“Please.” She held up a hand. “Can I just get it out while I’m momentarily brave enough to talk about this?”
He had no idea where she was going, but his intuition was skating ice down his spine in a feeling of deep, crawling foreboding. “Say it. Whatever it is.”
“So, I’ve been thinking… You’ve become a really good friend to me these past few weeks—”
Oh, fuck.
“—and even though there’s obviously, um, really crazy chemistry between us, I’d like us to be friends. I mean, just friends.”
Oh, fuuuck. Billy’s gut was making a slow slide to the floor.
“I don’t have that many here, and no one else who knows Ryan or my life before DC. I don’t want to lose that or mess it up. I hated when I thought you were mad at me. Of course, if you thought we were only friends anyway, I probably sound like an idiot right now. But I still wanted to officially let you know what I was thinking. In case there was any question. Or anything.” She clenched her eyes shut. “And now I’m going to stop talking forever.”
He couldn’t even chuckle at her self-deprecating humor. Because she’d just put him in the friend zone. And, in the process, made the debate that had been raging inside him completely meaningless.
Even worse, her decision suddenly made one side of that debate a whole lot more compelling. More than that, obvious. Like there’d never really been any choice at all and he’d just been too moronic or cowardly to see it.
Wasn’t that always the fucking way? It took losing the choice about whether to turn right or left to highlight which path you’d really wanted to go down all along.
Now, a giant neon sign flashed in his brain over claim Shayna once and for fucking all and figure out the rest as you go.
Except she’d just pulled the plug.
And sonofabitch, it was better this way, wasn’t it?
Better for her in so many ways, not the least of which was all the bullshit he clearly hadn’t resolved from what’d happened to him in Iraq. Better for his relationship with Ryan. Better for them—him and Shayna—because he’d hated thinking Shayna was mad at him, too. He didn’t want to fuck up what he’d found with her either.
“Friends, huh?” he managed as his brain spun and his heart fought the idea.
She gave a nervous shrug. “Yeah.”
He inhaled a deep breath, manned up, and did the right thing—finally. “I’m honored to be your friend, Shayna. Of course. But for the record, our night together absofuckinglutely meant something to me.”
He was willing to let her go if he had to, but he wasn’t willing to let her think he hadn’t cherished the hell out of being with her.
Her gaze whipped up and he saw the confusion there. And maybe a little disbelief, too.
Which were two more reasons why respecting her wishes and quashing his belatedly apparent ones was the right thing to do. He’d screwed up that night with her enough that he’d left her doubting. If that wasn’t all his failings and insecurities in a nutshell, he didn’t know what was.
“But friends is great. So, friend, what are we having for dessert?”
When they got home that night, Billy was grateful to find a whole pile of messages in his inbox from new clients confirming that they were hiring him.
The new caseload was going to require all his time, in part because he’d agreed to two short-term surveillance cases—another infidelity case and a workers’ comp case to investigate the validity of the injury. And in the vein of when it rains, it pours, he had an offer from a law firm to do surveillance in another case where he’d be gathering evidence for an upcoming trial. Add to that four new background checks he still had to do and Billy was going to be a busy fucking boy.
He didn’t think he’d ever juggled so many cases at one time.
God bless referrals from former clients and the network of veterans who had each other’s backs in the civilian world just like they’d done on the battlefield. And since new jobs tended to come in fits and starts, he was hesitant to turn any of them down.
But it meant that he wasn’t going to be able to spend as much time helping Shayna.
That cut both ways. Good, because it would help ensure the platonic distance between them—and he might need that help given his newfound insight into his own misfit emotions. But bad, too, because he thought it was much safer for her to be doing this with someone at her side.
Billy broke the news to her the next morning. “Hey, Shay,” he said, hitting the first floor wearing sleep pants and a T-shirt.
“You’re up early.” God, her smile was pretty.
And he was a fucking idiot. It was maybe the hundredth time he’d thought that since their talk the night before.