Page 35 of Caught Up

“Liar,” Ryan said.

Taylor laughed. “Okay, fine, but it’s alittlehot that he went through all that trouble just to apologize.”

It was, but...“I don’t know if I’d give him that much credit,” I said. “It felt more calculated than that. I keep thinking of Junior as the kid I grew up with, and I need to stop. He could be much more dangerous now.”

Ryan nodded. “Especially if he’s spent the past decade in the mob. Who knows what kind offucked-upshit he’s capable of.”

They had a point there. “Exactly.”

Taylor’s expression turned contemplative. “Did you feel unsafe with him at any point?”

I thought back over that night. I’d been surprised and worried when he showed up, and even a little afraid, but the fear was more about Junior embarrassing me than harming me. And after the show, when he’d told me to run in the hall, all I’d felt was excitement. It was like I was back in high school, racing through a corridor to get to our latest meeting spot before we got caught.

“No,” I admitted. “I never felt like I was in danger.”

“But what if your instincts are wrong?” Ryan pressed.

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “We can stick to the buddy system, and if he shows up at Velvet again, I can, I don’t know, find some way to avoid him.”

“Is that really what you want to do?” Taylor asked. “After he, you know...” She formed a circle with her left hand and then proceeded to jam three fingers from her right one in and out of it while making suctioning noises with her mouth.

I slapped her hands out of the air. There were children nearby. “Yes, I’m sure. I was horny, and he was there. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.”

Ryan narrowed their eyes at me, seeing right through my bullshit like always. “Yeah, butis itmore than that?”

We’d reached the coffee shop, and I used the excuse of holding the door open for them to delay answering. Sure, Junior turned me on, and it was fun to banter back and forth with him, but I wasn’t looking for anything other than a casual hookup right now, and nothing about our shared history was casual. Nothing about the way he’dbegged meto forgive him was casual.

“It’s nothing more than that,” I told Ryan when we got in line. And I meant it. Junior had been my first and worst heartbreak; I wasn’t going to give him a chance to do it again.

Taylor rolled her eyes. “Fine, then at least give us all the juicy details about what happened between the two of you.”

“When we sit down,” I promised. There were too many ears close to us to go into detail in line.

Once we were seated at one of the café tables outside, I filled my roommates in on the rest of what happened, sparing no details, because Taylor threatened me with bodily harm if I did.

“And you’re really going to avoid him after he made you come that hard?” Taylor asked when I was done.

I eyed her over the rim of my latte. “Did you already forget about the stalking?”

“Pssh,” she said. “Who amongst us hasn’t stalked someone?”

“I haven’t,” I told her.

Ryan coughed, and I swiveled my gaze to them. They lifted a brow at me. “Are you forgetting that time you helped me follow my senior crush home after school so we could see how close her parents’ house was to mine?”

I grimaced. “Not our best moment.”

Taylor leaned forward in her chair. “Or when Jackson and I became exclusive, and you made that fake Instagram account and slid into his DMs to test his loyalty?”

I pointed at Ryan. “It was as much their idea as it was mine!”

Ryan turned beet red and swiveled toward Taylor. “Only because Brett had hurt you so bad, and we wanted to make sure Jackson wasn’t another fuckboy!”

“Also,” I said. “Technically, that was catfishing and not stalking.”

Taylor grinned. “And that somehow makes it better?”

Well, this conversation was going sideways. Time to bring us back on track. “Regardless of whether or not we condone stalking, no, I don’t plan on seeing him again.” My mind went back to the other night and what might end up being our final encounter. “To give him credit, his apology did seem sincere.”

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