“You and Olivia are hooking up?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
That was about as much explanation as Ben needed to provide to his friends.
Or so he thought.
“Is it serious?” Finn poured Ben, Hunter, Aiden, and Graham whiskeys from his position behind the bar. The Clumsy Clam didn’t officially open for another hour, so they had the place to themselves. “Or you two just keeping it casual?”
Ben slid his fingers through his hair as he considered his answer. What would Olivia say if she were asked the same question? “There aren’t any commitments. And no strings. That’s about as much as I can tell you.”
“Huh.”
Ben turned to Aiden sitting in the barstool next to him. “What?”
Aiden shook his head, clearly fighting off a smile around his mouthful of whiskey. “Nothing. Just got a different vibe on the boat.”
“Meaning?”
“The way you looked at her before you two went below deck,” Hunter chimed in from the other side of Ben. “It was the same way Beaumont over there looked at my sister that day on the beach. Before they took off on the jet ski.”
Again, Aiden was smiling around his glass. A look of pure male satisfaction if ever Ben had seen one. Although he had no idea what the hell they were talking about. What happened with the jet ski?
Ben savored the burn of the whiskey as it slid down his throat. “What’s your point?”
Graham tipped his glass in Ben’s direction from the barstool next to Hunter. “You like her.”
We’re going to dodge that one. “Well, I don’t dislike her.”
“You used to,” Hunter threw out.
Ben snorted. “Yeah, back when I was an asshole kid who hated everything.”
Finn propped his hands on the bar. “So, just to clarify, this is purely sexual.”
“Last time I checked, yeah.”
“Mind if I ask her out, then?”
Ben cut the blonde ex-footballer a dangerous look that was so instinctual he had no chance of hiding it.
Chuckling, Finn slapped the towel slung over his shoulder onto the bar. “Knew it.”
The other three guys snickered into their drinks, setting Ben’s teeth on edge. He knew they were just dicking with him, but he wasn’t feeling too amiable right then. Not after realizing just today how much he really did like Olivia, and his odds of convincing her to make something real out of their arrangement were a snowball’s chance in hell to one.
Even after Jade had discovered them stumbling out of the bathroom with mussed hair and wrinkled clothes, not much had changed for him, except that everyone now knew about them. He actually thought the whole thing was pretty fucking hilarious. But he’d been wise enough to keep that to himself, especially since Olivia had obviously been embarrassed and had kept her distance from him for the rest of the trip. Which bothered the shit out of him. It was indicative of how things would be if this situation between them went south. Whatever was between them obviously wasn’t strong enough to sustain a friendship. At least, that was the message he’d gotten from her.
The idea that their entire association would end once she met someone—
His knuckles turned white around his glass.
The whiskey in his belly turned to battery acid. He couldn’t even stand to hear Finn threaten to ask her out, even though he knew the man was fucking with him. Picturing her walking into The Clam on some faceless prick’s arm, smiling up at him, allowing him to hold her close while they danced to the band onstage, had ice cold rage thrumming through him like a base drum. He wanted to smash his glass against the goddamn wall.
“So, what’s the deal?” Aiden pushed. “You not going to go for it or what?”
When had “going to get a drink” devolved into “chitchatting about your feelings?” All Ben had wanted was some whiskey and a distraction. Couldn’t they just talk about the damn game on TV? Or someone’s job? Hell, Graham had excitedly told them he was going to be a father the second they’d all sat down, and they’d still managed to center that conversation around his new job in construction equipment manufacturing.
“She seem like she wanted to go for it on the boat?” Ben sniped.
Graham huffed. “Man, that’s a copout and you know it. Have you even tried talking to her about it?”
“No, but can you see it actually working between us?” He looked each of them in the eyes. “I mean, maybe I’ve had some thoughts lately about taking things further, but we’ve spent most of our lives hating each other. We have a rocky foundation at best. How the hell am I supposed to get around that?”
Especially when she doesn’t know the full truth.
Hunter snapped his fingers and pointed at his best friend. “Finn, isn’t there a solution for that? I know you’ve heard about this. For whenever you want to get to know someone better?”
“Why yes, Hunter. I believe they call that talking. Communication. The art of conversation.”
“Oh, yeah,” Aiden mused sarcastically. “It’s supposed to be all the rage. Little too avant-garde if you ask me.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Talking would require her agreement to go on a date with me. Otherwise, we’d just end up fucking and not talking.”
“Well, that would require you to actually ask her on a date,” Graham stated.
“That’s not part of our arrangement.”
“But you want it to be.”
“Shit, I don’t know,” Ben grumbled, knocking back the rest of his drink. “Liv’s always gotten to me, and not always in ways I’ve liked. But over the years, I’ve never been able to forget her. She’d pop in my head at the weirdest times. Like whenever I’d hear one of my Marine brothers video chatting with his wife or girlfriend. Or whenever that IED hit us and I was fighting to stay conscious. And the moment I saw her in that room at the spa…” He rubbed his chest, scratching at an odd, itchy sensation. “I can’t really describe how I felt. Relieved, I think. I guess happy, too. Like everything in my life had finally—”
He frowned at what were going to be his next words.
Was that really how he felt?
Hunter nudged him with his elbow. “Finally what?”
Ben stared down at the bar in disbelief. “Finally fallen into place. Like…it all felt whole for the first time.”
Finn let out a low whistle.
Graham wiped away invisible tears.
Aiden laughed and slapped him on the back. “Sorry, man, but you’re fucked.”
Now that he’d voiced his feelings out loud, he was infused with a fresh sense of optimism. Hope. Acknowledging that he might very well want to keep Olivia for his own made him feel lighter somehow. Like he’d finally unburdened a secret he’d been harboring for years.
Ironic.
Maybe it would feel the same if you unburdened your real secret.
Possibly. Not necessarily, though. He knew he had to tell Olivia the truth about the past, especially if they were to have any hope of a future.
But first, he needed to know if there was any hope to begin with. Before he did something that could potentially destroy a good thing between them, he needed to know that there was something actually worth saving. Something to fight for. Before he opened the Pandora’s Box to the past, he had to know there was a possibility for them to come out the other side of it intact.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “If this blows up in my face, you douchebags owe me.”
He scrolled through his contacts and hesitated over Olivia’s name. Then he told himself to grow a fucking pair. If she said no, it was no big deal. They’d just go on doing what they were doing and he would have to be satisfied with that. Because he’d also discovered something critically important that morning.
Olivia was hands down the fuck a lifetime.
In that cramped bathroom, where he’d taken her against a door when she deserved a soft bed where he could have taken his sweet time with her, he’d experienced the best sex of his life. And when he knew they could—and would—do so much better than that the next go-around, that was saying something. If she said no to his offer, then he’d buck up and take it like a man, because some of Olivia was better than no Olivia at all.
He tapped on her name and opened a new message window.
He pressed send before he lost his nerve and deleted it.
Waiting there, pretending to listen to the conversation around him, which thankfully, had switched to baseball, was a lot more torturous than he expected.
His phone chimed five minutes later and goddammit, his heart grew fucking wings and took flight.
He grinned like an idiot. She was actually agreeing. Had he ever flirted with a woman through texts before? He certainly couldn’t recall a time.
Friends. Why was that word becoming so offensive to his ears?
Apparently…they were going on a date.
Holy shit, what was he doing? This wasn’t part of the arrangement.
He didn’t care.
Because he was taking Olivia on a fucking date.