Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 92062 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92062 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
I shake my head and try not to let seeing him with her bother me. It’s been almost seven years since we had one night together. I walk down the steps and look around. “I’m going to the bathroom,” I tell Evie, and she nods at me as I walk to the back of the bar.
I push open the door and walk to the sink to rinse my hands, looking down at the water and I’m taken back to that one night, the one night that will forever be one of the best and one of the worst nights of my life. More so the best than the worst, even though we haven’t been the same since.
Nate and Joshua had just gotten home for winter break after beating the number one team to move up in the standings. Nate wasn’t even supposed to be at the bar that night. He had plans to go with Joshua and Jack to join our cousins at the hockey rink that night for a pick-up game. But now here he was with a couple of his friends from high school just sitting on a barstool laughing. It was the first time I’d seen him since he was back.
“Hey.” I walked up to him and smiled big. My heart hammering in my chest as I walked into the middle of his legs and leaned in to kiss his cheek. It was something that I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I mean when he’d come into the house and seen me after a couple of days, he would always give me a side hug or sometimes hold up his hand so I could give him a high five. This was very different and for the life of me I don’t know why I did it. I just did.
“Hey,” he said smiling at me, “this is a surprise.” He hadn’t seen me since he headed back to school at the beginning of August.
“You can say that.” I looked at the guys next to them remembering them from coming to my house a couple of times, but whose names I was blanking on. It could be that it was because I was still in the middle of Nate’s legs and my hand was on his thigh. It was an intimate gesture that I’d never done before.
“Hey.” I held up one of my hands to the guys who are around us. They replied back with a chin lift instead of any verbal words. I was about to move away from Nate and head back to my friends when a guy who was walking past us was pushed into us and Nate wrapped his arm that was holding the beer around my waist and pulled me to him while he extended his other hand to protect me from anyone else that was going to bump into me.
“Watch it,” one of Nate’s friends told the guy and all I could do was look up at Nate.
“You okay?” he asked me and all the words that I learned my whole life were just stuck and jumbled in my head. The only thing that I could do was nod my head.
He smirked at me and the hold around my waist relaxed a bit but it didn’t let me go. “You want something to drink?”
“Sure,” I said and then someone called my name from across the bar, and when I looked up, it was one of the girls that I came with. “I should”—I pointed to the girl, my mouth dry—“get back to my friends.”
He looked straight into my eyes and butterflies took flight in my stomach. “Yeah, you should,” he said, bringing the beer to his lips and then his tongue came out to lick the drop of beer that was on his bottom lip. My hand itched to come up and hold his face and kiss him, but I knew that I needed to get away from him before I did something that I would forever be embarrassed about.
“I’ll see you around.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I groaned inwardly at them and he chuckled.
“Yeah,” is all he said as I slowly disengaged myself from him. I walked back to my friends and the whole time I felt like his eyes were on me. One look over my shoulder when I got to my friend proved to me that I was right.
I spent the night chatting with my friends, in between looking over to where he was, and it’s as if he knew when I was looking at him because his eyes would come to mine and we would share a look. A couple of times it was reversed, and I could feel him staring at me.
I saw him put the beer down on the bar and he got up, shaking his friends’ hands before I saw him walking over to me. My heartbeat hammered so hard, it’s a wonder that it didn’t come out of my chest. His eyes stared into mine as he made his way to me. “Do you want a lift home?” he asked when he was leaving, and I nodded my head, even though I was not ready to go. I said goodbye to the girls who all looked at me as if they knew something was up, but also knew that Nate was like a brother to me.