“I scooted.” She gestured to the empty space she’d cleared so he could sit. “The scoot implies that you are invited.”
“Scooting isn’t verbal confirmation.”
“You need verbal confirmation that I’m okay with you sitting next to me after I pointedly scooted? That’s ridiculous. When someone scoots, you know that it’s an invitation. Unless there’s some Russian thing where scooting means something else.” She thought on that for a second. “But that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Fuck, you’re cute.” The edge of his thigh brushed against her calf. His jeans to her corduroy.
Still, he didn’t sit. He just kept leaning. He was a leaner.
“Pointedly scooted,” he said under his breath with a chuckle.
“Um…” Smooth, Sadie, real smooth.
Roman did this thing with his lips that wasn’t really a smirk and wasn’t really a grin. It was more like a please-let-me-take-your-panties-off-for-you smile.
He started to turn his prior lean into a full sit when Sadie set her cup aside and held up her hands, palms to him. “Hold up.”
He held up.
“Whydoyou want to sit here?” Sadie asked, doing her best to put on a solid, untouched-by-all-that-was-himfacade.
“I was thinking it’s out of the way.” He lifted his shoulder. “The party’s getting crowded. Don’t much care for crowds.”
Oh. He was simply looking for a place to sit. Not because it was next to her. Well, that stung now, didn’t it?
The partywasgetting crowded though. A desert party with a couple of kegs. They weren’t high schoolers, so they didn’t need to come to the desert to have a party. But Roman’s brother Jase had decided this was what he wanted to do with this fine Friday evening. So they all tagged along.
Turned out, there werea lotof tagalongs.
Jase threw good parties.
“You wandered all the way over here because the party’s getting crowded? What’s wrong with sitting over by Jase? Don’t you want to spend time with your brother?” Sadie never tried to be argumentative. But that didn’t mean that her family hadn’t been telling her from the time she could form a solid word-string that she had a future as an attorney.
Sadie was just…Sadie. She didn’t like to think of herself as contrary, she just required an abundance of clarification. Was that so bad?
Roman didn’t seem to mind.
He didn’t move. He didn’t sit, either. He just stared at her with the panty-removal grin.
“You’renot sitting by Jase,” he said. “And I’ve been thinking it’d be nice to catch up.” Roman crossed his arms, amusement dancing in the gleam in his eyes.
That was a better answer, at least.
It wasn’t,I’m just trying to escape the throngs of people. And this seat is available.
She turned fully toward him, which meant there was more leg-to-leg contact, but she was going to go with it.
“Catching up,” she said, “would imply that we’ve spoken more than two sentences to each other in all of the time we’ve known each other.”
Spoiler alert, they hadn’t. Sure, through friends of friends and friends of family, they had seen each other around. She was fairly certain that if he would run into her at the Cherry Creek Mall parking lot, then he’d probably help her out if her car didn’t start. But given that Roman Dvornakov would probably never be caught dead at any place that involved shopping, that wasn’t a likely scenario.
“Do you always argue like this?” he asked.
“I’m not arguing, I’m just asking questions. And yes, generally, I do ask a lot of questions. It helps me find answers.”
“I’ll play.” Suddenly, he was the picture of intensity. “The first time I saw you was when Eli dropped my brother off at the house and you were in the backseat of the car.”
Holy crapola. He remembered that?He remembered that?
