Page 25 of Leave Before I Love You
I lean down and press my lips to hers, tasting the salt of her tears. It’s chaste and, given the perspective of what we’ve just been through, innocent. But it’s also a signature on the dotted line for everything I’ve sworn to uphold. It’s a need for human connection.
It’s a reminder of how simple life used to be—of everything Avery and I have always been without saying it.
Finally, she nods, pulling free and wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “It didn’t work, did it?”
“What?”
“The phone.”
I shake my head, my hands settling on my hips. “I’ll buy you a new one.”
I don’t explain where it went, and she doesn’t ask. We’re both too busy with the rest of the sentence left unspoken.
I’ll buy you a new one…if we ever make it back.
Neither of us says it aloud, but it hangs there in the silence anyway, taunting us with uncertainty. Right now, all we have for sure is each other, and weirdly enough, I’m starting to understand why fate picked her.
Which is hilarious, considering four years ago, the night of our first-ever kiss, I told her she wasn’t my type.
Laughable, right?
The fact is, the most blatant lies we ever tell are the ones we tell ourselves.
The Past
Four years ago
Henry
The shot of Fireball burns down the back of my throat as I slam the glass on the knee-high table in our VIP booth and dance to DJ Johnny’s fire remix of the song “Forever” by Diplo featuring Malou and Yuna.
Ronnie is dancing with a woman in a tight red dress that glitters under the lights, and Mav’s shamelessly flirting with a pair of Aussie girls, their accents making him eat out of the palm of their tanned, red-nail-tipped hands. I watch for a second, shaking my head. Not surprising—Australia is full of dangerous predators after all. The women, apparently, are no exception.
Not that I blame them.
Mav and Ron are swimming in their liquor, so I might as well be here alone. Beau’s definitely a better companion, but lately, he’s been completely uninterested in wingman duties, and tonight, he didn’t have any interest in coming out for Allure’s grand opening at all.
I don’t know what’s gotten into him lately, but I swear he’s turned into a full-on fucking hermit. Always tired. Always busy. Always talking about the fuckingMidnightapp he’s in an all-out war to pitch against Seth McKenzie. I get it—Seth was the fifth in ournow-foursome until he fucked Beau’s girlfriend Bethany right out from under him—but damn, it’d be nice to have my friend back.
I barely get the thought out before Carly, our cocktail waitress and a woman I’ve hooked up with a time or two when she worked at Tau Tau, tugs on my arm, leaning in as DJ Johnny cranks the bass and neon lights strobe across the floor. “You want any more bottles of anything? They’re doing last call soon.”
I’m already half cooked, and Ronnie and Mav are well and truly gone, so I slice a finger across my throat and wink at Carly.
She nods and sashays down the stairs to the dance floor, and I follow her with my eyes until she passes Beau’s sister Avery, dancing with half the motherfucking University of Alabama football team in her tiny gold-mesh dress.
Avery throws her head from side to side, her brown hair arcing above her, and her dress rides up to the top of her tanned thighs. One guy grinds at the back of her, but she essentially ignores him, laughing and screaming with one of her girlfriends when they bump into her space with their dance partner.
I lean into the railing at the front of the booth and rub a thumb across my bottom lip as an uninvited flash of her black thong peeks out from the bottom of the back of her dress.
I tell myself to look away.
Instead, my jaw ticks.
She’s hot, and she definitely knows it, which I can only imagine is what made my ego tell her she wasn’t my fucking type in the elevator of her condo earlier when Beau and her best friend Juniper decided to stay in instead of joining us.
The truth is, Avery Banks is everyone’s type. The real problem is that very few can actually handle her.
Self-confident, wild, uninhibited—she’s the kind of strong woman who scares people.
