Page 71 of Illicit Illustration

A smile crossed her face as she finished, bright eyes meeting my drowsy ones.

I was sure from the outside, this scene would look ridiculous, me half-dressed with my pants around my ankles and my hand covered in cum, fingers frozen on my waning erection. Her naked,sitting across from me with a tablet in her lap, vibrators spread out across the table in between us.

But I wouldn’t change a fucking thing.

“Get what you need?” I asked, afraid to move and ruin the moment.

Her smile spread, her cheeks turning pink as she nodded.

“Now is when you decide to blush, kitten?” I chuckled, watching as the flush deepened, her eyes twinkling when the humor of the situation set in and she joined me, her laughter ringing out into the quiet room.

But as the gravity of the moment set in as the endorphins faded, her laughter slowly stopped, her eyes wary as she looked at me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, reaching to the side table and grabbing some tissues to wipe my hand.

“Did we just ruin this?”

I faltered, my gaze snapping to hers. “Ruin what?”

“Everything. I don’t know how we come back from this.”

“Maybe we don’t come back from this,” I whispered, reaching down to pull up my pants. “Maybe this is when things go forward.”

“Reid.”

Shaking my head, I resisted the urge to look at her, quickly buttoning my shirt and fastening the buckle on my belt.

“You can’t just pretend this doesn’t change things.”

Sitting back with my fingers gripping the armrests, I finally lifted my eyes to find hers. “I’m not pretending anything, Haz. This changed everything. And if you weren’t so scared of taking what you wanted, you’d see how good we could be together. It wouldn’t matter that there is a reveal tomorrow, and it wouldn’t matter that you have feelings you don’t know what to do with for someone you’ve never seen. What would matter is how I feel about you, and what you want to do about that.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Itisthat easy. Letting yourself feel what Iknowyou feel for me is easy, it’s overcoming this bullshit fearthat I don’t feel the same thing—that I’m not fucking desperate for you—that is keeping you from realizing that.”

Hazel

The look in Reid’seyes last night as he let himself out of my apartment haunted me. But in typical avoidant fashion, I’d thrown myself into rendering the last parts of the commission instead of facing the truth of what he’d said. I’d finally finished attaching the files to an email at 3 am before I’d hidden under my covers and eventually fallen asleep.

I’d survived on only a few hours of sleep before, but I’d never felt quite as weary doing it as I did today. I should have been excited that I was going to meet Seven in a matter of hours, but I wasn’t.

My nerves and anxiety had nothing to do with the anonymous man who I had thought I had a connection with. It had everything to do with the man who had walked away from me last night when I’d hidden behind my insecurities instead of telling him I felt the same as he did.

“What is going on with you today?” Charley asked, straddling the barstool next to where I was tying bows onto the heart-shaped ornaments she’d planned to string from the copper ceiling tiles overhead.

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, that avoidance thing may get your brother to stop asking questions, but you know I’m not gonna fall for that shit,” she laughed, carefully prying the thin pink ribbon from between my fingers and pushing what I’d been using to distract myself out of reach.

“It’s…everything’s fine. I’ll be fine.” And maybe if I repeated it enough, it’d come true.

“And now Iknowyou’re full of shit.” Which was why she held the title of best friend. Charley had always been able to tell when something was bothering me, and until now, I hadn’t minded her need to fix those things. But she couldn’t fix this. The only person who could change the situation was me. And the more I thought of tracking down Reid and telling him how I felt, the more panicked my mind became.

“I think I love him.”

Glancing to the side, my best friend was the poster child for the phrase gob smacked, her mouth dropped open and her eyes wide as she stared at me.

“What?” she finally asked, regaining her ability to speak. “What the hell happened in the last forty-eight hours? I thought you were going to see how things went tonight before you decided what to do. You mentionednothingabout being in love with one of them.”

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