My Life as a Holiday Album (My Life as an Album #5) - L.J. Evans Page 0,63

feelings tied up in it.

For years, I’d acknowledged and put aside the physical attraction I felt toward Grace, not only because of my friendship with Cole and her, but also because our working relationship was too important. But when she’d offered tennis and kissed me like there was never going to be an end to our match, I’d dived right in. I’d not only entered the game, I’d ramped it up with my lips finding every inch of her, from toe to tip. We’d spent the night repeating the performance, getting better with each round, until she’d collapsed after arching and calling my name for the third time. My real name. Not the Asshole she was calling me these days.

She hung up with her dad and turned to me.

“I can’t believe Cole left.” Grace turned shocked eyes on me before quickly looking away. She pulled out her phone and texted a message. I assumed she was chewing Cole out for leaving.

I watched as she banged out the words while my body remained flooded with images and senses and sounds of the night we’d spent tangled together. My body responded―just as it had this morning in the kitchen―and I grabbed a throw pillow, shoving it into my lap and slouching down as if I were relaxing. As if my pants weren’t tenting at the sexiness of her, both in reality and in my dreams.

Grace looked up from her phone, eyes narrowing.

“Come sit down,” I said.

She didn’t come over, nor did she respond. She crossed her arms over her chest, pushing up her breasts like she’d done earlier, showing her cleavage. Making me ache even more to kiss it. To kiss her. To pull her into my arms and force her to acknowledge the one thing that was true: we were good together.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said quietly. She flinched. It was such a small, almost imperceptible movement that if you didn’t know her, if you hadn’t spent years of your life with her as I had, you wouldn’t have seen it. But I did, and it was all I needed for my body to go limp. The thought of her in pain.

When I’d agreed to “tennis,” I’d thought if anyone was going to be left broken, it was going to be me and not Grace. Not only because she’d been the one to propose it, but because Grace was a rock. I’d seen the men she’d left underneath her boots strewn behind her in college. The guys had been there every step of the way, right up until we’d all graduated together. She may have started a year behind us, but she’d worked her tail off to walk down the aisle at the the same time as us. The volume of classes and her single-minded focus had barely been broken by the men who’d tried to become a permanent fixture in her life.

She’d responded to them with sass, sarcasm, and a bite that left them bruised.

It wasn’t until she refused to respond to my calls and texts that I recognized Grace’s bite for what it had been all along: her armor. She wasn’t damaged like Mila Kunis in that goddamn movie, but she’d definitely hid her feelings from me…from everyone. She’d hid them so well that I hadn’t known until it was too late. Until I’d walked away and not called for weeks. Until I’d realized how much more than just physical attraction had been between us.

I got up and moved around the coffee table toward her, but she took two steps back, and I stopped.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you. Hell, I didn’t even realize you felt differently than you said.” She glared at me, at my words, and I corrected myself. “Differently than we said.”

She swallowed and looked away, and I knew that at least my words were impacting her. She fiddled with the layers of leather and silver wrapped around her wrist and then looked up at me.

“That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?” she asked. “We didn’t even get a chance to talk about it before you cut and run.”

“I didn’t run,” I said—calmly this time—instead of letting her provoke me. Because she wanted to get under my skin. She wanted me to get riled up so she’d be justified in yelling back. “How could I tell Derek no? After everything he’d taught me? After everything he’d done to make sure my application saw the light of day at UCLA? He was—is—more than an uncle.