Page 35 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

He put the book down, looking at her slightly worried. “Not really. And I was waiting up for you.”

“Why?”

He shrugged, that concerned expression still on his face. “Just wanted to make sure that you were okay.”

Honestly, how had Amy even been able to ignore her feelings for him for so many years? It was a complete mystery to her now as she sat there, her veins thrumming with the power of it all. How had she ever been able to think about anything else? Stubbornness, she supposed. It never had been her best trait.

“I’m okay,” she said. “Promise.”

“Just needed some alone time from all these crazy rich people?” he asked with a grin on his face.

“Yeah, but you’re all my crazy rich people.”

“Good, I’m glad.”

There was a quiet lull, almost long enough that Amy could see Kai looking back over at his book, so she forced herself to speak before her courage failed her completely.

“So I was talking to Jason…” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And he mentioned that the meeting you were supposed to have on the same night as the high school reunion had been a disaster because you canceled at the last minute with no explanation. How he had been really mad until he’d found out you’d bailed on him to go be with me at the reunion, about the ‘engagement,’ and then he wasn’t mad anymore.”

The horror on Kai’s face was getting more and more dramatic by the second. Amy couldn’t help but smile a little.

“Oh,” he said. “Well. Yeah.”

“You could have just told me,” she said.

“You would have been mad.”

“Probably. But I’m not mad now. I wanted to let you know that.”

“That’s always a good thing. Did he say anything else?”

“He talked about how everything came down to good communication,” Amy said with a nonchalant shrug. “Which cut a little too close to the bone, honestly, because it’s not exactly our strong suit. Clearly.”

“Yeah. I don’t think we’re all that great at communicating, huh?”

“No, absolutely not. So I thought I better come in here and communicate something.”

Oh God, she was really going to do this. And why did Kai already look like he knew what she was going to say?

“Um…”

Now was when her mouth decided to dry up and stop working. Her tongue felt like sandpaper, and her teeth may as well have been glued together.

“Say it, Amy,” Kai said, his voice so gentle it could barely be heard of the rush of the waves outside.

“I think you already know, Kai. And I don’t know how to put it all into words anyway. There’s too much.”

“Hmm,” he hummed, an agreeing sort of sound, and looked away, deep in thought.

There was a pause where neither of them knew what to say after that. But somehow it wasn’t awkward; it was just… still. Like both of them just needed a moment to process everything that was going on. Amy didn’t know what else to say, so she said nothing at all. She just sat there in the strangely peaceful quiet as Kai visibly collected his own thoughts, staring intently at a point by the bed, seemingly on another planet.

But then he returned, and he looked at Amy and any notion of finding something to say vanished in a puff of smoke. The way he was looking at her… he had never looked at her like that before. No one had ever looked at her like that, like she was the only thing on the planet worth looking at, like he was never planning on looking away.

Then his hand started moving in her peripheral vision, reaching out, his fingertips brushing her cheek as soft as a sigh. Amy couldn’t help it. It wasn’t even a conscious decision, but she found herself leaning into Kai’s hand until his palm was cupping her cheek, the warmth against her skin feeling like flames.

Then his face was moving closer, and she was moving into him at the same time, two magnets being dragged together, slowly but inevitably. And it had always been inevitable, hadn’t it? They would have always made it to this point, no matter how much they lied to themselves.

Amy’s eyelids fluttered shut as their lips met, and it was nothing at all like the kiss they’d shared in the pool. There was no performance in it, not a single scrap of fakeness between them. And Amy was so, so tired of pretending. She melted into him almost instantly, her hands running down his arms, his hands on her back, their breath mixing together, and it all felt so…

It just felt right.

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