Page 37 of Breakaway to You

Anything else you liked tonight?

Piper

Is this your way of getting me to share my thoughts about the kiss?

Zeke

Maybe.

She still hadn’t told me her take about our kiss. I’d opened up and told her my true feelings about it, and I had hoped she would tell me in return. Hopefully her avoidance wasn’t her way of trying to soften the blow that she hadn’t liked it.

Piper

If you must know what I liked…

I liked playing darts with you and the guys. I liked your “handling” of the club soda. I liked how you showed up at the bar tonight. But there was one thing I liked the most…

I gripped my phone tight. I’d never wanted a text to come through so badly. Seconds ticked by, but they felt like minutes. She was purposefully making me wait, and I both loved and hated it.

Zeke

You’re killing me here.

Piper

For some reason, I don’t think you’ll be surprised to hear that the kiss was definitely what I liked the most.

To borrow your words, it just might be my favorite kiss to date.

My body warmed at her words. Her answer made me want to sprint from my room and knock on her door so I could kiss her again. I didn’t want to kiss her because we were pretending or to prove something. I wanted to kiss her because Iwantedto. And I wanted her to know that I wanted to kissher.

Zeke

It’s still nice to hear the enjoyment wasn’t one sided.

Piper

We went above and beyond, selling our fake relationship.

All the warm and fuzzy feelings left me, as if a bucket of ice water had hit me in the chest.

I struggled to know how to respond. My first instinct was to go along with her, to agree that we’d been stellar actors who were also talented kissers. But the longer I sat there staring down at my phone in my hands, anger started to prick at my skin. I wanted to adamantly disagree and tell her that there had been nothing fake about that kiss. Except I couldn’t be sure on her part. She might have liked the kiss, might have really enjoyed it, but that didn’t mean she had any more feelings than that. So instead of disputing her comment, I kept it simple.

Zeke

Yeah.

It’s late, and we have to be up early to take the bus back to Saint Paul. See you tomorrow.

I laid back down, setting my phone on the nightstand, not waiting for her response. I pulled up the covers and wished I hadn’t texted Piper at all. I’d been weak and stupid. That I was even entertaining the idea of having feelings for Piper was ludicrous. There was a reason I didn’t do relationships, and this was a perfect example.

This wasn’t my first time having stronger feelings for someone than they had for me. And I wasn’t about to make that mistake again. It never boded well to be the one more invested in a relationship. A person only needed to get left at the altar one time to learn that lesson.

Thoughts of Anna swirled through my mind. Memories of how my relationship with her had felt like the first time someone had cared about me, that someone had loved me. Or at least I had thought. I’d stood there in a tuxedo surrounded by a few hundred people in a beautiful chapel waiting for her to walk down the aisle, where we’d vow to love one another for the rest of our lives, to be there for one another no matter what.

But she’d never come.

The silver lining I had tried to sell myself was that at least there had only been a handful of people in the crowd who were there for me. Only a handful of people had seen my most embarrassing, devastating moment. Crew had been there, and a few guys who had been on my college hockey team, but that was it.

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