Page 40 of The Red Zone
Now that I thought about it, I guessed she was right. Aside from her more mature looks, and terrible argumentative skills, there wasn’t all that much that had changed about her in recent years.
“You know my brain inside and out. In the span of a minute, you can make me feel a rainbow of emotions. You know exactly what makes me tick. You can read my facial expressions like you memorized them a thousand lifetimes ago. So, while you might not know my favorite color or how I take my coffee… you know me. Far better than I’d like to admit.”
“Blue.”
“What?”
“Your favorite color is blue. Light blue to be specific. And you don’t drink coffee, you drink tea. Ginger tea twice in the morning and chamomile once at night. If neither of those are available then you’ll settle for green.”
She sucked in a breath. “How do you rememb—"
I cut her off. “And around the holidays you’ll trade out the ginger tea for peppermint instead.”
Mae looked at me slack jawed—half in disbelief, and half something I couldn’t entirely make out. She was right. I knew her like the back of my hand… and I thought about her a lot more than I should have—then and now.
It was time to stop denying myself the truth.
Setting my beer on the hardscape next to me, I pushed off the ledge and entered the water. I turned toward Mae and grabbed the mostly empty beer from her hands and placed it next to mine. Facing her, I placed one hand against the ledge on both sides of her.
She just stared at me with her big blue eyes, not moving a muscle as I inched closer to her face. I could feel my breaths go shallow as the pull toward her grew stronger. The draw between us had always been intense, but right now… it felt unbearable.
I skimmed my lips across hers. “You have no idea what you do to me.”
“Well…” She smirked, pulling back slightly. “I know that I make you angry…”
“Fantastic observation.”
Both of us grew more breathless by the second.
“And… I make you flustered…”
“Questionable.” The corner of my mouth lifted up.
She might have shocked me the other night by getting stark naked in front of me, but right now I was feeling the furthest thing from being on edge. In fact, speaking of edging, I had every intention of doing that to her again, and again, until she was in tears if that’s what she wanted.
She tipped her head down, peering up at me with those big doe eyes. “I make you turned on…”
“And then some.” I pressed my forehead to hers. “You’ve been eye fucking me since the day I moved in.”
“You must be mistaken, because I’ve hated your guts the entire time.”
“No, you haven’t. You just wished I was rearranging yours.” I challenged. “Which I find funny considering you claim that you don’t like me. Yet, somehow, you continue making excuses to be in my presence—pushing me in the pool, your birthday party, your late-night swim, coming to the pool house tonight. You’re up to four occurrences in the last week alone.” She didn’t say a word, so I continued. “If I were a betting man, I might even go as far as saying that you’re seeking me out. You’ll deny it, of course, but we both know it would be a lie.”
“I can assure you that I’m not interested.”
“In anything other than my dick, right?”
“Your dick is the only thing about you that I’m remotely interested in.”
Our lips grazed each other as we spared back and forth.
Our eyes locked and everything about us went silent as I leaned forward.
At the last second, Mae dodged my kiss, ducking into the water under my arm and coming out the other side. Flipping onto her back as she swam away with a smirk. “This was fun. Sorry I can’t stay longer. Early morning tomorrow.”
“Is this your way of getting back to me for last weekend?”
“What happened last weekend? I don’t have any memory of it.”
