Instead, he just says, “Nah, I was getting lazy with it, a definite sign I need a break.”
“Oh, okay then, good. Actually, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s something I think we should do.”
“What’s that?”
“We should kiss.”
“Uh . . .”
“Hear me out.”
“Floor’s yours,” he says as if he isn’t already in, as if she’s going to have to convince him. He shouldn’t be. He should be worried what it’ll mean, for him, for them, but instead of having any sense of self-preservation, all he can manage to care about is whether or not she’s thinking straight. She doesn’t seem drunk, but . . . he doesn’t want her to regret it tomorrow.
“We’re going to be doing this for two months. Pulling off a lie this big is tough enough, but the more we’re around people, the more casual affection they’re going to expect.”
He cocks an eyebrow in her direction. “They asked you about it, didn’t they?”
“It might have come up,” she admits, taking a long sip from her water bottle before setting it aside.
“And what did you say?” he asks, leaning harder into the kitchen counter, hoping the pain of the sharp edge into his lower back will tamp down his need to just agree to her suggestion, no more questions asked.
“I said that I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Yeah, there’s no way they let you get away with that. At the very least Frankie had something to say and probably Chloe too.”
“You’re right. I literally had to flee. And then I thought getting a ride from Izzy was a good idea.”
“And it wasn’t?”
“Nuhuh. I’m not drunk enough to tell you about that.”
“But you are drunk enough to want to kiss me?”
“That’s . . . no, that’s not . . . I’m not drunk,” he raises a challenging eyebrow, “anymore. I was pleasantly inebriated, but it’s almost all gone now.”
“Did you know your vocabulary gets more sophisticated when you’ve been drinking?”
“Does it?”
“Mmhmm. You know, boss, if you want to kiss me, you can just say so. You don’t need to make up an excuse.”
Her eyebrows lift in surprise. “So it’s not over the line for you?”
“Nah, I think we’d still be on the right side of it.”
“It’s just a kiss,” she says, mostly to herself, he thinks. “It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it is. Because everyone else thinks that we’ve exchanged hundreds, maybe thousands, of kisses already. It could be like practice.”
“Practice kissing? Pissing? No, that doesn’t work,” he says, wrinkling his nose.
She laughs at that and yeah, who cares why she wants to kiss him? He’s down for it. She takes another long sip from her water bottle, finishing the thing off, and she slides down off thecounter to dump it into the recycling bin. She’s closer now, but still too far away for his liking.
“Yeah,” she agrees, “like if we ever have to do it in front of other people, we wouldn’t want it to be the first time. Don’t take this the wrong way, but there are so many ways that could go wrong.”
“How would I take that the wrong way?”
