Page 74 of Not Dating Material

I lead him back out onto the safety of the very public deck, where I know for a fact I’ll keep my hands to myself. He picks up two more cocktails from the kitchen on the way and hands one over as he slides onto the sun lounger beside me.

“Comfortable there?” I ask him dryly.

“Very.” He wriggles, warm skin moving deliciously against mine. “Only don’t look down and see how much.”

So of course, I glance down and am greeted by the incredible sight of tight material over a hard shaft.

I inhale deeply, but that doesn’t stop me from ending up with the same problem. “I hate you.”

“I know.” He slides his sunglasses on, turning his attention to the water. “But I also know you really, really don’t.”

“Eat glass,” I grumble.

Which, apparently, he finds hilarious. “Is that Seven speak for fuck off?”

“You know it.”

“So why don’t you just tell me to fuck off?”

I open my mouth to answer him, but it occurs to me that while people know I don’t like to swear, no one has specifically asked why. Xander’s never known me to, and even when I met my friends, they respected my choice and went with it. Molly though, he’s not asking to be nosy but to get to know me better, and that’s weird on a whole other level.

“It … makes me uncomfortable.”

“Really?” He spins around, looking shocked. “Would you prefer if I didn’t swear?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s …” How to make this make sense? “I’m a big guy. My tattoos and piercings make me feel good, but I know that when people look at them, they see a certain type of person. Society sucks for that, by the way. But I know what it’s like to be intimidated by someone. I know what it’s like to be scared. And while swearing is common from just about everyone these days, it doesn’t take much for an f-bomb to sound aggressive. Coming from someone like me, it takes even less. So I make words up or use dumb phrases. Even when I’m mad, those things usually don’t bother people. If someone cut me off in traffic and I dropped all the swears under the sun, it would be a whole lot of a different scenario to if I called them a frog-faced duck head, right?”

Fingers, cool from his icy drink, slip between mine. “Tell me something else about you.”

“Like what?”

“Like … Seven’s your real name, right? Is there a reason for it, or your parents just liked it?”

“First of all, they’re not my parents. They’re two people who I wish I could scrub from my memory forever.” I let out a bitter laugh. “I’m named Seven because it’s the most powerful number, and my dumb witch of a birther wanted me to always feel powerful … which is ironic when you consider how powerless I’ve been so many different times in my life. Sometimes while she was right there.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“Eh. Not important. But yeah, Seven’s a real name. Rush is the only one of us who goes by his nickname.”

“It suits him.”

“It sure does, Tiny.”

Molly rolls his eyes. “Careful, or I’ll give you one.”

“Oh, yeah, like what?”

“Like … saint. Or angel. Or red.”

“Literally all of those options suck.”

“You’re right. Besides, Seven suits you. You know why?”

“Because it’s as inaccurate as Rush’s name?”

Molly shakes his head. “I looked up what Seven as a name means. It means loving. Blessed perfection. You don’t see it, but you’re all of those things and more.”

Those three things are so far from how I see myself they barely make sense. “And Molly means deluded,” I say with no real conviction behind it. But I struggle to take a compliment. Who knew?

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