Page 57 of The ABCs of You & Me

I slide my hand toward her with my pinky raised. “Pinky promise.” She rolls her eyes, but she reaches out and wraps her pinky around mine.

My body reacts like she’s straddled me. Every ounce of blood rushes south, and I pull my hand back quickly. It would be so easy to reach for her and pull her to me. So easy to guide her lips to mine and sink into her. So darn easy to give in to this gnawing need I’ve had for weeks now.

“Night, sunshine,” I whisper before rolling over.

“Goodnight, Foster,” she hums, and if I allow myself to get sucked into the delusion, I’d tell you she sounded disappointed by that sendoff.

I wake to the smell of something baking and coffee. A guy could get used to waking up to someone else creating the delicious smells in a house.

A guy could also get used to waking up with Sophie Hore’s hand on his chest. She’s still on her side of the bed, but her arm is stretched across the gulf between us, like she had reached for me in the night. The thought of Sophie reaching for me at any time, let alone in a bed has me standing at attention just in time for her eyes to open.

“Good morning.” She yawns, and my god it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.

“Morning, sunshine,” I murmur, rotating my hips, trying to hide myself from her.

She stretches, and the noise she releases makes everything worse. “Something smells amazing.” She rolls over and slips her legs off the bed, sitting with her back to me, and I take a minute to study her from behind.

Her hair is mostly in a bun, but strands have escaped the elastic. She’s all long lines and lean muscle, same as she has always been. As beautiful as she has always been. I watch, captivated as she pulls her hair out of the band and gathers the blonde locks back up to redo it. I don’t know what it is about watching a beautiful woman do her hair, but I can’t seem to move. I should get up, at least get my legs over and hope the change of position hides the morning wood I’m sporting. But instead I remain motionless running over the fact that I got to share a bed with the woman I’ve loved most of my life without fully realizing it.

“I’ll see you down there, okay?” she says without even looking over at me.

Wicked, I’ve made her uncomfortable. Chased her from her own bedroom.

I sit up and take in the room in the daylight. She hasn’t lived here full time in years, and yet she’s everywhere. My parents put away all our stuff the second we moved out. Not Nancy and Karl, though. This space is a time capsule of their daughter.

Along the wall across from the bed is a string of horse show ribbons, more red than any other color. Below the ribbons are pictures taped to the wall. Lots of her and Cass smiling. Cass’s hair is a little different in each one while Sophie’s remains the same—long, straight, golden. My eyes snag on one at the bottom right of the collage.

Getting up slowly, I walk to the wall. I see caramel eyes and the hint of a smile on the face of a younger me. I hated my picture being taken back then—I don’t know why, too cool for it maybe, or at least I thought I was. But I can see it there, the joy I got from Sophie being beside me. The hint of a smile was all because of her, and how I managed to contain it at all was a testament to my teenage stubbornness and nothing else.

I pull it from the wall. It’s us, sitting on the couch at my parents’ house, game controllers in hand, Sophie radiant as always.

“If memory serves me right, that was taken during a Mario Kart marathon,” Sophie’s silky voice flows from the doorway. “And I do believe you were losing.” She snatches the image out of my grasp and studies it. “It’s a lifetime ago.”

“You haven’t changed much,” I say.

“You haven’t either,” She reaches up and threads her hand through my bedhead. “Your hair is even the same.” We freeze when her fingertips make contact with my scalp.

Tension seeps out of every crevice in the room, and its tendrils wrap around us. Easing it could be so sweet. I could just slip my arm around her waist and pull her into me. Lean into her touch and silently beg for more. Drag it out as I tip my head and run my nose along hers. Breathe her in and breathe out all the things I wish we could do.

It takes a Herculean amount of effort to take a small step back, moving toward where my phone sits on the bedside table on my side of the bed. No, not my side—it’s not our space, it’s hers.

“What smells so good?” I ask, slipping my phone into the pocket of the sweats I’d opted to sleep in. Sophie’s eyes follow my movement, stopping on my legs before they meet mine again.

“Maple scones.”

“I love scones,” I exclaim with more enthusiasm than I mean to, and she laughs, the tension immediately dissipating, much to my relief.

“Yo!” My sister’s voice comes from somewhere downstairs. “Can you two stop being cute and come down here, please?”

“Cute?” I ask, one eyebrow raised as I catch myself in the mirror above the dresser.

Sophie steps closer, tilting her head as she studies our reflections. “Yeah, it works. Only because of the morning hair, though. Otherwise ‘hot mess’ is how I’d describe this”—she gestures between us—“situation.”

“Hot.” I let the word linger and take a small amount of pleasure in the way her eyes widen. “Mess,” I finish, grinning over at her. “Let’s go be hot messes with scones.”

“We‘ve got the space, so we figured why not. Bennett and Marley didn’t even hesitate.”

“What are you talking about?” Sophie asks, sitting next to her father, her plate piled high with breakfast.

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