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Bentley’s jaw tightens. “Don’t forget my soirée. I’ll text you the details.” Irritation flashes over his face as he sees how close Elisha and Ves are standing. “You’re both invited, of course. It’ll be nice to catch up and get to know each other.”
“Like I said, I’m”—she looks at Ves—“we’re going to be pretty busy. But we’ll see. Tell Tori hi.”
Ves frowns. She’s already had this conversation? Evidently her ex can’t take no for an answer. As Elisha starts for the door, he catches her loosely by the wrist. He can count every single one of her thick black lashes as her eyes widen up at him. “Hey,” he says softly. “C’mere. You’re going to be cold.”
And then in front of everyone, he unwinds his scarf, still warm from his body, and loops it around her neck. Their heated gazes lock. “There,” he murmurs. “Gorgeous.”
Chapter Thirteen
Ves
When Ves’s knuckles brush the curve of her ear, Elisha makes a sound of delight. The ends of her short brown hair tickle his thumb, the innocent gesture giving him a hot nudge in his pants.
“You realize,” she whispers as she steps through the door Ves holds open. Snowflakes catch on her hair, on the apples of her cheeks. “That they’re definitely going to think we’re a thing now?”
Dismissively, he tells her, “I’m not bothered by what they think.”
“You know, for someone who’s not a big relationship person, you did a pretty decent job of pretending to be my boyfriend back there,” she says lightly.
A bit more than decent, he thinks. “Purely for your benefit.” He clears his throat, wishing he could clear his mind half as easily. Coming to her rescue was a knee-jerk reaction to witnessing her obvious discomfort. It had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the spring-loaded coil of jealousy that unfurled when he saw the way Bentley was looking at her.
To his relief, she takes him at face value. “Thanks, by the way, for paying, but I’ll get the next one.”
He never intended to let her pay for this one, but he likes that she offers. That it goes without saying there will be a next one. That for some reason, he’s more than okay with her foregone conclusion.
“Also, thank you for what you did back there,” adds Elisha. “You didn’t have to, and I know you weren’t comfortable with, um, all of that.” She gives a little laugh. “The look on his face when you called him Ben. It’s such a great, solid name, but he thinks it’s ‘plebeian.’ Solana can’t stand how pretentious he is, so knocking him down a peg? You’ve got a fan for life now.”
He clears his throat. “How about with you?” For a reason he doesn’t want to dwell upon, he wants Elisha to find him impressive, too.
“Oh, goes without saying,” she says brightly. “If you want to give me the best present ever, just keep using the nickname loudly and frequently in my presence.”
“You’ve got it.” They share a grin that feels a bit like solidarity, a bit like something more.
“And obviously you’re off the hook about the party. I’ll probably have to make an appearance, bring them a poinsettia flower arrangement or whatever, and make an excuse for you.”
That gets his attention. “You’re still going to attend?”
“Attend.” She eyes him with unconcealed merriment. “Ves, I’m currently wearing your scarf after that possessive little display back there where you pretended to be my boyfriend—I think you can be a little less formal. And yes. Probably. As much as I want to go back to pretending he doesn’t exist, it’s just not realistic now that we live in the same town.” She groans. “Oh my god. I can’t believe that’s just a sentence that I said.”
“Don’t go,” Ves says impulsively. “He’s just trying to needle you with that nice-guy act.” Before either of them can dissect why he even cares, as casually as he can manage, Ves adds, “I realize that I don’t know you that well, but dear old Ben didn’t really seem like your type.”
“My ex-slash-long-story? Well, now that I think about it, it’s actually quite a short one. Boy proposes to girl, gets a job in her hometown after graduation, then finds every reason under the sun to delay following through. I was so humiliated I took the very first job offer I could get and ran off to Atlanta.”
He’s torn between saying Sorry that happened to you and What a fucking asshole, but then she laughs as if she’s trying to brush off the fact that she overshared. So he bites back his instinctive protectiveness and anger on her behalf.
Ves wouldn’t mind if Elisha wanted to take his arm again, but she doesn’t, although their bodies do brush while they tromp back through the snow. The air between them simmers with an undercurrent that he doesn’t particularly care to investigate. He blames his smooth move with the scarf as the catalyst.
“So when did you become an expert on my taste, Ves? Spend a lot of time thinking about who’s my type?” she teases.
He dodges the questions as well as a rather emboldened squirrel who bounds alongside them on the sidewalk. He’s a bit unsure whether Elisha’s teasing him or if she doesn’t think he has any business thinking about her questionable taste in partners. “Of course not,” he says with a huff. “He seemed...” Like he still wants you, his mind whispers. Ves hesitates, then reroutes. “You don’t like him.”
Not even as a friend, clearly. Ves himself has parted amicably with the women he’s casually dated, neither party invested enough to stay friends. But Elisha’s ex keeps going out of his way to stay in her life like some kind of haunted, permanent fixture. It’s weird, it’s suspicious, and Ves doesn’t like it. Or him.
She exhales. “Yeah, that would be why we’re exes. What, do you stay friends with all of your ex-girlfriends or something?”
He thinks about Connecticut and paying a small fortune for the Amtrak ride back to his campus apartment on Christmas Day and Claire not even trying very hard to talk him out of it. “No,” he says. “But then, I haven’t had very many. I date casually and that’s about it. I don’t do serious.”
“Oh, that’s... Sorry, I was going to say sad, but maybe you have the right idea. Getting serious has never really worked out for me. I just hate being single over the holidays. Especially here of all places.”
