Mine To Have (Southern Wedding 1)

He turns around to look at me and I take him in. He’s wearing khaki pants and a button-down blue shirt tucked in with white sneakers. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up to his elbows and the two top buttons are open around his neck, showing you the smooth skin under it. Skin that I spent a good part of last Saturday licking. His green eyes light up when he sees me, his five o’clock shadow thicker than I remember. "Hey," he says as if him being here is a normal occurrence

"What are you doing here?" is the only thing that comes to my mind.

"I was in the neighborhood." He smirks at me, and I can’t help but laugh.

"You took a plane?" I ask him, my head spinning around and around while my head is reminding me of the way he kissed me.

"No, I drove." He stares at me, and my stomach fills with knots.

"You drove six hours to be in the neighborhood?" I fold my arms over my chest before I do something stupid like grab him by the shirt and pull his lips down to kiss me.

"Actually, it was eight hours with traffic." He chuckles, and my whole body feels like it’s been zapped with an electric shock. "Besides, how else would I be able to ask you to dinner?"

My mouth opens. "You drove all this way to ask me to dinner?"

"Well, I tried calling but you must have changed your number," he says, looking around. "And calling your office"—he shrugs—"seemed so impersonal." His eyes stare right at me. "And let’s be honest, you would just avoid me."

"Okay, one.” I hold up my finger, angry that he knows me as well as he does. "I didn’t change my number." I take the phone out of my pocket, showing him the phone.

"I called you," he starts to say, and I hold up my hand.

"No, you didn’t." I shake my head, walking over to Donna’s desk and picking up the phone to dial my number. The phone rings in my hand. "See, working phone."

He grabs his phone from his back pocket and looks down at it. Putting the phone on speaker, it doesn’t even ring and goes straight to my voice mail. "That’s all I got. I called over a hundred times on Sunday. I texted you also."

"Well, there you are, lying because I don’t have anything." I look down at my phone.

"Let me try," he says, typing out something on his phone and pressing send. I look down at my phone waiting, and nothing comes through. "See," he says, turning his phone, and I see that all the messages on his screen are green.

I put my hand in front of my mouth. "I think I blocked you."

"You don’t say," he says, not the least bit shocked. I look down at my phone and dial his number, and his phone rings in his hand. "Oh, look, it’s Harlow calling," he jokes and puts the phone to his ear and I hear it echo. "Harlow," he says as if he isn’t standing in front of me. "How nice of you to call."

"Very funny," I say, hanging up the phone. "Okay, so maybe you are blocked."

"Well, unblock me," he tells me.

"I don’t know how since you aren’t a contact in my phone," I say, looking down at my phone, and he gasps.

"You deleted me as a contact?" he asks, shocked.

"No.” I shake my head. "It’s just I lost my phone, and well, I didn’t have it saved to the cloud, so I lost all my contacts."

"Oh, wow." He folds his arms over his chest. "Blaming it on the cloud."

"I’m not blaming it on the cloud," I defend.

"Good, because no one really knows what the cloud really is," he points out and he isn’t wrong. When the guy at the store explained it to me, I thought he had two heads.

"Anyway, we are going off topic here," I say, getting flustered.

"Yes, we are." He nods.

"Also…" I point at him. "I would never avoid you,” I lie through my teeth. Even he knows I’m lying.

"So, if I had left a message, you would have called me back?" He stares right into my eyes.

"Yes," I say, hoping he changes the subject.

"You would have called me back right away?" Fuck, is the only thing I can think of when he asks that question.

"I’ve been busy." I throw up my hands in my defense.

"Exactly," he says. "So you would have avoided me, and then what?"

"And then you would take the hint and not call me back," I say, and I can see the hurt flicker over his eyes, and then he quickly recovers.

"Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing I was in the neighborhood." His voice is soft. "So what do you say, Harlow?"

"About what exactly?" I ask him, knowing that we definitely should talk about what we did last weekend. But then as soon as I think about last weekend, I hope that we don’t talk about it. I want to sweep it under the rug where it belongs and hope to fuck I can get over it and stop thinking about it. Except one look at him and I’m already replaying all the times I reached for him in the night. Or the way he never ever let me go, he always had to be touching me.