Page 37 of For The Weekend
“I won’t forget,” I tell her. “And I’ll do it.”
Her eyes go wide. “Really?”
“Yeah. I’ll go to the wedding with you.”
Before I even fully have the words out, she squeals and throws her arms around me in a hug, and I not-so-surreptitiously drag my nose over her neck, inhaling the sweet scent of her shampoo mixed with cinnamon.
She pulls back slightly to look up at me, her eyes sparkling. “Are you sure about this? You really don’t have to.”
I brush a loose strand of hair from her face. “I’m sure.”
“It’s a terrible idea. You pretending to be my boyfriend.”
“Maybe,” I agree. Though it’s the perfect excuse to spend more time with Eloise and get to know her better, without the pressure of an actual relationship. Because as drawn as I am to her, I’m still not sure I’m ready to dive into anything real. Not with my past still hanging over me like a dark cloud.
“You’re going to hate the wedding,” she says, and there’s no doubt about that.
“Most definitely.”
She tosses her head back to laugh, and I barely restrain myself from planting my lips on her throat, tasting her skin overher pulse point. With a pat to my shoulders, she steps away from me, but I let my hands linger on her sides.
“Do I have permission to tell your family to go to hell?”
She tips her head to the side. “To do that, you’d have to talk to them. You really want to do that?”
“Not particularly. Unless it’s to tell them to go to hell.”
She thinks on this for a moment. “No, no telling anyone to go to hell, but that’s a good idea. We should go over the rules or permissions or whatever.”
“Rules?”
“Yeah.” She vaguely gestures between us. “What we can say, if or where we can touch each other, you know?”
I have no rules, and she has all my permissions. Matter of fact, if she could start at my chest and make her way down to my dick, that’d be great.
“Maybe we should go out,” she says and then immediately backtracks. “No, never mind. I’m already asking so much of you?—”
“Dinner?”
She stills. “Hmm?”
“Let’s go to dinner and talk about your rules or permissions or whatever.”
She playfully smacks at my arm when I parrot her words back to her, as if she thinks I’m kidding. I step toward her, crowding her against the glass counter. I’m careful not to touch it and leave handprints she would need to clean up, though I’m all but crushing her. I can feel each of her inhales and exhales against my neck, her tits brushing my chest with every breath. Reaching around her, I snag her cell phone from the top of the case and enter my phone number into her contacts before setting it back down.
“Text me a night that’s good for you. I’ll find a babysitter for Mazie,” I tell her, and she nods, a bitlike a bobblehead.
I allow myself one last touch, a pinch of her chin, and then I force myself to leave.
Because my feelings for and attraction to Eloise are anything but fake.
Chapter 11
Eloise
Roman and I decided to go out on the following Friday, but in the meantime, I wrote out and deleted multiple texts to him of random thoughts I had during the day, including but not limited to:
Scale of 1 to 10: how bad do you think it would be if I wore sweatpants to the wedding?
