I swallowed.
“I’ll have a beer and the steak,” I said.
“What beer would you like?” he asked, his pen scratching out notes.
I cleared my throat. “Whatever the house beer is or whatever.”
He nodded and moved on, leaving me staring at the table and wishing it would swallow me up.
No one had noticed, right?
I was miserable, but I knew it was only my own fault. I could have just sat next to him in the first place. Maybe I should have.
But…
I’d been single for so long. And if I went and sat with Brody and openly flirted with him and didn’t try to hide the fact that we were fucking, everyone would know. They would all be talking about us. I didn’t want everyone to be all interested in my business, and I definitely didn’t want to overshadow Keaton and Olly on their special bachelor party trip.
“Hey, Ace,” Xavi said, leaning around from the other side of Aiden to get my attention, and I ignored him. “Hey!”
I looked up and met his eyes on purpose, then deliberately turned around in my seat. “What did I miss after I had to go?” I asked Taeho, making sure Xavi knew I was in no way interested in conversation with him at all.
And there it was – the lie in my own excuses.
Because if it was really just about not making a scene and taking attention away from the happy couple, then I wouldn’t have ignored Xavi so openly.
If I was really trying to preserve the peace, I wouldn’t antagonize the one person here who I knew was definitely most likely to kick up a fuss and start a fight if he didn’t get his own way. Xavi was a brat and I was openly humiliating him.
If it was really all about that, I would have politely listened to him and then found an excuse to get out of the conversation – I wouldn’t have turned my back on him.
It wasn’t about that at all.
The truth that I didn’t want to admit even to myself – the truth that screamed at me as I tried and failed to listen to Taeho’s long-winded yet animated description of their second paintball battle – was that I was afraid.
I wasn’t brave enough to sit with Brody. I wasn’t brave enough to let it be something that would last longer than this weekend.
And I wasn’t even brave enough to admit to myself that this was almost definitely going to hurt – all because I was too scared of the greater pain that might come later if I got out of my own way.
Brody
Sitting there at dinner, making polite small talk to a guy I barely knew, I looked up at Ace. I looked up at him, sandwiched between his friends, where he’d deliberately sat to avoid me – leaving me with the short straw.
I remembered his voice telling me this was just a casual weekend thing.
And I decided then and there I wasn’t going to put up with it.
I wasn’t going to let him walk all over me – use me. I was going to stand up for myself and tell him that if he wanted casual sex, he was going to have to find it somewhere else.
And then we all stood up from dinner, and Ace sent me this dark, secret look across the table when someone said something about going back to our rooms so we could get enough sleep for tomorrow, and a shiver went all the way down my spine.
All the way to my dick, which twitched in my pants at the mere thought of getting my hands on him again.
That was when I knew I was in trouble.
I swallowed hard, nodded goodbye to the others who caught my eye or clapped my shoulder as they headed past me, and then fell into step with Ace as we walked out of the dining room. We were all going back to the same place – apart from Xavi, who ignored everyone else and made a beeline for the bar – but we ended up walking in pairs that pretty closely matched our room assignments.
At least the fact that everyone else was doing it made it seem normal that we were, too. Just two friends heading back to their room. To their two separate beds.
If he was so ashamed about being seen with me, at least this excuse gave us a reason to walk side by side for a little while – a chance for me to pretend he didn’t feel that way at all. He’d made it pretty clear by sitting apart from me that he was only interested in one thing from me – fucking and nothing else.
