I look down at her.
"Friends," I say.
She nods once, seemingly satisfied and we move on.
I wish it were that simple for the rest of it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BENNET
"Come in, Bennet. I'm not going to bite."
Jenn is leaning against her doorframe with her key already in the lock and a look on her face that is patient and a little amused. It’s doing absolutely nothing to help me figure out what my feet are supposed to do next.
Her gaze has dropped to my mouth a few times since we got in the elevator, and she's done that thing with her lips — a small, unconscious dart of her tongue — often enough that I've stopped pretending not to notice it.
This is the natural progression of things. I understand that academically. A decent date, easy conversation, the pier, the kiss for the photographer, an elevator ride up that had its own specific charge to it. This is what comes next. I know that.
And yet here I am, standing in the hallway like a man who has just discovered that knowing what comes next and being able to make his body cooperate with that knowledge are two entirely different problems.
The thing is, I'm not sure if I've always been this gawky about it or if I'm only now becoming fully sentient. For the better part of the last ten years, I've existed in a clear-cut kind of comfortable solitude — not lonely, I told myself, just selective — and the bad boy persona made that easy. Nobody tries to set upthe billionaire playboy. Nobody suggests he needs fixing when he looks like he's having the time of his life in every photograph.
The image I built was supposed to be a temporary solution, something to get people off my back for six months while I figured out what I actually wanted, and then six months became a year and a year became several and somewhere in there, the temporary solution became the entire structure of my social life.
It worked. It worked very well. And the cost of it, standing here right now outside Jenn's apartment, is that I have essentially no practice in any arena that matters.
The kissing I can do. Apparently. She didn't seem to have complaints on the pier, and the photograph looked convincing enough. But whatever comes after the kissing, the actual architecture of letting someone in, I have spent a decade very carefully not building those muscles, and it turns out muscles you don't use atrophy in ways that are difficult to explain.
Jenn is still watching me with that patient, slightly amused expression.
"I should go," I say.
She tilts her head in the way she does. "Okay."
"It's not — " I stop. Start again. "Tonight was good. It was sincerely good, Jenn."
"I know." She straightens off the doorframe. "You don't have to explain yourself, Bennet. We said friends." She shrugs, easy as anything. "Friends don't owe each other explanations at the door."
I look at her and feel something that is mostly gratitude and a little bit of shame and entirely too complicated to sort out in a hallway at eleven PM.
"The pediatric nursing thing," I say. "Do you like it?"
She blinks at the subject change, then smiles. "I love it. Why?"
"Just — " I shake my head. "Goodnight, Jenn."
"Goodnight, Bennet." She unlocks her door and pauses, looking back at me over her shoulder. "For what it's worth, I had a good time too. Weird. But good."
She goes inside.
I stand in the hallway for a moment longer than necessary, looking at her closed door, thinking about the ease of her — the way she asks what she wants to know and accepts what she gets and doesn't make any of it heavier than it needs to be.
I think about what it costs to be that open with another person.
Then I knock on her door.
She answers with a smirk, like she'd been standing on the other side of it waiting to see how long I'd last.
