Page 17 of Hate To Love You

She looks at me like she’s telling me to remember to get changed first. It’s a great idea. Swimming in the nude is no longer an option. Not that I ever did that. Okay, fine, a few times, but hardly ever in my pool. More like in the lake with friends on skinny dipping dares and whatnot.

“Swim right now.” I scratch under her chin, where she loves to be scratched. “Tomorrow, Project Get Our Dads Not To Hate Each Other begins. You up for it, girl?”

She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Like there isn’t any hope in the world that this is ever going to work.

She’s probably right.

CHAPTER 6

Patience

I’m tired the next morning when my alarm goes off at seven. Apollo’s dad will be at the airport, landing about now. Then, he’ll rent a car and drive out and be here by eight-thirty or nine. He declined our invitation to pick him up the same way my dad did. No one wanted to inconvenience us.

I blink my grainy eyes at the ceiling. It’s not fancy like some houses, but instead, it has stucco and is domed like a cave roof. It’s not a low ceiling, but it does curve at the top. In the middle of the room, the most impressive light fixture of blown glass leaves looks like it’s on as the sun plays over it. I wonder if that was intentional in the design. The windows here aren’t stained glass like the one on the main floor, but they still let in lots of pink-gold early morning sunlight.

I keep watching the flickering lights on the ceiling as I think about last night.

I can still hear the horrible cry from that poor bird. I’m glad it got outside. I hope it’s okay.

I hope I’m okay after getting an eyeful of everything Apollo. I missed this whole stage. Those awkward, formative years when a guy goes from being a boy to a teenager and then to a man. I’ve said this before, but it was never more obvious than last night when naked Apollo appeared like a…god damnit…like a sun god, all bronzed, muscled, and hard.

Well, not like…everywhere. Not down there. But still. He was still…um…well endowed.

Okay, fuck, whatever. If you saw your one-time best friend’s stick and berries out of the blue, it would haunt you too. And by haunt, I mean get stuck in your mind, not like a ghostly haunt, and not a creepy doll haunt. They’re not frightening. His package is just a package, and I certainly have no interest in it, just like I have no interest in the rest of him, muscles and all.

I noticed a few things last night. He has a crescent-shaped scar on his left peck, and he has no ink that I can see. He’s been carved out of the earth, just like this mushroom house. His skin is made of finely spun gold, and it looks terribly soft.

Jesus, god. Fuck on a mushroom.

My hormones are acting like how they would have acted if I had known Apollo in high school. I no doubt would have woken up one day and noticed that my bestie had turned out hot. I probably would have been the awkward one. I would have gone through this embarrassing phase where I avoided him. He’s a boy, and I’m a girl. It was bound to happen when we left our childhood behind, our bodies changed, and we slowly became aware of that.

I’m more than slowly aware now, thank you very much, middle-of-the-night dick sighting.

Ugh.

I cover my eyes with my hands now, but that makes it worse. The memory of the shape of…um, Apollo’s body…is burned into my brain, so I focus on the sun instead. Maybe I can burn it off if I scald my retinas.

His dad is going to be here in a few hours. And my dad will be coming this afternoon. Today is the day if it’s any day. I know it’s basically today or bust. We get one chance, and that means working together. We haven’t done that because I’ve been avoiding him at all costs. I guess he would say I have a stick up my arse, but at least I have something. I don’t sleep in the nude or run out of a room in the nude when someone is screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night.

I suck a deep breath in through my nose and let it out through my mouth as I let my entire body sink into the big, round bed. Yes, it’s round. And no, it’s not awesome or anything. Neither is this room. Or the rest of the house.

Or Apollo’s body.

“Oh my fucking god.” I leap out of bed. Action. That’s what I need. I need to do something. I can’t just lay here anymore.

My hormones are burning red hot despite the cold shower I give myself, no matter how much it sucks, especially since I never shower in anything less than scalding hot water. Those hormones still don’t calm down while I get dressed.

They spike a new fever entirely when I get downstairs and find Apollo in the kitchen, standing at the counter and staring out the window. He’s leaning on his forearms, facing away from me. His jeans are kind of riding up his butt just a little, which makes it look perfect and hard and manly. Wedgies can be sexy on guys.

No. No, they can’t. They’re not sexy on him. What the hell is going on with me?

I clear my throat, and he spins around. His eyes are doing that liquid caramel thing that makes me suck in air, and my nipples pucker under my T-shirt. I threw it on over my tank top, but I regret picking shorts now. They’re not short, but they feel like it. It feels like his gaze is incinerating me when it lands on me.

“I have an idea,” he starts saying. “I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I thought about it while I was swimming.”

“When?”

“Last night. Early morning? I don’t know if I could ever stop swimming.”

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