyone else in the room, assumes that I am crazy about my wife. Why wouldn’t I be? I married the girl. And they are all, in fact, right. However, Lucca knows the truth about our marriage. He knows there’s never been anything physical between Stella and me. He knows we’ve been faking up until the point that my feelings got very real. And now he’s making a fool of himself.
Have I envisioned kissing Stella a time or two or twelve? Sure. But here, at a bar, surrounded by strangers and my team, playing a seventh-grade game? This isn’t exactly how I saw that kiss going.
I miss my mark, the black eight ball sitting on the edge of the pocket by a mile. And everyone stares at me, disdain in their eyes. Stella looks too, her cheeks red as a rose and her jaw tight.
But what was I supposed to do?
Next up, Lucca sinks his, and without bothering to draw from Fran’s bag, he dips Kelli, planting a kiss on the woman’s mouth.
Somehow Fran and I end up groaning in unison.
“I would have picked kiss,” Lucca says. “I always do.”
“My turn,” Fran says, missing her pocket by an inch. “Rose,” she says, eagerly passing her stick to her friend.
By round three, Callum has kissed Fran again, Zev has hugged Rosalie twice, Fran has cursed twice, Stella and I keep missing our pockets, and Lucca is officially Casanova.
“You’re either trying to be bad or you’re blind,” Zev says to me on round four. “How are you a Red Tail again?”
I don’t answer. I grumble out nothing and roll my eyes. It’s clear that Fran is attempting to get her friends together. But then I already thought they were. I really need to pay better attention. Tightening my hands over the stick, I hit that cue ball hard. It knocks into two balls, smashing into opposite pockets.
“About time,” Callum says under his breath.
“Oh yeah!” Lucca sings. “My boy is getting lucky.”
Fran is there in an instant, holding her trusty Ziploc up to me. I feel the heat of Stella’s eyes. I feel everyone’s eyes. I reach in, pull out three papers, let two fall to the ground, and open one. Then, not even making sense of the words, I pretend to read: “Kiss Rosalie.”
“Whoa—what?” Zev says, whipping his head back around to me.
Stella squeaks next to me.
“That’s what it says,” I tell him. Let’s get Fran’s shenanigans over with.
“Does it?” Fran’s lips press together as if she doesn’t remember. “That’s brilliant,” she whispers.
“Well, you aren’t kissing her.” Zev steps half in front of his girl as if he’s waiting for me to assault her.
“Then you better,” I tell him, slapping the slip into his hand.
“Graveyard,” Lucca groans. I have clearly disappointed him.
Callum laughs, and somehow, I can hear his Fran holding her breath—her soft inhale, and then nothing.
There’s a beat where no one speaks. No one moves. And then Zev’s cupping Rosalie’s cheek, peering into her eyes, and moving his mouth to hers.
I am so freaking jealous I can hardly stand it. Not of Rosalie, not of Zev. Just the fact that he gets to kiss his girl.
Thirty-Five
Stella’s beenquiet since Fran’s kissing game. She sits next to me, staring out the windshield of my car, silent.
I keep my eyes on the road. “Was that too much?” I stop myself from mentioning that it was her idea. I didn’t ask to go out tonight.
“Too much?” she says, and she sounds annoyed.
“Yeah. Like too much peopling?” That’s a thing, right? I swear I read that in one of Willow’s books.
