Page 23 of A Lifetime in 30 Days
“Well, it was morning.” She reached for the thick menu on the table in front of her. “It was in the wee early-morning hours, but still. Plus, I can eat breakfast food at any time of day or night.”
“Yeah, I remember that about you.”
Her head snapped up, and she saw that he hadn’t picked up his menu but was watching her. She sighed and thought,Fuck it.Setting the menu down on the table again, she eased back against the seat. “What is this, Aden? And don’t tell me you just wanted to check on me again, because I think we both know that’s not totally true.”
He mimicked her moves and sat back against his seat. “You wanna do this right now? Tonight?”
“If by ‘this,’ you mean be honest with each other? Yeah,” she said with a nod. “I want to do this right now. I’m too old for games, and tomorrow’s not promised, so say what you have to say.”
She sounded like a combination of the cards from her affirmation and motivation box. She should’ve pulled one out tonight when she’d gone up to her room to grab her shoes. But now she’d have to wing it.
“Okay, I wanted to see you again,” he said. “I just wanted to see you.”
“Why?” She toyed with the hem of her shirt.
There was a moment of silence between them. Their gazes held, but neither of them spoke. Then his shoulders rose and fell as he sucked in a breath and released it.
“I met you first,” he said. “You remember that?”
Oh, wow. She did remember, so she nodded.
“We were at that rally in the park, and you dropped the flyers,” he said.
“And you picked them up like we were a meet-cute scene in some romance movie.” Why in the world did she say that? They didn’t have a meet-cute, did they?
His grin was slow to spread this time, and he dragged his tongue over his lower lip. Something no man who looks like him should do at this time of night when he’s sitting across from a woman as sexually deprived as she’d been these past few months.
“Yeah, it did feel like that, didn’t it?”
No. No, it did not,her mind screamed, but she nodded.
“You smiled when you said thank you, and I thought my heart was gonna stop,” he told her, and shook his head. “I was like, what the hell is goin’ on? Having quick physical reactions like that to a shorty wasn’t my thing.”
“Oh, come on, now, you are not gonna sit here and try to tell me you never had a purely physical reaction to a woman before. Especially not when you were in college.”
“Well, I mean, if you’re talkin’ about did I see a fine girl and I got aroused, hell yeah, that used to happen. But this was different.”
The way his tone shifted when he’d said that last sentence had her pulse quickening.Stop it! Stop it, Savannah!Screaming at herself was the best reminder of who and what she was at this very moment. A grown-ass woman who’d just buried a man she’d dedicated way too much of her time and energy to. A man who had, once upon a time, happened to be this guy’s close friend.
“Y’all like to toss that worddifferentout there,” she replied. How many times had one of those early conversations with a new guy included “You’re different from the women I’m used to meeting,” or “I like you because I can tell you’re different,” only for them to end up treating her the same way they’d treated all the other women before? Too damn many.
“That’s what Caleb said about you too,” he told her. “When he came back over to our table that night at the step competition. We asked where he’d been for so long because he’d said he was just going to the concession stand. And he said he’d met this girl, and that just the way you looked at him when you talked was different.”
Why did he remember that? Of course Vanna remembered every detail about the night she’d first met Caleb, but why would Aden remember it?
He dragged a hand over his neatly cut goatee. “I was like, word? And then when we were leaving, he pointed you out and I felt sick to my stomach.”
“Me too,” she said. “Those jeans were so damned tight I was afraid I might faint from poor circulation.” She tried to joke because the look on his face was too serious, too potent. But she hadn’t lied—when she’d finally peeled those jeans off that night, the etchings from the seam, zipper, and snap were red marks along her skin.
“Nah,” he said, half his mouth lifting in a sad smile. “Those jeans looked fuckin’ perfect. Everything about you looked perfect that night, just like it did that day I met you a week before the step show.”
She cleared her throat because his potent look had just ratcheted up the heat in this joint. Aden had root beer–brown eyes, but as he’d been talking to her, they’d gone almost black, the timbre of his voice dipped just a tad lower, and something flipped and flopped in her stomach that she knew wasn’t hunger because she’d eaten enough at home.
“Then Caleb and I became a couple, and Jamaica and I became a part of your circle,” she said, because what the hell else was she supposed to say?
That she’d thought he was fine that day they first met too? And that she’d been a little jolted by seeing him again at the step show, but Caleb had already sent her pulse into a frenzy with his attention and goofy demeanor? She’d always been a sucker for a man who could make her laugh.
“Nah,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “You wanted honesty, don’t pull back on me now.”
