“Am I not invited?” Aiden frowned, still not entirely awake.
He was so much softer than I’d ever seen him right now, sleepy and mussed. Not that I was exactlyintimidatedby him normally, but he seemed a hundred times more approachable when he’d just woken up.
“Uh. It’s not that you’re not invited.” I scratched the back of my neck. “Just thought I’d save you the ordeal.”
“Wasn’t the whole point of bringing me to saveyouthe ordeal?” Aiden raised an eyebrow.
I licked my lips. Maybe? The more I thought about what I was doing, the less I understood it.
The original plan had involved Kieran. My best friend, someone who I knew where I stood with.
Aiden was completely different, and I hadn’t planned for any of it.
Not, if I was being honest with myself, that I’d planned particularly well to take Kieran with me. It was more that…
“Gimme five minutes,” Aiden said, interrupting my thought process—which, to be fair, probably wasn’t going anywhere useful. He stood, stretched so that his t-shirt rode up and revealed a few dark hairs peeking over the waistband of his underwear, and then marched off to the bathroom while I was still staring.
I sat heavily on the couch, finding it still body-warm from Aiden, and played nervously with my phone.
It was just that I didn’t quite understand where I stood with Aiden. Which was stupid. He was treating me like a friend, and I should have been doing the same. Different as he was from me, I had no doubt he was a good friend to have.
“Will I do?” Aiden asked all of a sudden, startling me as I finished my seventh round of the match-three game on my phone that was there for when I was waiting nervously.
My mouth fell open.
Aiden had washed his face and slicked back his hair, and I couldn’t tell if he was wearing a thin ring of eyeliner or if his lashes were just that dark and thick naturally.
He’d taken off the worn leather jacket and shrugged on a fitted blazer in a washed out navy. Same jeans, same t-shirt, but he could almost have been a completely different person.
“Wow,” I said before I could think of anything less stupid to say.
Aiden’s whole face broke into a bright, warm smile. “What, you thought I was gonna spend the whole time letting you down?”
That was exactly what I’d thought. Not exactly that he was going to let me down, but that he was going to be the neighborhood problem child the whole time and my family was going to have to deal with it.
This was so much better, though. Now they’d have to deal with my hot, put-together boyfriend who’d won dozens of professional awards and scrubbed up really,reallywell.
And wouldn’t takeanyof their shit, unlike me.
A little thrill of excitement bounced around the pit of my stomach.
If thishadbeen for real, Aiden would have been completely out of my reach. He wouldn’t have looked twice at me, Kieran’s theory about him having a practically-lifelong crush notwithstanding.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Aiden grinned, eyes sparkling as he offered me his hand. “Come on. We’ll be late if you stare any longer.”
I wasstillstaring as he helped me up, marveling at the little nautical star on the knuckle of his index finger.
If Mom had put two and two together by now—or if Dad had spelled it out for her—this dinner was sure as hell about to be interesting.
* * *
“I didn’t catchwhat it is you do, Aiden,” Damien—Hallie’s soon-to-be husband—asked in the middle of an icy silence that had fallen after yet another pointed remark from my mom to my dad.
Damien was trying really,reallyhard not to run screaming from my family and had latched onto Aiden as a possible source of sanity.
“I’m a tattoo artist,” Aiden said between mouthfuls, without a single shred of shame. Not that he had anyreasonto be ashamed.
At a table full of lawyers, bankers, and managers, he might’ve been the only one of us with a soul.
