Page 59 of The Write Stuff

The change had happened sometime during the reader event, closer to the end than the beginning. He’d disappeared for a solid 30 minutes. Nathan had disappeared, too. They’d come back separately from one another, and yet Huxley was a new man when he appeared.

He was a flirty man. I was almost positive it was flirting at least. Nobody had ever flirted with me, so I couldn’t be sure. It felt flirty, though. It was definitely a different energy than he’d been boasting earlier in the evening.

I was confused as to what I should do about it.

He’d had too much to drink or something, or so I told myself — that always lowered inhibitions — but he’d been flirty for the walk to my apartment. He still hadn’t seen inside, and I couldn’t invite him up because the lights were on, meaning that Lucy was home. She had no idea that we’d been hanging out with one another, and given the fact that she was still running hot and cold on me over the job — introducing her to Hayley had softened her stance some — I couldn’t risk telling her about Huxley. She would use it against me and tell Mom.

We stood on the street in front of the building talking for a full 30 minutes. He didn’t ask to come inside. He seemed reticent to leave, however. Finally, I had no choice but to say goodnight. My bladder was lodging a complaint. He hadn’t kissed me goodnight, although there was a moment I thought he might, but he had given me a long hug.

It wasn’t as titillating as a kiss, but there had been emotion behind the embrace, something real that I couldn’t identify. Then he was gone. He walked down the block and called for his rideshare. I knew because I watched from the window. Lucy had even caught me watching, but I’d lied and said I was just amused at the drunk people on the sidewalk below. Did she believe me? It was hard to say.

She decided that the people on the street weren’t entertaining enough to keep her attention and went back to her room to pout. Or maybe it was to text Hayley. I knew there was a lot of that going on. I remained in the window until Huxley’s ride appeared. Even after, I stayed in my spot staring.

Was I wrong? I had to be wrong. Huxley liked me as a friend, which was a vast difference from how he’d felt about me when we were teenagers. It was an improvement. No, it was great. I liked hanging around with him, even if it was just as friends.

What if he wanted to be more than friends, though?

I threw out the possibility just as quickly as it had entered my mind. Huxley was never going to look at me that way. He’d just been drunk, and I was reading too much into the little touches and smiles. I wanted to see it, so that’s what I saw.

I believed that right up until I met him the next day at the coffee shop — we were due for another writing session — and he planted his feet on either side of mine under the table. He didn’t move them once we brushed against one another. He left them there. If anything, he moved them a little closer.

My mouth went dry when I looked up and found him watching me. “Were you hungover this morning?” I asked, expecting him to nod and tell me about his woes.

Instead, he made a face. “I only had one drink with dinner last night.”

“But …” I looked back over the time we’d spent together the previous evening. He was right. I’d only seen him drinking one cocktail. “Oh.”

“Oh?” He arched an eyebrow and shot me a crooked grin. It made him even more handsome, which shouldn’t have been possible.

“Lucy is talking to me some now,” I blurted because I was desperate to change the subject.

“Oh, yeah?” He pressed my feet between his. “Does that make you happy?”

“It’s better than sharing a roof with her — that apartment is only 1,000 square feet — and having her pretend she can’t see me.”

That had him frowning. “That sounds like emotional blackmail to me. She was trying to back you into a corner so she wouldn’t have to keep her job.”

“She hates her job,” I confirmed. “She complains about it constantly, about how her feet and back hurt.”

“I believe that’s normal when you’re waiting tables. I dated a cocktail waitress when I was in college. She claimed to walk 10 miles a night. I have no idea if that was true or if it just felt that way to her.”

Talking about his previous girlfriends was a risk, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. I treaded right back into dangerous waters. “Did you love her? The girlfriend, I mean.”

He shook his head. “No. Most definitely not. It was just a two-month fling. You know how those go.”

“Not really.”

He kept staring, and I swear it took him a full 30 seconds for my words to sink in. “Wait … are you saying that you’ve never had a fling?”

“What are you considering a fling? I once dated a guy for six months, and he didn’t want to put labels on anything. Is that a fling?”

“No, that’s a jackass,” he replied, not mincing words. “A fling is something that happens over a weekend, or even a few weeks. No more than a month, though.”

“Oh.” Well, that was disconcerting. I’d always filed Kevin away as a fling. Perhaps I needed to do some thinking on that.

“What guy didn’t want labels with you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I shook my head.