Page 56 of Accidentally Amy

Damn it, I thought as that traitorous cat started purring.

It was just so fucking hot in that apartment.

Wasn’t it?

I was so focused on her at that moment that I didn’t hear a key jangling in the door, leading me to nearly have a heart attack when Jason and AJ burst into my living room a second later.

“Why aren’t you ready?” Jason said, looking at Izzy with his eyes narrowed, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“I texted like five times to warn you,” AJ said to me, shaking his head apologetically. “The Bricks are playing in the game before ours, so Jace wants to go early and heckle.”

“Come on, are you kidding,” I said. Jason was so obnoxious.

I glanced at Izzy, and she was looking up at my brothers with a curious grin.

“Izzy, these are my brothers. The loud one is Jason, and the slightly less loud one is AJ. Guys, this is Izzy.”

“Nice to meet you,” AJ said.

“Nice to meet you, too,” she replied with a smile.

“You’re giving Goodyear his meds, and the psycho isn’t even hissing?” Jason said in disbelief, watching my cat eat the laced applesauce from her spoon. “Who the fuckareyou, Izzy?”

I was ready to jump in and explain away his behavior, but before I had a chance, she said around a smirk, “You’re a grown-ass man wearing matching shirts with your brothers. Who the fuck areyou, Jason?”

Chapter Sixteen

Blake

“Haven’t I told you enough?”

“Nope,” Kylie said, raising her hand to signal to the server she needed another beer. “Because it doesn’t make sense to me yet.”

I sighed and looked at Jason. “Can’t you do something about your wife?”

“You know that I cannot,” he said. “And I don’t want to. Your idiocy is giving me life.”

“Myidiocy?” I repeated. “Care to explain how my friendship with this person isidiocy?”

Because my brothers showed up early, my plan for giving Iz a quiet ride home had been tossed aside, and the four of us ended up piling into Jason’s old truck. They’d talked Izzy into going to our game first, which she seemed to have fun at, and then they convinced her to join us for wings.

They’d been fairly chill all night, but in the five minutes thatIzzy had been standing by the door, taking a phone call, I’d been subjected to a speed round of interrogation.

Kylie had forced me to divulge every tiny detail of my strange new friendship.

The way we met, the way we’d come to be friends, the way we were very intentionally carving a path that would never lead to romance because it was against the rules.

“It’s obvious you have chemistry and you’re her boss,” Jason said matter-of-factly, grabbing a chip from the towering nachos in the center of the table. “So your stupid rules and plans are idiocy. All it’s going to take is a single moment, and everything will change.”

“No, it won’t,” I said, irritated. “We aren’t animals, for God’s sake. We can control our behavior and our environment.”

“Oh, really?” he countered with his eyebrows up, looking at me skeptically.

“Really,” I said defensively.Of course we can control them—we have to.“And you’ve got crumbs in your beard.”

“Really?” he said, lifting his chin andnotwiping away the disgusting specks in his beard.

“Oh,really?” AJ teased from the other end of the table, grinning while lifting a taco to his mouth.