“Hey, I’m supposed to be the childish one here,” he says. “Get your own thing.”
An actual laugh tumbles out my mouth, and Jack’s brows shoot up, looking as surprised to hear it as I am.
“I actually thought about you today,” he tells me, making my heart rate quicken a little.
I try to appear nonchalant. “Oh yeah?”
“Just something with the kid. Kyle. He fell on the ice and was really bummed about it. It made me think about what you said the other night.”
“Which part?”
“About how you can get back up even if you stumble,” he says.
“Oh.” I let my spoon rest against my lower lip, considering that. I hadn’t realized that anything I said had made that much of a difference to him. “Well, good. Now I won’t feel bad about the bill that I put in the mail for you.”
He chuckles. “You put a bill in the mail for me when you live across the hall?”
“I’m a professional,” I tell him seriously.
He laughs again, and the moment is just so…easy, that it sort of freaks me out. I can’t recall a single time I’ve ever had an easy moment like this with Jack Baker. It really is as if we might be becoming…friends. Even if friends don’t think about their friend’s nipples like I still kind of am.
“Oh, that reminds me,” he says, looking nervous suddenly. “I actually got you something. You know, as a thank-you.”
I go still. “You did?”
“Nothing major, I just saw it, and it reminded me of you, and—”
His neck flushes the more he talks; he finally just mutters the rest of whatever he’d been about to say as he moves to the edge of the counter and rifles around in one of the drawers.
“What, did you hide it?” I laugh.
He shrugs. “Couldn’t decide if it was weird that I got it.”
“Why would it be weird?”
“Because half the time, I don’t even know if we’re friends?”
He says it nonchalantly, but for some reason, I feel a wave of guilt crash over me when he does. It’s true that up until recently, we very much could be cemented in thenotfriendscategory, but…I don’t know. He did offer me a place to stay. He did listen to everything I had to say when he was spiraling. Hedidmake me BFF nachos.
“I mean…you’re currently sharing your ice cream with me straight from the tub,” I point out. “I think that might make us…kind of friends?”
His mouth quirks. “I can work with ‘kind of friends.’ ”
“It’s better than you insisting on meet-cutes and endgames.”
“I maintain that we had a fabulous meet-cute.”
“Do you even remember when you first met me?”
“I was in a towel talking about soap and my balls,” he says matter-of-factly.
I blanch. “That can’t be true.”
“Of course it is,” he insists. “You had come to see Ian, and we had run out of my usual bodywash, and all there was in thebathroom was this weird bar Ian uses, and I’m pretty sure it’s for his balls, so I said—”
“Okay, okay,” I say with a wince. “I do not want to talk about my brother’s balls.”
“But mine aren’t off the table?”
