Page 66 of Unwritten Rules

“We’ll be late if you don’t get your ass in gear, Hellcat.”

My voice rebounds through the penthouse from my perch at the breakfast bar, where I’ve been flipping through Mila’s dog-eared, highly annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet.

“Holy shit, Nathaniel. Calm your tits!”

I can’t help chuckling at the exasperation in her voice, and my chest swells with an indescribable longing to have this be a reality.

This everyday normalcy with the woman I love. Waking up together, starting our day together, this idle banter that makes my body feel light as a feather.

Having come somewhat clean to Mila about the nature of our friendship versus the sexual attraction that clearly vibrates between us had been liberating as hell.

She’d understood and acknowledged that I’d never been with anyone in all the time we’d known one another. That in itself showed her that my inability to be in a relationship was yet another of the many red flags in our path.

But fuck if I didn’t want to just grab her and kiss the shit out of her when she was holding little Sebastian – the visual of that moment being our life – my entire self has never been filled with such hopelessness when the realisation settled.

That will never be us.

I won’t let it be us. I won’t ruin our friendship, my friendship with Henry – and I certainly won’t be a damn thing like my father. A thought that niggles daily, that I shove down into the deepest reaches of my psyche.

When she’d left with Nola and Jo, the two boys had taken great pains to include me in their fatherhood joy, and I’d carried it off well for…oh, all of ten minutes before I lit out of there like the hounds of Hell were at my heels.

I’d needed to make sure she got home okay. That whatever, or whoever, she’d run from hadn’t reared its ugly head, and the idea of a movie night in her garden hit me like a bolt from the blue as I passed a small electrical store in her neighbourhood, stopping to grab a pocket-sized projector.

I think I did a decent job of making her believe it’s just a fleeting sexual attraction between us. Or at least, I hope I did.

I need her to believe that my resolve is so much stronger than it is. Because I’m not sure how much more temptation I can take.

Rather than tempting fate last night, I’d stayed in the spare bedroom and slept there all night – because miraculously, Mila didn’t have any nightmares.

She’d woken me by bouncing into the spare room, waving Mitzi, her plush deer, excitedly after having had her first night of proper sleep in years. It filled me with a sense of pride – and simultaneously, loss.

She won’t need my arms to comfort her in the night anymore, knowingly or otherwise. I won’t have a reason to be her rock. I’ll have to resort to the true meaning of the friend zone, even as I know we’ve been dangerously and willingly teetering somewhere in between for a while now.

We’d celebrated over cereal and coffee, and I’d asked her to be my plus-one for the Ball on Wednesday before I’d nipped home to change for lunch at Henry’s.

“Does this look okay, Nathaniel?”

I drop the tattered Romeo and Juliet on the counter and turn to Mila, ready to crack a joke, as I usually do when she asks this question – lest I give the game away, obviously.

I can’t ever let her know that my feelings run as deep as they do, or her pursuit of me would be relentless.

And if she ever decided to go down that route, I know I wouldn’t stand a chance against her.

Fuck, it took everything I had to push her away almost a year ago in Devon!

As I look at her, my mouth goes dry, sweat breaks out across my brow, and my chest aches with a physical pain like nothing I’ve ever experienced previously.

“You’re…you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You’re exquisite, Hellcat.”

The words have left my mouth before I’ve even formed the thought, and her face lights up like a thousand suns as she strides across the living area.

She’s wearing a white dress that stops just below her knees and looks like it’s got some kind of crochet overlay. It’s got small puffy sleeves and is nipped in at the waist by a white belt before it flares out gently over her hips.

Instead of her favourite Converse, she’s paired the dress with a pair of white wedge heels with her bright pink painted toes peeping out. And she’s pulled her hair back in an up style just above her nape with some artfully placed dark brown tendrils escaping to rest against the curve of her neck.

She’s exactly like the song that makes me think of her.

Just like Heaven.