Page 33 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

“Are we going to kiss or not?”

“Are you two all right?”

Kai and Amy stopped their bickering and looked up at the jacuzzi, where Jason and Jess were watching them with slightly confused expressions. Kai hadn’t realized how loud they’d grown over the course of the conversation. Maybe it really would be better if he just sank and drowned right about now. It would certainly solve a lot of problems.

“Amy’s just being mean!” he called, making a joke of it.

“You two are like little kids on the playground, I swear!” Jason said.

Screw it. At this point it really was needed to sell the fact that everything was just fine and dandy.

Before Amy could tease him any further and before he could overthink himself to death, Kai looped his arm around Amy’s waist, pulled her in tight and put his lips to hers. It was a chaste sort of kiss at first. The type of kiss strangers do when they’re acting in a play in the community theater group, arms all over the place but lips dry and shut tight, pressed to each other’s faces with a carefully calculated amount of pressure. But then it started to morph into something else. Amy’s arms gripped his shoulders tighter as she fought for balance while they floated in the water, and he held her just as tight, a hand moving between her shoulder blades. Their lips were no longer stiff and firm, but softening by the second, their noses pressed together and Amy’s breath tickling his cheek.

Kai wanted to dive into that kiss, to submerge himself and never come up for air again. But Amy pulled away, and before Kai could catch her eye, before he could get his brain working enough to say anything at all, she was looking over his shoulder at the upper deck.

“Aw, man,” she said and looked over at the others. Jason and Jess weren’t even looking in their direction, hopping out of the jacuzzi to go and get dressed for dinner.

“It was worth a shot,” she said, quickly releasing Kai from her grip and swimming over to the ladder to climb out of the pool. “But we should probably get ready for dinner too.”

“Uh, yeah. Probably.”

With that she was gone, scurrying away and not once looking Kai fully in the eye. Like she was embarrassed about what had just happened. Meanwhile, Kai felt years of suppressed feelings rush to the surface of his mind so fast that it made him dizzy.

God, he was such an idiot. He really was. And his brain was a complete traitor, coming up with that idea to make their fake relationship more believable. As if kissing awkwardly in public wouldn’t be a completely obvious sign that they were fabricating the whole thing.

But it really hadn’t been awkward at all, maybe a little at first, but after that… then it had been in the process of shifting into something else entirely before Amy had pulled away. While everyone was inside, Kai dunked himself under the water, trying to clear his head and failing miserably. He wanted to kiss Amy again. And again and again… If he could just do it forever, he’d be the happiest man alive. He had always wanted to kiss Amy, and it was only just now that he was brave enough to admit it to himself.

He had no idea what he was going to do for the rest of the trip, how he was supposed to stay even halfway sane. Because now that his feelings for Amy were properly unlocked for the first time in over a decade, he had no earthly clue how he was ever going to shove them back down again.

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