Craft (The Gibson Boys 2)

“Yes,” I grouse.

“The guy who was here the other night. Who took you to his grandma’s house.”

“Yes.”

Her amusement knows no bounds. “Let me get this straight. Out of all the men on that app, you somehow managed to find him?”

It’s a rhetorical question. Or it better be because I’m not holding her hand through this process.

“It is a semi-local, kind of regional app. So it’s not entirely impossible, but I am leaning towards fate, Mariah.” She gets to her feet and floats around the room like a cartoon princess.

“Fate? Since when is fate a form of hell?”

The spinning stops and she laughs. “Since when is screwing a hot history teacher a form of torture?”

“I didn’t screw him,” I mutter. But I’ve fucked myself to thoughts of him a million times.

“That’s your fault.”

Yes, it is.

I appreciate the few quiet seconds as she flops back in the chair again. My fantasies of Lance were just that—fantasies. Make-believe. Not real. Now my reality has been skewed, flipped upside down and it’s all merging together in one ridiculously hot, yet slightly mortifying, situation.

Whitney shakes her head. “You are the only person in the universe who can find fault with an app that helped you meet a gorgeous and sexy man who already likes you to begin with!”

It’s so much more complicated than that. So complicated, in fact, that I don’t even know how to boil it down to make sense of it.

“How’d he take it?” she asks.

“Oh, he thought it was the greatest thing ever.”

“And you should’ve too.”

“Look,” I gulp, feeling my cheeks ready to betray me. “We have one relationship, for lack of a better word, at work. What we had online wasn’t really me and wasn’t really him. Or maybe it was him, actually. But I definitely wasn’t being myself.”

It’s easiest to leave it at that. There’s no sense in bringing up the fact that he’s a hook-up guy, a one-night stand—a couple nights at best. And even if I could pull off a one-night-er, I couldn’t do it with Lance.

Whitney is my best friend for a few reasons. One, she’s loyal. Two, she takes me as I am. Three, she can read all my nuances appropriately.

She gets comfortable, curling a leg beneath her. “So what you’re saying is you are the book nerd in-person and a little vixen online?”

“No,” I say too quickly.

She barely contains her laugh. “How vixen did you go?”

“I’m not a vixen.”

“Clearly or you would’ve rode his cock like any other hot-blooded female. I saw him, Mariah. Your self-control is on a whole other level.”

“Can we focus here?” I say, pulling her out of that line of questioning. “I don’t know what to do.”

I expect a quick chirp about how to have sex or something equally inappropriate, but she surprises me.

It’s a moment you can only have with someone you’re close to, a moment where you don’t have to speak but thoughts are still being exchanged. Her foot starts to bounce on the floor as she grasps my panic. I, on the other hand, inflate my lungs a little more easily than I have been able to in the last handful of hours.

“I’ll see him in the morning,” I say, resolved. “How do I navigate this, Whit?”

“I didn’t think you’d use the app, to be honest. I love that you did, but I’m surprised.”

“Yeah, me too. Surprised, I mean,” I clarify. “Not loving that I did it.”

“Let’s start there. Why did you do it?”

A sense of calm settles over me, like when you’re in trouble and finally accept that everyone knows it was you who did it. You go through the motions of telling the truth because it’s only going to delay the inevitable if you dance around it. You just want the conversation to be over and the fallout realized.

“I was sitting here one night right after I heard about Chrissy being pregnant.” My throat is scorching as I put the thoughts I’ve kept to myself into the universe. “And I guess I kind of broke down, you know. Not crying and all that, but more of a pity party. Wondering if there’s something wrong with me. Considering adopting a cat.”

She drops her jaw in mock horror.

“Anyway,” I continue, “I just needed that confirmation. I just wanted to know I could still reel a guy in. That I wasn’t lame.”

“You can’t believe that. I won’t sit here and let you say you think you’re lame.”

“You know what I mean.”

She scoots her chair closer to mine and kicks at my foot. “I know you thought you’d be in a different place right now, but you aren’t for a reason.”

“I’m fine with that. Really,” I insist when she looks at me like I’m lying. “I’m happy I’m not with Eric. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have some nice, sweet, cute guy want to be with me.”