Next Man Up (Making the Score #2) - Tawdra Kandle Page 0,66

don’t want Quinn and Gia and Nate looking at me funny or anyone waiting to see us fall in love. Because I want to be crystal clear, Eli. I’m not going to fall in love with you. And you’re not going to fall in love with me, either. Promise me that, or this is all off.”

I smirked. “Little bit cocky, aren’t you? Assuming that you’re so irresistible that not falling in love with you is going to be hard on me?”

She shook her head wearily. “It’s not me. It’s that people confuse sex with love, and if I’m the only one you’re having sex with, you could start thinking that there’s more between us than there is.”

“So if I’m very careful to remember that sex is just sex, and you and I are friends only, then . . . what? We’re friends with benefits? Occasionally?”

“And you don’t tell anyone. And you don’t act weird around me. No staring or . . . getting pissy when you hear that I’ve been with some guy. No being jealous or making snide remarks.”

“Fine. And same goes for me.” I stretched a smile over my face. “Don’t get bitchy when I’m flirting with other women.”

Zelda cocked her head. “If you’re going to be flirting with other women, why do you need me?”

I brushed the muffin crumbs off my bare chest. “Flirting isn’t sex.”

“Hmmm.” She glared at me for a moment and then sighed. “Whatever you say, Eli. Are you ready for me to drive you back to Liddleton? I’d like to get some more studying done today.”

“Sure.” I finished my coffee in one gulp. “Just let me get on my shirt.”

“Really? Don’t you want to give a thrill to the rest of the building on our way to the car?” Her tone was arch, and I grinned.

“Nah. I don’t want to dangle something in front of the ladies and then not deliver. And there’s only so much of me to go around.”

I could practically hear her eyes rolling as I returned to her bedroom to get my shirt. Today might not have gone exactly as I would have wished. Zelda might not be where I wanted her to be yet.

But it was a start.

Chapter Nine

Zelda

“Hey, Zelda, are you coming with us tonight?” Quinn stuck her head into my room. “Gia and I are just about ready to leave.”

I turned around from my desk, frowning as I glanced at Quinn. “I haven’t decided yet. I want to hang with you guys, but . . .” I chewed the corner of my lip. The truth was that I couldn’t really tell Quinn why I wasn’t completely on-board with going out for pizza with the girls, Nate and Eli. I wasn’t even comfortable admitting it to myself.

In the four months since our first night together, Eli had stuck to his part of the bargain with admiral fortitude. He hadn’t breathed a word about us having sex to Nate, I was positive; Quinn and Gia didn’t seem to be any the wiser about us hooking up, either. And when we were all together, which happened with increasing frequency, Eli was friendly and teasing, his normal snarky self, not paying any more attention to me than he did to Gia or Quinn.

For some perverse reason, that bothered me. I’d been the one to insist that it had to be this way. I’d been the one who said we had to keep our casual hook-ups on the downlow. I knew I was being ridiculous, but when we were all out together and some random ‘ho—excuse me, some other woman—came up and began flirting with Eli, I wanted to jump up and scratch out her eyes. I’d never experienced this before. I didn’t know jealousy, and I refused to acknowledge that I was feeling it now.

On the nights when we got together to study, just the two of us . . . well, then, everything was different. When we were alone, Eli didn’t make any secret of what he wanted; he touched me frequently, flirted shamelessly and somehow coerced me into revealing things about myself that I never shared with anyone else. I wasn’t sure how he did it. There was something about the way he listened and how he responded that made the man supremely easy to talk to, and apparently, I was putty in his hands.

The sex . . . well, it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before, and that, my friends, is saying something. I thought I’d