AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I wanted to scrub my eyes and make sure it was really Bran sitting across the table from me, but I knew he’d call me out on the theatrics. Still, I couldn’t help scrutinizing him out of the corner of my eye as I took a drink of my beer. Whowasthis guy sitting across from me, being so mature rather than making gagging noises?
Then, I saw whohewas sneaking glances at while he pretended to be so casually tipping back his beer, and it all made sense.
Everyone is someone’s best friend–you can’t make them all off limits.
Who cares about age once you’re both consenting adults.
He wasn’t making a case for me and Aiden–he was making a case for himself andLiv.
I nearly choked on my beer. Liv looked at me with concern. Bran looked at me with a laugh in his eyes. He knew I’d figured it out, and he knew there wasn’t a thing I could say about it. If he had a thing for my best friend, that was nothing compared to whoIhad feelings for.
“So I think we’re all agreed,” he said blandly. “You should go for it.”
* * *
Every day was pretty casual at Cross Media, but early release game days werereallycasual. When I opened the refrigerator to put my salad inside, I saw it had been stocked with beer.
“We start pre-gaming at noon,” Joe told me.
“Joe starts pre-gaming at noon,” Gloria corrected. “The rest of us wait for the bus.”
“I’m ahead of my time,” Joe quipped.
Later, I saw that Joe wasn’t the only one. At least half the floor grabbed a beer with their lunch, and productivity wound down the closer the clock ticked to the time the bus would pull up outside the building to drive us to the stadium.
I wasn’t one of the drinkers, though. In fact, I stayed at my desk through lunch. I was catching up on work. The Brand Development team was having our first big meeting with Blake Morten next week, and I wanted to make sure I was well versed in his presentation and platform.
Gloria pulled up a chair to watch some of his YouTube videos with me, chomping noisily through carrot sticks while they played.
“Oh don’t worry,” she said when I shot the bag of carrots a sideways glance. “He says a variation on the same five things in every video. You don’t need to catch every word.”
I tried not to snicker, but I’d watched enough of them to know this was true. “Why is this guy so popular?”
“Because he’s–”chomp“–a gorgeous, cat-loving specimen of a man hunk.”
Joe sidled over, beer in hand. “I thought I heard someone talking about me.”
This time I did not snicker, but Gloria did. I winced for both of them. I sensed that, despite her prickly attitude, Gloria liked Joe, but if she didn’t start giving him some hope, he’d give up.
“We’re watching Blake Morten’s YouTube channel,” I told him, angling the screen so he could see better.
Joe made a face. “No, thank you. Maureen made us do a movie night where we watched them all in a row. How many times has he said that his best friends have four legs?”
“At least a dozen,” I admitted.
“What about ‘we don’t choose them, they choose us’?”
“More than a dozen.”
“I swear to God–” Joe set down his beer and held his hands up, palms out, “–the first time he came in, he said with absolutely no hint of irony, ‘sometimes I wonder who saved who,’ while showing us pictures of his first cat.”
“Isn’t that a bumper sticker?” I thought for sure I’d seen it slapped in a few back windows with silhouettes of cats and dogs bookending the words.
“Yes, it is, so the fact he injected it into casual conversation like it just came to him–” Joe shook his head, too disgusted to finish his sentence.
“It was gross,” Gloria agreed. “But like, his arms.”
“What about them?” I studied them in the video. They were thick with muscle, but they were almosttoobig, like maybe he’d have trouble finding shirts that fit comfortably in the sleeves.
