The more I thought about it, the more my stomach hurt. I’d believed, just for a little while, that Kieran wanted something else from me.
Theboyfriend experience.
And some sad little lonely corner of my heart had thought that maybe, after all this time, he’d looked at me and seen what I wanted him to see all those years ago.
But that wasmybad, and it wasn’t what Kieran had said at all, andIwas the one who’d offered more.
It was Kieran’s prerogative not to take me up on it. I’d told him,his pace.
Obviously, his pace was a dead stop.
Taking a deep breath, I hit the buzzer and waited.
“Felix?” Kieran’s voice crackled through the speaker.
“You were expecting Santa, maybe?” I joked, trying to sound as teasing and light as I wanted to feel.
Kieran was still my best friend. We could stillbebest friends.
Any dumbass romantic ideas I might have had were, thankfully, stored safely away in my brain where he couldn’t see them.
“Not for another few months,” Kieran said. “And I hear he comes down the chimney.”
I wanted to make a joke about Santacomingdown the chimney, but nothing immediately sprang to mind.
How had I written six whole books?
The sound of the security door unlocking made me smile as much as Kieran’s voice did. Spring was in the air in Slow Falls, butspringwas a relative term in upstate New York, and the nights were still on the scarf-and-gloves side.
Neither of which I’d brought with me. I wasn’t even sure I owned gloves.
As I raised my hand to knock on Kieran’s actual front door, a bang and the unmistakable sound of an unhappy cat stopped me.
“Dammit,” Kieran swore on the other side, another thump punctuating the word. “I bring you into my home and you try tokillme?”
I hesitated a second more, and then knocked on the door, curiosity getting the better of me.
Kieran answered it, flushed and with his hair a little out of place, his hand already halfway to smoothing it back again.
“I have a confession to make,” he said, holding the door open wider to let me inside.
Standing on the coffee table was a familiar fluffy back shape.
“Hemingway?” I asked. “Or, uh… were you gonna call him—”
“No, Hemingway,” Kieran said firmly, closing the door behind me. “And he’s a she.”
I passed Kieran the bottle of wine I’d brought with me—the local convenience store’s most palatable-sounding red—and headed over to the coffee table without a second thought.
“I should’ve known,” I said, reaching out to offer her my hand to sniff. “You’remuchtoo sweet to be a boy.”
“Hey!” Kieran objected, drawing my attention back to him as Hemingway pushed her head into my hand.
At leastoneof us knew what we wanted.
“Present company excepted,” I said, which wasn’t even a lie. Kieranwassweet.
Which was why I was still thinking about the fact that apparently he was kind of a tomcat.
