Best Served Cold

More accurately, I was mere inches from his bare chest. From his lean abs and the hint of a ‘v,’ I knew for a fact disappeared right under the waistband of his shorts.

“What do you mean?” My voice was steadier and more confident than I felt inside.

Inside, my stomach was quivering with butterflies from being so close to him.

From, for a quick flash, feeling the way I had once upon a time.

“You’ll have to do better than that to push my buttons, Rae.” He barely even blinked as he spoke, and he reached out and wound a small lock of my hair around his fingers. His gaze dropped to his finger, then hovered on my mouth, then found its way back to mine. “And you know it.”

I held his eyes for a second before straightening and saying, “Do I?”

Chase smirked, pulling his finger out so my hair sprung back into place over my shoulder. “Why don’t you try it and see what happens?”

“Maybe I will.” I stepped away from him, taking the water with me. “And you’ll regret ever saying that to me.”

“I don’t know.” He grabbed his roller and met my eyes for one last time. “Even ice melts over time, Rae.”

“What does that mean?”

His lips twitched. “If you keep playing with fire, even your heart will melt.”

I blinked at him, then threw the remaining few mouthfuls out of my bottle at him. The droplets splattered across his back, and he tensed as the cold liquid ran over his skin.

He glared at me.

I shrugged a shoulder. “There. I put out the fire.”

He kept glaring at me for a second before his lips twitched and he lost control. He laughed hard, and I turned, flicking my hair as I went.

Chase, nil. Rae, one.

Maybe.

CHAPTER NINE – CHASE

I pulled away from Rae’s house. She hadn’t spoken a word to me since this afternoon when I’d caught her staring at me.

Well, that was a lie. She’d muttered a quiet “thank you” as she’d gotten out of the car a minute ago, but that didn’t count. That was her not being completely rude.

I say not completely rude because she could give the silent treatment with the best of them, and she was goddamn good at it.

But it’d worked for me today.

Today had been nothing more than a reminder of how things used to be. How it was before she broke my heart for no fucking reason. Throwing back to high school and the day she’d finally agreed to go out with me had clenched at my damn heart.

And she made it sound worse than it was. I hadn’t stalked her or anything. I’d just tried my luck a few times at asking her out. She says it like I asked her every week for three years or something.

It wasn’t. Once a year for two years until she left for college, then the day of her birthday.

When she said yes.

If you asked me now if I’d have still asked her out knowing how it ended, my answer would be yes. I would have asked her out. I’d do it all over again, too.

She wasn’t the bitch she came across as sometimes. Hell, she admitted she could be a bitch. I didn’t have rose-tinted glasses on and I wasn’t looking at her through some fucked-up veil of love.

She could be a bitch, but she could also be the best person I’d ever known. She didn’t think with her head, she thought with her heart. She acted impulsively and didn’t always sit to think about the consequences of her actions.

If she did, maybe she wouldn’t have ignored me for a week before she broke up with me with some lame-ass excuse about not being ready for a serious relationship.

We’d been together two years. I was going to ask her to move in with me. We were hardly just hooking up.

She had flaws. She wasn’t perfect. I didn’t want her to be perfect. She may have appeared that way to anyone who didn’t know her, but that’s because they didn’t see who she really was.

She was rough around the edges, and so was I. Find me a human who wasn’t a little rough around the edges on the inside. All I hoped was that she’d wake up and realize that her rough edges fit right into mine.

Because today I’d realized the one thing I didn’t want to admit to myself.

I fucking missed her.

I thought I was over missing her, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t over missing her smile on a morning or her over-dramatic eye rolls. I wasn’t over missing the way she looked at me or the way she hummed as she did the most mundane tasks.

I wasn’t over her.

That was almost more startling than knowing I was in love with her. They weren’t one and the same. You can love someone and still move on with your life. You can love someone and be over them and your relationship. They’re the kinds of loves that will always be there no matter what you do or where you go or who you meet—like your first true love.