Page 80 of The Ones We Fight For

“Like that,” Walker murmured back. She batted her eyelashes for effect. His jaw ticked, his eyes wandering down to her lips for a split-second. “Fine, but I warned you. So, just to preface this, I didn’t really have someone around to give me ‘the talk’ about the birds and the bees when I was a kid. Cole never thought to tell me because he was also still a kid. Anyway, I found this… video in my dad’s old crap, and I watched it. I was, like, seven or something.”

“Oh no!”

“It gets worse. I thought the people were dancing. I guess I thought it was cool? So cool I brought it to show and tell.”

“No!” Talia’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t.”

“Oh, I did. Then I had to have a meeting with my principal, my teacher, the school nurse, and my brother. My dad was too drunk off his ass, as usual, to attend. They all sat me down and explained as a team what the video was and why it wasn’t appropriate for seven-year-olds to watch. I’m pretty sure they had to send a letter to all the parents in that class about the porn that I exposed them to.”

“That’s horrifying but also… kind of adorable?”

“I’m not sure how you reached that conclusion,” Walker let out a puff of laughter.

“You were so innocent!” Talia said earnestly.

“I’m not innocent anymore.” He fixed her with a hard stare. The seduction behind it made the heat grow between Talia’s thighs.

“No, I suppose you aren’t,” she choked out.

Walker’s eyes darkened as they flitted down to her breasts, the scoop neck of her dress revealing a little of the black lacy bra underneath, then back up to her face. “Are you?”

“No.” Her tongue dipped out of her mouth to drag along her bottom lip. “I don’t want to be.”

“Here we are!” The waitress appeared out of thin air, and Walker ripped his hand away from Talia’s thigh. Talia hadn’t realized how close they were, or that his hand had slid a little further up and over on her leg, mere inches from where he could have ruined her in seconds. The waitress set down Walker’s plate of steak frites, and he coughed loudly, scooting several inches away from Talia, the boundary set again.

They made idle talk as they ate their meal. Talia tried to break down the invisible wall he had put up as she fiddled with her spoon in her ratatouille, but it was to no avail. The closest she got was holding his hand, but it was from a distance. He was a million miles away.

“Where’d you go?” Talia finally asked when she couldn’t take it any longer. Walker blinked the haze from his eyes and twisted his torso to look at her.

“Sorry, I’m just overthinking. Cole’s birthday is on Saturday. We used to do something fun, and I just don’t feel like celebrating. Then I feel like we should be celebrating. But what exactly is there to celebrate? I don’t know.” He took another bite of his food, which he had admitted ordering solely because it had the word “steak” in the title. After Talia had explained that steak tartare was actually raw ground beef, Walker had grown concerned with the menu items of anything he didn’t recognize and opted for the safest option. Talia had mostly been pretending to eat her food, shifting the eggplant and zucchini around to keep herself occupied, so she took his lead and took a bite. It was still warm despite her delay in eating it. It had originally tasted bland when she first tried it, but the opening in her and Walker’s conversation had her reconsidering. Now it reminded her a little of the stews her mother used to make when she was sick.

“Maybe you can do both?” she suggested. “What kind of thing do you normally do?”

“Cole never really had a childhood, so he had this tradition where we would all do something that no one had ever done before. It didn’t even have to be big, but it had to be new.”

“That sounds fun.” It did. Cole should have gotten to live out so many more firsts.

“I think we’re just going to hang out this year—eat some cake, maybe,” Walker offered with a shrug.

“My mom used to take me shopping to get one full outfit on my birthday. We’d spend all day out, agonizing over every detail of it, then we’d go get ice cream.” Talia smiled, glancing down at her stew. “I think you would’ve liked her. She would’ve given you so much unwarranted parenting advice.”

“If she’s anything like you, I’m sure I would’ve loved her. Cole would’ve loved you, too, and Paisley—God, you and Paisley would be best friends. She was a force to be reckoned with.” Walker looked up, as if he could see them in a pattern on the ceiling. Talia clasped his hand in hers again, a gesture of comfort, and joined him in looking up.

“And here’s your dessert!” The waitress walked straight into another of Talia and Walker’s moments with the chocolate lava cake they had ordered. They nodded politely as she set it down in front of them. They agreed on the typical date standard earlier, one that involved sharing a piece together. So much had passed between them that by the time it actually came, they both stared at it in awkward silence, neither of them reaching for a fork.

“You know you’re not betraying your brother by eating a piece of cake with me, right?” Talia brushed Walker’s shoulder to try to break into his thoughts again. Walker opened his mouth a few times to respond before he clammed up. He snatched a fork off the table, scooted closer to her, and dug the fork carelessly into the middle of the cake before he suspended it between them with a small smile.

“I know. Open?”

Talia obeyed, met with the rich taste of fudge when he lifted the fork to her lips. It mixed into her senses, her nose breathing in Walker’s cedar woodsy scent while her mouth worked to swallow. He was staring at her lips again, and she knew her eyes were begging him to kiss her.

“You have a little…” Walker wiped at the corner of her mouth and did the most erotic thing she’d ever seen: licked the chocolate off his finger.

Holy shit. Talia had never thought of frosting as sexual before Walker, but this was now the second time frosting felt like foreplay to her.

“You normally make sure I’m covered in frosting, not the opposite,” Talia chuckled, opting for a light joke to cut her sexual frustrations. She stabbed into the cake with her fork, shoving a heaping portion into her mouth.

The sooner the cake was gone, the sooner they could leave, and the sooner she could avoid grabbing Walker by the collar to devour his mouth in front of the whole restaurant.

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