Page 29 of It's Complicated

And that brought me to the other part of my turmoil. I had no idea what the hell he thought of any of this.

He enjoyed it as much as me, and I believed that he didn’t regret it, but that was all I knew for sure.

Isaac was much better at compartmentalizing things than me. He could pack shit away, lock it up, and never look at it again.

I could only ignore things for so long before they drove me crazy and I freaked out and made everything ten times worse.

Which was why I’d come to my sister’s house to process, only that hadn’t happened, and all I’d managed to do was be confused and distracted in a different location.

“Did I tell you about the hotel?” Emma asked.

“The one that canceled your reservation last week?” I asked. Hopefully she hadn’t noticed that I’d pretty much zoned out for a few minutes there.

“Yes!” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Can you believe it? We made the reservationsix monthsago, and they cancel it three weeks before we’re supposed to check in.”

“That’s insane,” I said. Hopefully that was a good enough answer.

“Right! Thank god I found us another hotel. It’s more expensive, but so much nicer and more central for what we want to see.”

“That’s good.”

She pointed to the snacks on the table. “Eat.”

Dutifully, I picked up the bowl of apples and popped one of the slices in my mouth.

She launched into another rant about the hotel canceling their reservation and how she’d had to scramble to get them another one so close to their travel dates while I zoned back out.

How the hell was I supposed to go home and pretend like everything was fine when I had no idea if Isaac was as twisted up by all of this as I was?

I couldn’t just ask him either.

Isaac had major abandonment issues, and he didn’t trust people, not until he got to know them and was able to feel them out.

He wasn’t afraid to cut people out of his life, and he’d told me about more than one friendship he’d walked away from when things got weird or being friends with them was too much effort.

He wasn’t callous about it, and it wasn’t like he stopped talking to someone the moment things got difficult, but he only put up with so much before he walked away.

I couldn’t risk putting him on the spot like that, not until I had an idea of how he felt about things. It was entirely possible he was just as messed up as me and was hiding it but trying to force a conversation before he was ready would spook him, which would just make him shut down.

And if he wasn’t messed up and had already put it behind him, bringing it up and piling my crap on him would just make things even more awkward. Especially if he’d decided it was a one-time thing and he wasn’t attracted to me the way I was attracted to him.

One uncomfortable conversation wouldn’t kill our friendship but having that hanging over us would eventually erode things, and I wasn’t willing to risk it.

Not even for the best kiss of my life.

My neck heated as memories of last night came rushing back to me.

I was a single man with a healthy sexual appetite. I’d also spent most of my life as a star athlete, which made picking up easy. I’d never had to work for sex or female attention. I’d had a lot of sex in my life, but none of my hookups could even come close to what happened with Isaac.

Sex was fun. It was a great way to blow off some steam, get some good feels, and enjoy some intimacy. It wasn’t supposed to be life-changing or make me question pretty much everything I thought I knew about myself.

Even though Isaac and I hadn’t had sex, or even touched each other’s dicks, it felt like my entire world had been flipped upside down and backward.

The intensity between us had been as hot as the actual frotting, and the way he’d looked at me had almost been my undoing.

But it was his kiss I couldn’t forget.

In all my years of hooking up, I’d never been kissed like that. Never felt that kind of emotion or passion from just a kiss.

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