Page 15 of Surprise Best Man

Of course, I had to ruin things by going right ahead and blurting out what had brought me to his place to begin with. “Um, sorry about the whole, um…”

Can’t let a good thing just happen, huh?

“The whole thing with you seeing my dick and then running out on me, leaving me high and dry?” Sean smiled, not appearing bothered in the slightest by what had happened.

Hey, at least one of us was being cool about it. Some small relief there.

“Yeah,” I said, letting his infectious smile calm my mood.

“It’s cool. I mean, assuming you’re not feeling weird about it. If anything, I was mad at myself. I should have looked at you before you started and said a proper hello face-to-face. I understand the shock of my surprise at seeing you there, me with my, you know…”

He swept his hand toward the water, and he didn’t need to further explain what he meant.

I let out a soft laugh, taking a quick glance down to make sure even a small movement like that wouldn’t be enough to make me have a wardrobe malfunction of my own.

“I get it. It was weird for both of us.”

“You have to admit it—we kind of brought it on ourselves.”

I know exactly what he meant. “Yeah. If we’d both been, you know, actual adults about this whole thing from the get-go and didn’t both go with weirdly ignoring each other in public, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Right. So, I guess if you seeing me au naturel and you having to drive all the way up here is the worst of it, then we got off easy. And hey, it definitely finally broke the ice.”

“Hey,” I said, half-smiling as I raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that I don’t live up in the Hills with you? Maybe I’m right down the road.”

“That’s a good point. Neither of us knows what the hell the other’s been up to this whole time. Well, until recently, at least.”

“Only goes one way, I’m afraid. Not like I haven’t heard about the fabulous world-spanning exploits of the internationally famous DJ Mad-Ox.”

A brief moment of silence passed, one long enough for my gaze to drift out to the killer view of his house, a small glimpse at what his lifestyle afforded him.

“Then you have me at a little bit of a disadvantage,” he said with another grin.

“Pitfalls of fame, I suppose. But it’s looking like you’re doing pretty all right for yourself.”

“I suppose,” he said. “Not like I’m here much to enjoy it. It’s one tour after another and another and…” He trailed off.

“I bet it gets old,” I said, deciding to tease him a little. “Playing your music for thousands of screaming fans, selling out stadiums in London and Moscow and Tokyo.”

I almost made a crack about the girls who undoubtedly threw themselves at him, but a tinge of…something ran though me at the thought.

Jealousy? No—no way. It’d been years since I’d had a thing for the guy. I’d moved on. No doubt about it.

“It’s nice. Sure.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Only nice? Come on.”

“OK, OK. Pretty great. Dream come true and all that. But…”

He was about to say something but hesitated. Had it been Sean’s turn to have a tinge of some kind of strange feeling run through him?

“What?”

“It’s stupid.”

“No stupider than what we’ve already been through.”

The bubbles foamed up around our bodies, my eyes continually glancing over to steal peeks of his muscles. I scolded myself every time, but it was like I couldn’t help myself.

He let out a soft snort of a laugh, barely louder than the warm jets and bubbles. “Good point.”

Sean looked like he was having a really hard time getting it out. Now I was very, very curious.

“It’s just that when I saw you that first time—the first time since I’d seen you…way back when.”

“Way back when” was a hell of a euphemism for what we’d had back in college, but I let it slide.

“It was…weird,” he said. “No, ‘weird’ isn’t a good word. It was, I don’t know, like no time had passed at all. But it had—it’d been almost a decade. And it made me think that there was…some kind of connection that we had that I’d forgotten about. Or let myself forget. Or downplayed, at least.”

“You mean when you fucked me and then never talked to me again?”

Aaaaand there it was. The words blurted out of my mouth like they’d been propelled by one of the jet streams currently blasting the tension out of my lower back, like I had no control over them.

But damned if it wasn’t how I felt.

“When I fucked you and never talked to you again,” he said, nodding slowly. “When that happened.”

I said nothing, eager to hear what he had to say in his defense.

“But then I saw you again, and all I could think about was…” He trailed off.

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