I shook my head and hunched forward, placing my forehead on top of his thigh, my gaze glued to the tiles on the floor. “I’m too expensive. You don’t want to pay me hourly for that,” I mumbled. “And I’m starting to get a headache,” I told him as I straightened my fingers and tried to slip them out from his.
He didn’t let me.
Those million-dollar fingers tightened around mine in a super hold. “You wanna know what I have you under in my contacts?”
I wanted to shrug, but that felt way too personal. “Peewee?”
“No.” His fingers moved out from around mine, but before I had the chance to ball up my fist and take it away, his were back, stroking my thumb before doing the same to my other four fingers. “Try again.”
That time I did shrug. “Bianca?”
“Nope.” He linked our fingers together again, and I noticed then that they weren’t as cold or clammy anymore.
“I don’t know, Zac,” I told him.
The thigh under my forehead bounced a little. “Guess.”
It took everything in me not to sigh.
He loved me. Of course he liked women and had sex with them. Of course there were a ton of women who wanted to have sex with him and probably jumped at the opportunity to have his number.
I would have been one of them.
You know, if there was a chance. But there wasn’t.
And that wasn’t his fault.
If it wasn’t for our friendship, or the fact that we had grown up together, or the fact that we got along so great, I wouldn’t have any kind of friendship with him. I wouldn’t have him in my life period. It was a one in a billion chance that we’d even met in the first place. That circumstances had connected us.
I didn’t want to punish him for not returning my feelings. Because they were dumb, pointless feelings that did nothing but twist me up into knots and hurt me.
So I tried my best to lighten my voice as I offered, “Okay. Bianca the Baker?”
His leg moved under my forehead again. “No. You don’t need a thing after your name,” he said calmly.
I had to dig in deep to pull a joke out of my heart. “My New Daddy?”
He laughed lightly. “Nope. My Little Texas.”
I snorted weakly and felt him start playing with my fingers again.
“Bibi—” he started to say before the nurse practitioner cut in.
“Zac, I’m going to numb your knee a little and start the treatment, okay? You might feel some pressure.”
I sat up then, moving my grip to sneak through his fingers again. This was why I had come, to be here for him. And I knew I’d done the right thing then when I found him already pale and staring at the needle she was holding at his side like she was about to murder him.
“Remember to breathe,” she reminded him.
He wasn’t breathing. He was staring at the needle.
“Hey.” I squeezed his fingers.
The woman held up a placating hand. “It’s okay, Zac.”
Oh dear God.
I squeezed his hand tighter. “Hey you. Bubba. Look at me. Let her do her job. You sat through me getting stitches like a champ.”
Yeah.
He made it about three minutes before he fainted.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Zac a few hours later.
He was sitting on the couch, head resting against the back of it. His gaze just slid over to me without the rest of his head moving. “I’m good,” he replied, actually sounding okay.
He hadn’t been sounding okay an hour ago. He hadn’t looked that okay either.
It had taken everything inside of me not to laugh my ass off when he’d opened his eyes after passing out and asked, “What happened?” I’d had to hold it in until I’d run over to the pharmacy next door and bought him an orange juice, which he’d downed after a bottle of water that the nurse practitioner had provided. She’d told me immediately after his eyes had rolled to the back of his head that men passing out while giving blood or getting injections was pretty common.
I’d told him that on the drive back home, but he’d just given me a dirty look and said, “If you’re gonna laugh darlin’, go ahead and do it.”
It was only because I loved him very much that I held it back, tried to keep a straight face, and said, “I’m not going to laugh. I already knew you were freaked out by needles. I’d probably pass out if I