Page 21 of Pretty Little Lies

I immediately take it and lift it back, welcoming the burn down my throat as my face scrunches up from the intensity of it.

Levi plunks the glass from my fingers and replaced it with a frozen pink drink. “Bartender says these are a hit around here.”

I take a sip, jugging it down, and sayfuck itto any brain freeze that might sink in very soon after, when“A Groovy Kind of Love”by Phil Collins begins to transition from the current house music right into the slow song.

There’s absolutelynoway that Juice, Hot Rod, or Levi would know the significance of that song.

The one that Reeve asked me to slow dance to in one of my neighbor’s tree houses the night he told me of his father. When he came to South Shore alone just to see me.

It’s Reeve.

It has to be. There’s no other way he’d be able to prove it without coming out here physically and showing me. It’s so like him to do something like this and the weight off my chest instantly falls to the wayside.

I have to see him.

And, after that, we’ll need to keep our distance because of Levi, but he’s alive and that’s all that matters.

“Why are you smiling?”

Shit.

Removing my lips from the straw, I give him as sweet of a smile as I can manage.

More like a petty one.

Bestie didn’t win this round, and he doesn’t even know about it. And I shouldn’t gloat, but I am.

“You’d smile too if you’d taste this drink,” I reply, earning a perked and suspicious brow from Levi, as if a drink wouldn’t bring me that much happiness.

It would if he only knew.

Lifting my drink to his mouth, Levi doesn’t break eye contact with me when his full lips wrap around the black straw, and takes a sip. Since my mood has changed, so has this moment. I take in the dark stumble along Levi’s jawline and the sculpted edges of his cheekbones.

If I was his girlfriend, and he didn’t just try to slowly kill Reeve, he’d have no problem dragging me out of the house to do this with him tonight.

In fact, the idea sounds more delicious than what he’s intending on it to become.

Chill, Bay.

Seriously.

“What’s so special about it?” Levi asks when he’s done, and I roll my eyes, because if it’s not tequila, ol’ boy doesn’t want any part of it.

“Only you, Lev,” I deadpan, shaking my head at him before he takes a step forward and one of his large palms falls directly to my hip.

It burns my flesh there, and I immediately forget about my drink. I can smell the sea water and mint off the first hint of his cologne that mellows out into sandalwood and tobacco. I love when Levi wears this cologne for some reason. Maybe it’s because it’s so nostalgic for me. That it’s him and no one else.

“I don’t want to make this weird for you, but I need you to pretend to kiss me.”

Pretend?

I flex my face at him because that’s not going to do it for Torin Wildes, for one. If he’s watching us like a hawk right now and has probably evaluated every angle of how we’re standing and acting. “You need to think better.”

“I’m thinking wisely.”

Yeah, I don’t know what that means.

“The longer you stand here with your hand on my hip, the more fake this looks.” And it completely defeats what we’re trying to do here, obviously.

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