Love You Better (Better Love 1)

“You adore everyone.”

“Because there are so many people worthy of my adoration.” She bats her lashes and smiles, genuinely sweet. “Speaking of adoration, what did you make for me?”

“Margherita pizza.” I watch as her eyes flash over my shoulder, studying the pizza on the stovetop with obvious hunger.

“Mmmm. Did you add Italian sausage?” She runs her tongue over her bottom lip, and my groin heats. Fuck.

“Of course.”

“Good, you know how I need my meat.” She whips her eyes back to mine and wiggles her brows playfully, wearing a smirk that could be considered flirtatious on anyone else.

“Yeah, yeah, you hussy. I get it. You’re a sausage fiend.” I wave her off, trying my best to fight a laugh and failing. I place three slices of pizza onto a plate and set it in front of her.

“Can’t help it. I’m a growing girl with an insatiable hunger,” she says as she plops down onto the barstool and lifts a slice to her mouth.

I have to force myself to turn around, double-check that the oven is off, grab two beers from the fridge, anything to keep myself from watching her eat.

If I thought for one second that making a move wouldn’t ruin our friendship, I’d do it. I’d tell her how I feel, and then I’d spend every minute afterward showing her. But I learned the hard way that anything more than friendship between Ivy and me is impossible. It’s torture, but I can’t picture my life without her, so I take what I can get and stoically bear the pain.

“So, what’s the plan?” she mumbles through a mouthful of pizza. I crack open a beer and set it in front of her, then open my own and take a long pull before answering.

“Well, we could start that new cheesy horror film that came out last week. The one set in the high school and the teenagers are played by grown fucking adults?”

“Mmm, that could work. I’m down for gore, and older actors make me feel less skeezy about drooling over the hero.”

“Ha, right. Or, we could watch Becoming, that documentary about the former First Lady.”

“Always my First Lady,” she says and lifts her beer to me.

I knock my can with hers. “I’ll cheers to that.”

“Well,” she says after taking another drink of her beer, “my brain is tired. I need something I can pay minimal attention to and possibly fall asleep in the middle of.”

“Sounds like you’ll take twenty-seven-year-old teenagers for 1,000, Alex!”

“Yes!” she exclaims around a laugh, hopping up to put her plate in the sink. “C’mon, chef. My tummy has been sufficiently filled, and Bailey is bartending, so she won’t be home until late. Let’s get to the Netflixin’ part of the evening. I know you probably have to run one hundred miles in the morning, so we don’t want to keep you up too late.”

I chuckle. “It’s actually only six miles tomorrow.”

“Ick.” She shudders and saunters into the living room, and just like I’ve been doing since we were fourteen, I follow.

When I get back to my condo later, it’s midnight.

Ivy, like usual, fell asleep before eleven, during a fucking gory ass slasher flick. I don’t know how she does it. I was crawling out of my skin, using all my energy not to shriek like a small child. If she hadn’t maneuvered her sleeping body onto my lap, I might have actually screamed.

The nights with more touching are torture. They are the best and also the worst possible thing. Tonight, when she fell asleep on my shoulder, her mango body wash engulfed me like a drug. An opium cloud of her scent. Thick and sweet and intoxicating.

When she sleepily moved so her head was in my lap, I forgot about the movie entirely. The weight of her head on my thigh and her warm breath slipping through the fabric of my thin joggers was enough to drive me crazy. By the time she rested her small hands on my leg, I was running my fingers through her silken hair and mentally reciting the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence to keep my dick in line.

I can’t get that contact out of my mind.

Even with the physical distance between us, I can still smell her shampoo, can still feel her fingers grasping onto my thigh, and I’m hard as stone. It doesn’t matter how many amendments I recall; my erection isn’t relenting.

Fuck.

It’s not the first time I’ve taken matters into my own hands with Ivy on my mind. It definitely won’t be the last.

I try not to.