Page 54 of Study Buddies

I couldn’t help the eye roll. For a smart guy, he could be really fucking stupid sometimes.

“Give us a second,” I said to Tori. She nodded and scooted further back on the bench seat, pulling the fabric of her dress out of the way as I shut the door.

I grabbed Lucas’s arm and dragged him a few feet away from my truck. He shook out of my grasp, but somehow without as much resentment as usual.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked again.

“Because you saw it.” My voice was quiet and low. “When she stepped into the living room, all I could think about was how fucking hot she looked. But you saw beyond that. You knew something was wrong.” I didn’t look at him or at Tori up in the window as I walked around the front of the truck.

“I wish I had.”

19

TORI

I rummagedthrough the kitchen cabinets until I found some muffin tins. Cooking wasn’t really my strong suit—Hailey was much better at it than me—but I wanted to make something nice for our movie night.

So far, we hadn’t come up with a regular plan for meals together. Maybe that was because we were all coming and going at different times—or because half the people in this house hated each other. Which was upsetting, but not something I was going to solve on a Friday night.

My phone was propped up against a can of black beans. I’d paused the cooking video while I browned and seasoned the beef, but now I was ready to continue.

The internet chef’s smiling face came alive as I pressed play, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. Hailey had told me about this guy’s cooking channel, but she’d neglected to tell me that his trademark was cooking while bare-chested, sometimes with an apron and sometimes not.

Despite that distracting feature, he was pretty good at explaining things in simple steps. I only had to pause the video twice as I shaped the wonton wrappers into the cups of themuffin tin. The flimsy sheets were so thin that three of them tore, but at last, I got them all more or less in place.

Ready for the next step, I unpaused the video. But then a shadow fell across the screen. The warmth against my back announced the arrival of one of my roommates, and from the tantalizing, woodsy scented cologne, I knew it was Jayden.

He moved closer, peering over my shoulder at the screen. “Kyle’s not shirtless often enough for you?”

I blushed. “He’s a good teacher. The chef, I mean, not Kyle.”

Jayden shifted around, leaning against the sink with his hands folded. “What is the shirtless dude teaching you to make? Dehydrated muffins?”

“Mini taco cups.”

He raised an eyebrow. “If you say so.” His smirk and the teasing look in his eye made him look as hot as the internet chef. His sleeves were rolled up, and I liked how while his forearms had a light covering of hair, his upper arms and chest were almost bare. It was fascinating—and it made me wonder what the rest of him looked like.

“Do you want to help?”

“Sure.” He straightened up. “What do I do?”

He scooped the seasoned meat into each little wonton cup, and I added black beans. He topped it off with shredded cheddar cheese. “Now what?” he asked.

“We bake it for 10–12 minutes.”

“Sounds good.” He lowered the door of the preheated oven and put one muffin tin in while I put the other two. “Anything else?”

“We can get out the toppings while they’re baking. Are you good at slicing avocados?”

“Passably good, but it’s not like I’m going to major in it.”

I stifled a laugh. Jayden was so easy to be around. I didn’t have to be on my guard, wondering if he was going tosay something outrageous like Kyle. Sure, sometimes Jayden pushed at my boundaries a little, but usually he was sending me in a direction I eventually realized I wanted to go in.

He and Lucas were alike in many ways—their intelligence being one of them. But Jayden just seemed to move through life with a little less tension than Lucas did. But maybe that wasn’t a fair assessment. Lucas was a nice man and a good friend. Maybe if Kyle hadn’t blown back into his life like a tornado, he wouldn’t get as upset as he had recently.

Jayden worked on the avocado while I cleaned up. But when I returned from putting the cheese away in the fridge, he met my gaze. “I’m sorry about the other night.”

For a moment, I thought he meant my date with Lucas. Then I realized what he was referring to. “I got my necklace back. That’s all that matters.” We’d both been so busy that we hadn’t had time to catch up yesterday.

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