Page 8 of Three's a Crowd
‘Okay,’ she said slowly, ‘that would be really nice.’
Adam smiled, relief flooding his face. He looked at her hard for a moment and the expression in his eyes made her heartbeat pick up again. Before she had time to think, he leant towards her and kissed her gently on the lips.
Daisy’s mouth tingled in response, her blood starting to zing around her body.
He deepened the kiss, his tongue sliding gently against hers and she sank into it, her senses reeling.
Quelle surprise.
He was a good kisser.
His lips were soft, but there was good, confident pressure from his mouth on hers.
And he tasted great.
In fact, to her surprise, kissing Adam felt really quite lovely. Not quite as all-consuming as she thought a kiss should, but nice, safe, extremely pleasant.
‘What the hell are you two up to out here in the dark?’ came a deep voice from a few feet away.
Daisy pulled away from the kiss, her heart thumping, to see Zach standing there, a look of pure comedic horror on his face.
‘Nothing,’ she and Adam said in unison, moving away from each other in a knee-jerk response to being caught.
Some unsettling feeling, that she couldn’t put a name to, twisted through her at Zach seeing her and Adam like this. Regret perhaps? No, more like satisfaction. This would showhim that she was a grown, sexually awake woman. A sexuallywantedwoman.
Adam didn’t seem to be able to look at his friend.
Daisy just held Zach’s stare, insolently.
‘Your mum needs you, Daisy,’ Zach muttered, turning away from them and striding off back towards the house, his shoulders stiff.
Daisy turned to look at Adam, who just grinned sheepishly at her.
‘We’d better go back inside, I suppose,’ he said, getting up.
Daisy nodded, following suit in a bit of daze, her insides scrambled.
They walked back in silence to the cottage, the air thick with the unsaid, but before she could step inside, Adam caught her arm, urging her to look at him.
‘So, let’s arrange for you to come to Bristol soon then?’ he asked with hope in his eyes.
For a fleeting moment, Daisy paused to reconsider her options. There was only really one decision if she was to keep her pseudo family intact.
‘Sure, let’s do it. Maybe once I’m settled at uni,’ she said. ‘That’d be lovely.’
Though, if she was honest, after seeing the look on Zach’s face, she wasn’t so sure about it any more. What had made him react so negatively towards them kissing? From the look in his eyes, anyone would think he hated her. Did he think she was going to break his best friend’s heart?
He was such an enigma when it came to his feelings. He’d never seemed that interested in her as a person, or so it had felt when they were young. Apart from one summer when she was eleven and he twelve. He’d rescued her from where they’d been climbing a cliff and she’d slipped and broken a bone in her foot and found she wasn’t able to climb down or even walk by herself.He’d been attentive and kind and, slinging her arm around his shoulder, had half carried, half dragged her back to the house where they were staying for the summer.
Once she’d come back from the hospital, he’d changed back to the hard, sardonic know-it-all she was used to though and had spent the rest of the holiday alternately berating her for her clumsiness and ignoring her. This had made her sad at the time. The glimmer of how things could be with him when he’d let his guard down had sucked her into a world of want for more of it. Even though she occasionally saw glimpses of this side of him again, he never fully lost the hard shell he’d built around himself again.
When she’d discussed it with her after they’d gone home, Daisy’s mum had put this down to his tough upbringing. ‘He’s been brought up in a very unemotional, male environment, darling, without much love, I’m sad to say. Just ignore him when he’s being like that and remember it’s his problem, not yours.’ This insight had helped her a little and she’d taken her mother’s advice and let most of the teasing go without reacting to it after that.
For some reason, this had seemed to inexplicably rile Zach more and he always countered by pushing harder for an emotional response from her.
Boys.
Though he wasn’t really one of those any more.
