Page 71 of If You Love Me

I check the time. Fee is with friends today, and Callie has hockey until six. “Are you sure you’re not busy?”

“Not at all. Come on.” Dred slides her arm through mine and leads me back down the hall.

Once we’re inside, she drops her purse and kicks off her shoes. She motions to her khaki pants, burgundy turtleneck, and cream-colored sweater. “Give me a minute. I need to change out of this.”

“Sure.”

She disappears down the hall. Her apartment is modestly furnished, with shelves lining one wall. Most are filled with books, though one contains all manner of board games. A couch and two chairs take up most of the small living room.There’s no dining table, but the small kitchen island has two stools.

Dred reappears a minute later in a pair of black jogging pants and a Badass Babe Brigade shirt. “Can I offer you something to drink?” She wrinkles her nose. “Flip left two beers behind the other day. Otherwise I have pomegranate juice and ginger ale.”

“Ginger ale works for me.”

“Flip told me you finally know what happened between him and Connor.” She pulls two glasses from the cupboard.

“Gotta say, it wasn’t what I expected, but it does explain a lot.”

“Yeah. I think Flip was more frustrated about the waste of food than he was the actual sandwich defilement, but it’s hard to tell with him sometimes. Anyway, now that they’ve aired their grievances, maybe they can start to move past them.”

“I’m hopeful, too.” I don’t know if I should ask, but I do anyway. “Have you and Flip ever…? Because I know you’re best friends. I could understand the appeal.”

Horror crosses her face. “Never. Gross.” I swear she starts to gag. “Friends. Only friends from now until forever. Like a brother if I had one.”

“You sound sure about that.”

“The first time I met Flip he asked me if I wanted to fuck.”

“That was his line?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, it was a special low for him, I think. I’ve witnessed him be smoother, but I see that now for what it was. He’d had a bad practice that day and wanted to disappear. I said no. He said okay, cool. Then we hung out like it’d never happened. He came over and I kicked his ass at Connect Four. From that moment on, we were only ever going to be friends.”

“Very grown up of you.”

“As the kids used to say, the sex vibes between us are not vibing. I’m proud to be his very platonic friend because it’s a special thing to love someone without romance or sex.” She passes me a glass of soda. “So how are you, really?”

“I slept with Roman.” I bite my lips together. “I did not mean to lead with that.”

Empathy softens her features. “Been holding on to that for a while, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Recently or before you came to the Terror?”

“Both,” I admit.

“Well, that explains the tension between you two.”

I feel a panic spiral coming on. “Do you think anyone else knows?”

Dred holds up a hand. “No one else suspects anything.”

“Are you sure?”

She leans against the counter. “I had to learn how to read people at a young age. It was a self-preservation kind of situation—suss out the bad guys so I knew who was a friend and who was an enemy. There’s been a vibe between you two. You’re guarded with him, more than you are with everyone else, and he looks at you like you’re an ice cream cone he wants but can’t have. Which is quite accurate.” She sips her soda. “Did you sleep with him on Christmas night?”

I nod.

“Yeah. He was killing it with the hot-Santa Daddy thing, and then the way he is with Callie...” She sighs. “He really is a great guy all the way around. Don’t feel too bad about giving in to temptation. That man would be hard to resist. Especially if you’ve ridden that ride before and it was a good time.”

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