“Nah—I don’t do that anymore.”
He gives a strangled laugh, and for the slightest moment, I’m mesmerized by a genuine smile playing across his mouth. His eyes glow, like when you hold a marble up to the light and the blue intensifies. I like it. I think maybe if he smiled more often—
My train of thought is cut off when that smile drops away and morphs into something devilish again—like he could sense my charitable thoughts and had to immediately remedy the situation. He picks up Frosty with a glare so full of heat I’m afraid that poor ol’ snowman is going to melt.
“Cheers to new roommates.” He presses it to his lips and tips it back, drinking gulp after gulp, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down his throat, making me feel as if all that liquid is somehow magically teleporting into my body and adding to what I’ve already got in here. I have a swimming pool inside me now.
I can’t take it anymore.
“GAH—YOU WIN!” I yell, letting go of the box and scrambling out of the kitchen and toward the bathroom as fast as I can. I pee for no less than two minutes straight, wash my hands, and also try to wash away my shame. It’s still fully intact as I make my way back to the kitchen, dragging my feet like a child headed to eat a big bag of carrots.
I turn the corner to the kitchen and there’s Drew, leaned back against my counter, James Dean raised f
rom the dead. Because he’s wearing athletic shorts, I can see that even his calves are strong. I wish I didn’t know that about him. My eyes then zero in on the item hanging leisurely off of his hand—the empty Frosty mug. He holds it like a bandit from the Wild West would a gun, like he’ll sling it around his finger and tuck it away in a holster.
“Feel better?” I don’t answer, so his smile just grows, and huh, turns out Dr. Stuck-up has dimples. I want to rise up onto my tiptoes and stick my fingers in both of them. “While you were gone, I had a change of heart. I think I do like these mugs after all. Let’s bring ’em.”
I’m disgusted as I watch him drop Frosty back into the box, pick up the whole thing like it only contains a single feather, and then wink at me as he leaves the kitchen. I feel that wink like a sun flare across my skin.
I’m going to have to up my game with this one.
It’s taken all day to move Jessie’s junk into my house. So much for having a weekend off. I had to burn my entire Saturday helping the roommate I don’t even want move into my home. She doesn’t need all of this stuff—I know she doesn’t. She’s just having us move it all to get under my skin, because she’s evil and gets some sort of sick delight from watching me feel miserable. Which is why any time Cooper and I dropped off a load of her boxes to the house, I’d smile, hum, or whistle the entire time we unloaded.
We had to make three different trips by the way. Three. I think we moved every single thing she owns minus her living room set—and that was only because I drew the line there. She thinks she’s being so sneaky, but I can see all of her plans to unpack this crap into my house, to integrate all of her female things with my masculine things and make me go berserk. Joke’s on her. None of this gets to go in my living areas. She’s going to have to stuff it all in her room like a life-sized vending machine. She’ll need a giant claw to sort through it all.
Mark my words, Jessie’s stuff will not touch my stuff. And no, I don’t mean that as an innuendo. There’s no need for one where Jessie is concerned because in no way am I thinking about her stuff and my stuff touching, and…well shoot, now I’m thinking about it as an innuendo.
“Dude, lighten up with your grip, would you? If you squeeze the steering wheel any harder, you’re going to leave permanent finger marks behind.”
I force my hands to relax by clenching and unclenching them one at a time. I convinced Cooper to let me drive this last load back to the house because I felt so wound up I needed something to do other than just sit in the passenger seat and bounce my knee. Apparently, driving isn’t helping either.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize I was doing that.”
“Yeah, obviously. You’ve been over there in your own world for the last ten minutes. At one point you were shaking your head, and your jaw was flexing. Super creepy.”
I glance briefly at Cooper then look back at the road. “I was not.”
He scoffs and pulls out his phone, holding it up toward my face.
I squint at it. “You took a photo of me while I was driving?”
“Yeah, I did,” he says, not sounding the least bit remorseful. “I sent it to Lucy so she could tell me what this moody face of yours means.”
Why am I friends with him?
“And? What’s her verdict?”
“Sexual frustration.”
I almost crash. My hand jerks and for a split second the whole truck snaps to the left. Thank God no one was beside us. Embarrassing would not begin to cover how I’d feel having to admit I sideswiped someone because my sister proclaimed I’m sexually frustrated.
“WHOA,” Cooper yells, pressing his whole arm against the door to brace himself. “That’s it! Pull over.”
I frown and look quickly at Cooper then shift my eyes back to the road. “What? No. There was a bunny in the road—I had to swerve to miss it.”
I feel his angry eyes on the side of my face. I almost hurt his baby. He’ll never forgive me. “Pull over.”
Cooper isn’t often serious. The last time I saw him angry was when I was chewing him out for going behind my back to date Lucy. The tone he’s using now is the same as it was that day—which is why I put on my blinker and pull over into the nearest parking lot.