Page 41 of Best Friends, Tennessee

“Who was that guy?” I asked.

“No clue,” Mason said with a grin. “I told him to borrow Finn’s hat, though.”

Finn put the cowboy hat on, glancing over at me.

He looked good tonight. Even I had to admit the hat suited him well, somehow making his jawline and cheekbones stand out even more. He was wearing one of his nicer flannel shirts, a brown and red pattern over a white T-shirt.

“Finn, you’re next,” Mason said.

I lifted my eyebrow. I leaned over toward Thomas, whispering in his ear. “I think Mason secretly wants Finn’s ass, by the way.”

Thomas waggled his eyebrows at me.

“Not a chance I’m licking salt off anybody tonight, Hot Mess,” Finn said. “No thank you.”

“What about letting someone else lick it off ofyou, then?” Mason said.

“What’s in it for me?”

“The glory of knowing you made someone very happy?” Mason offered. His eyes glanced over at me. “Ori, take a body shot from Finn.”

Something stirred in me.

I knew Finn wouldn’t do it, but after the other night, I wanted to push him.

Just a little.

“I’d do it,” I said.

“Oh, shit!” Mason called out, his eyes going wide with excitement. “He said yes. Finn, you know you’d do it for your best friend. Get that shirt off and get on the bar.”

“You’re wild, and you know it,” Finn told Mason.

“If you let Ori lick salt from your chest, I’ll let you eat free at the diner for a week,” Danielle said, smiling. “Because that would bewaytoo funny.”

“And I’m going to take a video of it if you two do that, by the way,” Max called out from behind the bar, where he was cutting up lime slices.

“No video, for Chrissake,” Finn said.

“Finn isn’t going to do it,” I said definitively. “He’s not really a body-shots kind of guy.”

Finn gave me a hard look for a moment, and I saw something spark behind his eyes. “Is that right, Ori?” he asked in a low tone,reaching up to his hat. He gently took it off, setting it down on the bar before reaching to shrug off his flannel.

“Oh, fuck yes,” Mason said, clapping.

“Ori doesn’t know how much fun we have around here on game night,” Finn said.

My heart beat a little faster as I watched him pull off his T-shirt, going shirtless in front of the bar.

Damn.

Called my bluff.

Danielle was laughing her ass off already. “Let’s fucking go, Finn.”

A few other people around us gave little hollers as Finn cleared a space on the bar, lying back on it.

Finn would never have done anything like this back in the day. He wasn’t timid, but he also wasn’t the type to draw lots of attention to himself. Either he’d changed a lot or he was purely doing this to fuck with me.

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