Chasing Ivy (Oak Hill 1)

Dawson jumped away from me when his phone started ringing loudly in his pocket. We both dropped our hands, causing the tape measure to smack me right in the forehead before it clattered to the floor.

“Ouch,” I huffed while hunched forward. I brought my hand up to the painful spot, humiliation flooding my body.

“Shit, are you okay?” Dawson asked, bending down alongside me to look at my head.

“I’m fine,” I grunted over the still ringing phone. “Your phone.”

“What?” he asked, confused. Like he was in a daze.

“Your phone is ringing.”

Surprise flickered on his face when I glanced down to his pants and then he hurriedly snatched it from his back pocket and pulled it in front of him.

Call it curiosity or just a coincidence that I’d looked down to see who it was, but I instantly wished I had a time machine to redo the last few seconds.

The throb on my head no longer bothered me.

What bothered me was the name “girlfriend” flashing right above a picture of someone I recognized immediately.

I quickly snapped my head forward as I saw Dawson hit “Ignore” on the screen.

I hurriedly bent down to pick up the tape measure while willing the simmering resentment that lay so quietly in my lower stomach to go the hell away, and asked if he was finished taking measurements.

He answered, “Yeah, I think I’ve got it,” and then swiftly grabbed the tape measure out of my hand and headed to the door.

I stood back beside my half-wall, waiting for him to turn around and at least mumble a “goodbye” to me, but he didn’t. Instead, he pulled the door open and walked out without saying another word.

That’s when the realization hit me.

I shouldn’t even be talking to Dawson if Breanna was involved. If she hated me back in high school, for absolutely no good reason, what would she do now if she knew I was having dirty thoughts about her boyfriend?

Kill me. That’s what she would do. She’d sever my head and feed it to the freaking wolves.

Chapter Fourteen

Dawson

Ivy was taking up space in my mind that was no longer reserved for her. I used to think about work, Breanna, and my next beer at Sailed Ships but now all I could think about was when I’d get to see Ivy again. Which was not how a friend should be thin

king, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t how someone who already had a girlfriend should be thinking.

Breanna called me when I was mere seconds away from dipping my head down and crushing my lips to Ivy’s the other night, which was so out of line that I could barely form words afterward. The only thing I could focus on was the way that Ivy’s mouth had parted and how she had sighed when I moved closer; as if she were tempting me... as if she really wanted me to kiss her.

Then the switch was flipped. The second my phone rang, the realization that I had almost just cheated on my girlfriend, with my childhood best friend, hit me like a 7-ton semitruck. I knew that Ivy had seen Breanna’s picture flash on my screen; she’d inhaled a sharp breath and her voice was unstable afterward.

Apparently, there was a lot that she needed to get caught up on.

Me dating Breanna.

The house I currently lived in… I couldn’t wait until she saw that. That would open up a whole new can of worms.

Breanna thought it was weird that I lived there. She said it was creepy, but she knew very well that I wasn’t going to move. She wouldn’t get her way with that.

She got her way tonight, though.

The second she got to my house after working at the dealership, the one her father owns (the same one that was always neck and neck with the one Ivy’s father had owned) she plopped herself in her tight, little dress down on the couch and ran her fingernails over my bare arm.

“Let’s go out tonight, babes.”