I held on to him for a few minutes before pulling back and looking into his eyes. He looked a lot more tired than I’d realized all week. He was truly torn up about this.
“Jace? Will you hold me for a while and pretend that we aren’t too afraid to say what we really feel? Just for tonight?”
He closed his eyes slowly and nodded before opening them again, the shine of moisture unmistakable.
He leaned back onto the couch and put his arm around me as I curled into his side and convinced him to watch my guilty pleasure,Love in the Wild,aSurvivormeetsThe Bachelorreality show that he always complained about.
He didn’t complain tonight though, just got up to pour two glasses of wine and then settled back in with his arm around me and my body pressed tight to his until it was time for me to pick up Kaylee. When we said goodbye, I promised to talk to Kayden after their meeting on Monday afternoon. I gave Jace one last hug, wondering when we’d be able to give into the desire to be more than friends.
Chapter Seventeen
Kayden
I stepped into theelevator at Acker Real Estate, excited but also a little nervous about seeing Jace. I’d reached out to him a few times over the last week, but he’d been working late every night. When he’d said he was also busy on Saturday, I figured I’d wait to see him today to find out if everything was okay.
It was hard not to worry that he might be avoiding me after the incident with Olivia. If she’d told him details about our night together, it was possible he was avoiding me while trying to figure out how to handle that information.
The possibility of being rejected by him stung. I felt something for him that I wasn’t used to feeling, and I wanted to see where we could go. Maybe that wasn’t fair, given I was asking him to crawl back into the closet with me, but I was pretty sure he felt it too, and he seemed willing to move at my pace.
At least, that’s what I’d thought until I’d seen him with Olivia. The way he’d frozen in place when she touched him like his body was a livewire and the way he’d looked sick after I told him we’d hooked up had made it obvious there was more to their friendship than he let on. To say I’d been spinning out about it over the weekend and what it meant for our relationship would be an understatement.
I’d tried to talk to Olivia briefly on the way out of the office after my last meeting with Jace, but she’d brushed me off, telling me there wasno need. I hadn’t fully processed seeing her again at the time and I hadn’t pushed the topic, but after a week to sit with it, I couldn’t reconcile the way we’d parted that night with her current chilly demeanor.What had changed for her in the last four years?
I was planning to make sure that she and I were on better footing today. If she was important to Jace, then it was important to me that she and I both felt comfortable around each other. Plus, I just couldn’t bear the thought of there being any hard feelings between us.
Hopefully we’d all feel more settled today and Jace wouldn’t be concerned anymore. Though a part of me hadn’t been able to shake the way I’d noticed him looking at her the same way he looked at me and what that meant.
As far as the rehab facility was concerned, the designs were in good shape. I had two options for Jace to review, and both had taken me a lot more time than I’d expected. I’d ended up working late last night to finish the second option after an idea had hit me late in the afternoon. And as much as I missed Jace, I had a couple of other client deadlines this week, so his avoidance had probably been for the best since it allowed me to catch up on work. Plus, there was the afternoon I’d spent with my father trying to help him sort out his medications. An experience in which I’d been subjected to enough emotional abuse to remind me why I hadn’tvisited in years. It had taken me a full day to recover from that, most of which I’d spent wondering why I didn’t just walk away from him again.
I stepped off the elevator and Olivia turned toward me in her desk chair.
“Good morning,” I said, watching as her nose ring glimmered in the light above. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had on a pair of leopard print boots. My dick twitched at the sight of her and the memory of our night together.
“Hey.” She gave me a tight smile. “Jace is just finishing up a call with his boss, Martin. I reminded him you were next but sometimes they run over.”
“That’s okay,” I said, stopping at her desk. “I was hoping we could talk again.”
“You can have a seat.” She gestured to the chair in front of her.
I glanced at the corner office, feeling unsettled. Olivia picked up her phone and fired off a text message.
“You don’t have to text him. I don’t mind waiting,” I said as I sat across from her.
She scoffed. “Trust me, he pays me to bug the hell out of him. He’s been on time to more meetings in the last week than ever in his life. People are talking about it.”
I chuckled. “Is he usually that bad?”
“According to the rumor mill around here, Jace Cohen is notoriously late,” Olivia said. Her ponytail swished across her back and her eyes softened in the same way they had the night we met. My memory had not been doing her justice. She was far more beautiful than I’d remembered, and it was nice to see her less shaken up than the last time I was here. “He’s never late when I need him though, so maybe everybody’s just full of crap.”
“He’s never been late for our meetings either,” I said. “Maybe he’s only late for the people he doesn’t want to see.”
She laughed and looked at her watch. “We’ll see. Two minutes and you’ll find out if your theory is accurate.”
Or if he just doesn’t want to see me anymore.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked tentatively.
I took a deep breath. “I just want to make sure you and I are okay. It’s pretty unexpected that we’d run into each other again, especially like this. I don’t want my presence to be uncomfortable for you.”
