Page 86 of Man Advantage

Trev shot me a look and narrowed his eyes.

I shrugged with mock innocence.

He huffed, shook his head, and muttered just loud enough for me to hear, “You’re an asshole.”

“And that’s not a bid for my silence, so…” I started to walk toward the deck stairs, but he grabbed my elbow, hauling me back as I cackled.

“Tell her,” he warned, “and I’ll tell all the kids where you got that scar on your finger.”

“Which finger?” I held up the middle one, keeping it tucked against me so no one else saw. “This one?”

He snorted. “No. The other one.”

“Go ahead.” I shrugged. “Do you really think I’d be embarrassed if you told a bunch of first graders that a shark bit me?”

“No, but you might be if I filled in the part where the shark was two feet long, dead as a doornail, and you stuck your finger in its mouth to see if its teeth were sharp.”

I huffed. “Still a better story than?—”

“Shut up.” His cheeks turned a satisfying shade of crimson, and I didn’t even try to hide my snickering.

And that just added another dimension to all the reasons Trev was a walking, talking distraction today. All those memories from our youth—I didn’t get nostalgic about many things, but it was hard not to when I thought about growing up with him and our friends. Even the time we’d been walking on a beach and found a dogfish that had washed up with the tide. Yes, I’d stuck my finger in its mouth, and yes, I had a hell of a scar from it. The part he’d left out was that he and Don had each promised to pay me five bucks if I did (hey, that was a lot of money back then). So it was really their fault.

To this day, his parents believed the story that he’d “fallen off his bike” when he’d cut up his knee. He’d sworn the rest of us to secrecy because his parents would’ve had his head if they’d found out he’d crashed said bike into a parked car while riding with no hands (something his mom had warned him about a million times).

Just like they still believed to this day that every time our group of friends went to the theater, we were absolutelynotbribing people to buy us tickets to R-rated movies. And Trev and I had never once bought tickets to movies we never saw so we’d have an alibi for the two or three hours we spent parked somewhere. Though that last one almost blew up in our faces once when his parents saw a film that we’d claimed to see, and they’d tried to strike up a conversation about it. I still didn’t know how we’d managed to bullshit our way out of that one.

Those memories were all swirling in my head today alongside everything that existed in the present. It wasn’t that I wanted the kid version of him now that I was an adult. It was just that all that nostalgia and all the years of friendship and our clumsy attempts at love—we had a ton of history together, and all that history combined with everything we had now made itimpossible to keep my feelings for him casual. We were the sum total of everything we’d ever been, everything we’d ever done, and everything we were doing now, and nothing in the world had ever felt more right or more perfect.

I’d told him I wasn’t ready to jump into an official serious relationship because I’d recently had a messy breakup, but honestly, it didn’t feel like anything I needed to get over. Not anymore. That whole shitshow of a relationship—all eight years of it—and its disaster of an end felt like a flicker of bullshit in the lifelong timeline of Trev and me.

As I watched Trev, all I could think was… Daniel who?

I wanted today to last forever, and I couldn’t wait to get him alone tonight, and oh my God, I was so stupid for him.

I was a grown-ass adult. I could handle keeping my hands to myself.

But I’d have been lying if I said my brain didn’t go completely blank every time I heard Trev’s voice or caught a glimpse of him. One minute, he was being adorable with one of the kids, carefully and patiently showing them how to hit a puck. The next, the sun would hit him just right and he’d be somewhere betweenso fucking cuteand Greek God.

Then he’d glance at me, and our eyes would lock for a second, and he’d give me a little wink or a lopsided grin, and by some miracle, I wouldn’t drop my damn drink. One smile would send me back to our childhood. The next would send me back to this morning.

And it was perfect. All of it. I couldn’t wait to get him alone, but I also adored watching him like this.

It was startling, and yet it made perfect sense. As if I couldn’t believe the depths of my feelings for him, but at the same time—I mean, no shit, I had tons and tons of feelings for him. We hadn’t wanted to put a name on this thing or go too fast, but it wasn’t like we’d just met. It wasn’t like this was the first time we’d beenclose. We weren’t starting from scratch—we were picking up where, I realized now, it had been a mistake to leave off.

Or maybe we’d needed the time apart. We’d both needed time to mature. Time to figure out who we were and what we wanted out of life.

It just seemed inevitable that we’d eventually find our way back to each other, and now that we had…

I sighed as I watched him helping a tiny boy maneuver a puck with a hockey stick.

Why is it that every time I look at you, I’m surprised by how much I love you?

The relative quiet after the party was amazing.

All the guests were gone. Everything had been cleaned up (and credit where it was due—Tim and Bryan had stayed until that task was done). The boys were in their rec room upstairs, playing some new video games they’d received as gifts. Nothing to do now but wind down.

After Trev put the leftover birthday cake in the fridge, he exhaled. “Well. That was fun.” He looked at me. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

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