Page 19 of Knock Knock

I liked Nate. In some new way. Maybe I had for a bit, or maybe this whole biological clock ticking down time like I was a bomb made me realize that there wasn’t a chance in hell I wanted to pick someone else over him in this thing called life. It started as admiration during sex. To watch him fuck was… hot diggity damn. I creeped a bit, freaked out about it to Maddox, and kept on doing it. Over time, our friendship and our hookup program blended into something that felt like a combination of two right things that weren’t in the right order, you know? Like, we had the bond and the attraction, but we forgot to have the relationship.

Would he even want that?

At first, I didn’t think so. It was a sex thing and nothing more. Then Andrea said that shit about him needing to talk to me, and Maddox said that shit about him being in it for me, and maybe… maybe we both roundabout wanted the same thing but didn’t know how to say it.

Well, no time like the present. I wasn’t the overthinking type, and I respected Nate enough to just fess up and come clean. So, using the last one percent of my phone battery, I sat in the dead truck in the parking lot of a truck stop diner outside Garron and called him.

“What?” he answered, all brood.

“You have a thing for me?” I asked.

“What?”

“A thing. For me.”

He coughed. “What?”

“You know…?” I widened my eyes as if he could see me.

“Come home, Xavi.”

“I can’t get the truck to start and I wanted to talk.” I kicked my bare feet up on the dash and twirled the keyring around my finger. “Whatcha doing?”

“How was your date?” he asked.

“It wasn’t a date. We ate shitty wraps at a truck stop and I ordered two pies because you weren’t here to tell me which one is always shitty. It’s the blueberry, FYI. And she paid.”

He laughed. “So it was good?”

I grinned at the dashboard. “I think I scared her off by accidentally admitting I have a thing for you.”

“Wha—”

“Nate?” I sat up.

Goddamn phone battery! Right when I got to the confession part.

Half an hour later, I finally had to beg a trucker to give me a boost. Twenty minutes after that, I pulled into the shop’s parking lot and shut the old girl down, giving her a pat on the dash for another job well done.

I was nervous to go inside.

Hindsight was twenty-twenty and all that, so yeah, I probably should have said that stuff to his face. But whatever. It was out there now, and this was Nate we were talking about, so my nerves played no part. We could talk about anything.

Still, my stomach felt like it was in my ass when I walked inside and through the shop, and my throat had gone dry by the time I made it to the apartment. It was late, so the place was dark, but the lit tip of a cigarette glowed from outside the patio doors. The door was open, but Nate hadn’t heard me come inside, so I took a quick breath to pull my gut out of my butt and swallow some saliva. When I closed the door, Nate stood.

And didn’t look happy.

Shit.Every doubt and negative thought I’d ever had rushed to the forefront of my mind to remind me of what a loser I was. Of course he didn’t have a fucking thing for me! What the hell had I been thinking?

Like a trailer park badass, he tossed his butt into an old coffee can and didn’t even wait for it to finish hissing before he hissed at me.

“What the actual fuck, Xavi?!” He stomped towards me, and my stomach dropped right out of my ass. I’d never really seen him mad at me before, but he was a hell of a lot better at it than I was. “You just wanna ask me if I have athingfor you while you’re out on a date?”

All the times I’d watched Devon grab my brother by the throat flitted through my mind, and I even braced for it. Nate had that Sawyer temper if he wanted to let it out. But Nate didn’t give me a necklace made of fingers. He hit me with an angry shade of blue eyes, a bare chest, hat hair, and a question I didn’t know the answer to.

“How the fuck could you, Xavi? Does our friendship mean nothing to you that you’re willing to risk it like this?”

I faltered backward. That punched me right in the heart. “What?” I seethed at him for even asking that. “I thought—”

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