Felix chuckled, stuffing both hands in the hoodie’s pockets. “Tell that to my impostor syndrome.”
“Youareincredible,” I said. “How many books do you have out?”
“Five,” Felix said. “But I’ve written six. Working on number seven now.”
“Can I read them?”
“You hate reading,” Felix said. “It gives you a headache.”
“Yeah, turns out I needed glasses and not mentioning the headache thing to a responsible adult was a mistake.”
“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”
I snorted as we pulled up outside Slow Falls’ best diner. Best of two, but still best.
I liked the other one just fine, but I didn’t want Felix’s first impression of my new hometown to be his elbows sticking to the counter.
“You gotta tell me about these books,” I said, climbing out of the car. “Because Iamgonna read them.”
“I’ll tell you,” Felix promised. “When you put food in front of me.”
3
Felix
These werethe best cheese fries I’d ever had in my life, hands down, no competition.
Not least of all because of the company I got to eat them with.
It wasincrediblyunfair that Kieran had grown up hot. The same—to use a horrible cliché—emerald green eyes, the same warm smile, the same familiar face, but with sharper, more defined angles now.
And biceps as thick as my thighs. Thicker, maybe. Kieran was still stripped down to the eye-searingly bright peach muscle shirt he’d been wearing under the hoodie I’d stolen from him, but he looked good in it. Tanned despite the weather, comfortable in his own skin, healthy and happy.
I wanted to crawl into his lap and sleep against his beautifully-defined chest for, like, a month.
Even more unfair was that he was treating me as though no time had passed at all since we’d last seen each other. We were picking up right where we left off, just when I needed a friend the most.
That awkward crush I’d had on him when we were younger? That’d just woken up at full force.
“I hope you didn’t want this hoodie back,” I said between mouthfuls, hungrier than I’d thought I was. Breakfast hadn’t happened this morning, and I was struggling to remember whether or not dinner had.
Not that it wasunusualfor me to only remember to eat maybe once a day, but I’d also had a long trip and a lot of stress—more than usual—already.
“Consider it yours,” Kieran said. “Plenty more where that came from.”
“Good, because it’s comfy and I live in it now. Like a hermit crab.”
Kieran snorted between bites of his grilled cheese and ham sandwich, which also looked incredible.
The bottomless coffee and comfy booths made this a tempting place to work, too. It’d make a change from a coffee shop, though I’d seen one of those on the way here, and a bakery, too.
Maybe this wasn’tquitethe barren edge of the world.
“Promised to tell me about those books,” Kieran reminded me.
“They’re dumb,” I said automatically.
“No they’re not,” Kieran corrected just as quickly. “And that shouldn’t be the first thing you tell people, anyway. Like, even if they’reterrible, at leasttellme they’re good.”
