She blinks up at me and I push her back into her bedroom and close the door.
“I can’t think when you’re half-naked,” I say.
She slowly pushes her arms through the armholes. “You’ve shoved a T-shirt over my head before,” she says. “That night when Lance dumped me and I was hurling my clothes around, you put a T-shirt on me then, too. I just now remembered.”
“Yeah, and I did it then for the same reason. I don’t feel right looking at pretty lingerie that isn’t meant for me.”
Except back then, the fact that her lacy undergarments had been for Lance hadn’t bothered me in the least.
But tonight? Knowing that she got all dolled up for a guy she doesn’t even know?
That bothers me.
Even though I told her to do it.
I run a hand over my face.
“What happened?” I ask. “With the Brandon guy? Did he say something or was he—”
“No,” she says, holding up a hand and sounding so weary my chest squeezes. “He was perfectly nice. I may even see him again. I just wasn’t feeling it tonight.”
She looks down at the floor and crosses one foot over the other. “Sorry.” Her voice is quieter now. “I know that was part of our deal. Me hooking up with him, and you with…”
She waves a hand toward the door, I’m assuming to indicate Cora downstairs.
Then her head lifts. “Hey, the music stopped.”
I nod. “I had Jason clear everyone out.”
She stares at me. “Why?”
The easy answer would be to tell her that I thought she was upset about something, and that I cleared them out on her behalf. And that’s the truth. But only half of it.
So I tell her the other half. “I guess I wasn’t feeling like holding up my part of the bargain, either.”
Her eyes search my face. “Didn’t look that way from where I was sitting.”
“You mean where you were sitting for all of thirty seconds,” I correct.
Because had you stayed you’d have seen that I wasn’t even remotely into that girl.
Parker licks her lips nervously. “So are you going to, like, go out again? Find another girl?”
I take a step nearer to her, relieved when she doesn’t step away. Those few moments of weirdness between us seem to have faded, as though we’re back to normal. Or, at least, our new normal. The normal that involves us seeing each other naked.
“I’m not going to find another girl,” I answer quietly, lifting a hand to her face. “Not tonight, anyway.”
My other hand comes up to cup the back of her neck, and her fingers wrap around my wrists as she looks up at me.
“What about your crippling fear that your cock’s going to fall off if you have sex with only one person for more than two weeks?” she says quietly.
I grin. “Well, at least I’ll rest easy knowing that I’ll be in the company of my best friend when it happens.”
I lean my head down for a kiss, but she pulls back just slightly, her gaze worried. “We’re still not going to let this get weird, right? We’ll still be able to go back to how we were when this is over?”
I pause. “I’m not going to do anything that would jeopardize our friendship. So if you want to use the safe word…”
She opens her mouth, and for a heart-stopping moment I’m afraid that that’s exactly what she’s going to do, and for the life of me I don’t know how I’d feel about it.