Dear Heart, I Hate You

“I’m sorry, was it really that hard?” He cocked his head to the side as he frowned back at me.

“Yes!”

Reaching for his hand again, I squeezed it as hard as I could to prove my point. But he wasn’t fazed in the slightest, his intriguing gaze still glued to mine.

“Is that supposed to hurt?” he teased, and I growled, narrowing my eyes as I tried to squeeze his hand even harder, but couldn’t.

Damn it. How could I make my point if I couldn’t even hurt him with my wimpy grip?

I moved on to the next guy at the table, who reached for my offered hand and shook it gently.

“Charles,” he said, and I smiled.

“Nice to meet you, Charles. Now, that’s how you shake a lady’s hand.” I glanced at Cal with a smirk.

The last one in their group introduced himself as Simeon, and when I repeated his name, hoping I pronounced it right, he nodded his head.

“Thanks for letting me crash your party.”

“No, thank you,” Cal said, brushing his knee against mine, and my entire body heated with the contact.

“Can I invite my girlfriends over?”

I glanced back at the girls, who were thankfully carrying on a conversation without me. It made me feel a little less like a jerk to see they were perfectly fine. Then again, this wasn’t high school; grown women tended to usually be okay on their own.

“Of course,” Simeon said with a smile.

Waving in their direction, I called out, “Girls, do you want to come over here with our new best friends?”

I laughed when they immediately pulled their chairs over to the table without question, squeezing in and forcing me to inch even closer to Cal.

Cal’s thigh pressed against mine as I scooted over, and I made no move to shift away. He didn’t either, but maybe it was because he couldn’t. The table was packed now, and I couldn’t have been happier about that.

So we stayed that way, our legs touching. My body was fully aware of every move he made, every muscle twitch, each time his leg pressed against mine a little harder than it had been a second before. My heart raced at the contact, each movement he made stirring an excitement buried deep inside me.

I’d read plenty of romance novels that talked about this sort of thing happening —the immediate connection between two people, that indescribable pull. And for the last few years, I’d rolled my eyes whenever I’d read those words, half calling them bullshit and half wishing they could be true. But in this moment when my entire being was being shaken to life by the simple act of a male thigh pressing against mine, I finally understood.

I got it.

Those words weren’t just something the author wrote to make the story sound pretty or give it more meaning—it actually happened to people. And it was currently happening to me. I felt like a live bomb, a firework, something on the verge of exploding. Nothing made you realize how much you’d been ignoring your heart, until someone came along and smacked it awake simply by existing.

Please let him feel it too. Because how much would it suck if I was the only one feeling this heart-altering stuff here? It would suck. A lot.

The seven of us chatted, introducing ourselves. My girls and I explained that we were in town for a conference, and the guys told us they lived here in Boston but were staying at the hotel for an office retreat. They worked in the finance industry and dropped terms about stocks, covalent bonds, and other things that honestly sounded like a foreign language to me.

When Cal spoke about his job, his face lit up. He was smart, and apparently good at what he did; I could tell that simply by the way he talked about it. His passion for his work only turned me on more. There was something so incredibly attractive about a smart, hard-working guy.

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nbsp; “I also help coach a kids’ hockey team,” he said. “And I’m a math and finance tutor at an afterschool program.”

I stifled a shocked laugh. “You’re telling me that kids actually want to talk about math and finance? Come on, Cal, don’t bullshit me,” I teased.

He smiled. “What? You wouldn’t want to listen to me talk about that stuff?”

No, but I’d like to listen to him talk about other stuff. “I’m just shocked that kids are even interested in that at their age.”

“You’d be surprised at the things that kids are interested in. It actually gives me hope for the future,” he said.