Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“I expected you and Ben to be shacked up for the next forty-eight hours at least.” Her friend worked twelve-hour shifts in the ICU, which meant that unless she decided to pick up overtime, she usually had multiple days off in a row.
Laveni waved a hand. “He’s out like a light, my poor baby. Said hi by the way. I told him I’d pick him up his favorite goodies from the café and a fresh coffee so he can have a feast when he wakes.”
She carried on. “So my love life already has a ring on it.” She waggled her left hand to show off the elegant and understated ring she’d chosen after gorgeous, besotted Ben proposed over a candlelit dinner he’d made himself—with a little help from Catie. “I’m far more interested in talking about what you’re doing with Danny.”
“Why?” Catie asked, delighted that Veni had found such a wonderful, solid guy after the hellscape of her ex. “Does sex turn boring when you get engaged?”
“You can only hope for our level of erotic bliss.”
“Erotic bliss?” Catie’s shoulders shook.
Veni shrugged. “I call it like I see it, babe.” Putting down her coffee, she leaned forward across the table. “Seriously though, Cat, you look good. Happy.” Her smile turned soft. “The way Danny looks at you—has it always been that way?”
Catie squirmed, parting her lips to remind her friend that—the aforementioned shagging aside—it was all pretend. But she couldn’t do it. Not after last night, when they’d slept cuddled up and he’d made her breakfast again and she’d wrapped her arms around him from behind and kissed his back on her way to make the coffee.
None of that had been pretend.
“We’ve annoyed each other the entire time since we met,” she said at last. “This is… new.” Her honest words opened the floodgates, and she blurted out the truth. “It’s freaking me out.”
“I get it. Big change in the relationship.”
“It’s not a relationship,” Catie said automatically.
“Cat.” Veni was the only person in Catie’s life who could make that single-syllable nickname stretch out to three syllables. “You two have always had a relationship. It’s just that before, it was a relationship of frenemies—”
“He was my nemesis, thank you very much.”
“Whatever. You two were nemeses then.” Veni took off her sunglasses just so she could roll her eyes at Catie. “Thing is, you guys have never actively disliked each other.”
Catie parted her lips, shut them. Because Veni was right. She’d never not liked Danny. He’d just been the annoying teenage boy who irritated her but whom she’d cooperate with when it was to their advantage. “If we had actual potential,” she said, her chest tight, “shouldn’t we have come together earlier?”
“I dunno.” Picking up her coffee, Veni leaned back in her chair. “Maybe he was an asshole until now and you were a diva.”
“Danny was never an asshole,” Catie blurted out.
Only to have her best friend grin at her. “You just defended your nemesis before yourself. You’re in deep, girlfriend.”
Making a face at her too perceptive friend, Catie leaned back in her own chair.
“Seriously though,” Veni said. “Sometimes we meet people at the wrong time in our lives. Like if I’d met Ben the week after I left the loser, I would’ve sneered inside and walked away—because on the surface, Ben is as blond and blue-eyed and arrogant as that asshole. I was too raw to see to the marshmallow heart beyond.”
Catie chewed on that, had a glimmer of a thought too scary to share. Instead, she said, “Enough about my messed-up dating life. Tell me about you and Ben and the gathering of the parents.”
It was exactly the right thing to say to derail Laveni’s focus. So it was only after their breakfast, as Catie was walking back to her car, that she allowed that powerful, scary thought she’d stifled to bloom: What if the reason she’d never seen Danny as a potential lover was that she’d known it would never be just a flirtation between them? What if some part of her had known that it’d be deadly serious?
Catie hadn’t been ready for serious for many, many years.
“It’s too early to be thinking this way,” she muttered to herself. “Even if he kisses you like a lover and not friends with benefits.” Her stomach got fluttery at the memory of their kiss on Tamaki Drive, with the city glittering in the distance and Danny’s hand warm and familiar on her back.
Something had changed that moment, but what it meant, she didn’t know.
23
THE INFAMOUS WALL OF SHAME
She turned up to Danny’s birthday dinner the next day—Friday—with a box of macarons that were a favorite with the family. Alison and Joseph had thrown Danny a big party for his twenty-first, as they’d done for all their boys, but after that, he’d kept his celebrations low-key. Dinner with the family followed by drinks out with his friends.