Page 68 of Side By Side

“Right. It’s a bar.”

“You have been to a bar before, right?”

“You’re teasing me right now, but you know I have. I challenged you to a race on the ice in a bar not all that long ago.”

“That you lost.”

“No, I won,” she argued.

“You cheated.” Belle laughed.

“Fine… I concede. I cheated. It was more fun than watching you kick my ass again.”

Belle smiled, stood, and stuffed her wallet into her back pocket.

“Want to come with me?”

“To the bar?”

“The gay bar, yeah. Ever been to one of those?”

“A few times.”

“Really?”

“With Walker.” She shrugged. “He mostly drank and danced with other boys. I mostly stood there watching him do that and holding on to a bottle of water for him after.”

Belle chuckled and said, “You’re such a mom.”

“I am not.” Chandler laughed a little. “Are you inviting me along because you actually want me to go, or because you need a ride?”

“I can get a Lyft or an Uber just fine this time of night. I’d go later, but you have me waking up at, like, four in the morning, so I can’t go at eleven and stay until two.”

“Would you normally do that?”

“No,” Belle replied. “I just need to get out of here for a couple of hours. That’s why I’m going.”

“My drama?”

“No, your sister’s. Your drama, I can handle.”

Chandler rolled her eyes and said, “Just go. Enjoy your night without the Wolfe sisters and our many dysfunctions.”

“Come with me, Chandler. We can just have a drink. You can even have water, if you want. We’ll hang out and come home. No big deal. You look like you could use a night away from this place, too. Oh, and don’t say that you shouldn’t go. If you don’t want to go, say that. I won’t be offended. If you do, we’ll go.”

“My hair is still wet.”

Belle sat down on the couch and said, “I can wait.”

CHAPTER 19

What had Belle been thinking? Her whole plan of getting out of the house and off that estate, where warring siblings had dominated her life since her arrival, had gone to shit because she’d invited one of those siblings out with her. She’d gotten to her room and had looked up a place to go for the evening, thinking a regular bar would do, but still looking up if a gay bar was anywhere nearby. She’d been prepared to pay however much a shared-ride car would cost to get her there, too. After finding Jay’s, she’d popped a frozen burrito into the microwave, ate it, and hopped into the shower. Then, she’d dressed up a little, thinking that maybe she’d meet someone to flirt with tonight, and she wanted to look good doing it.

That was all she’d planned, though. She wouldn’t bring a woman back to Chandler’s house. She assumed that would be fine – she was an adult, and it wasn’t like she was a virgin – but it felt very wrong to bring a stranger back to the house she was at least in part sharing with the girl she used to like and was starting to like again, although begrudgingly. She couldn’t like Chandler again. They were too different. And Chandler lived here, in this massive estate owned by her parents, which Belle didn’t fit into at all. On top of that, despite Chandler saying that she didn’t regret their kiss, Belle hadn’t exactly heard her admit that she liked women. A lot of girls kissed other girls as experiments, so it was likely that Chandler would move out of the house and in with a husband in a few years, pop out a couple of kids, and that would be that.

Belle had planned to flirt, if she saw someone there whom she was interested in, and maybe get a phone number, but that was it. Well, if someone wanted to make out with her, that would be okay, too, but no sex. She wouldn’t even go back to another woman’s place for that. She needed to be focused on skating right now, to help Chandler, and not at all on Chandler’s lips, which were full and looked so soft. Belle was staring at them as Chandler drove them to the bar, and she shouldn’t be. She recalled how soft they were years ago and clenched her fists in her lap, turning her head to look out at the highway as if that could ever be more interesting than Chandler Wolfe’s lips.

“There’s no parking.”

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