He rests their joined hands against his thigh as he drives and she doesn’t pull away, not until they have to get out of the car.
The Home Depot doesn’t have a truck, but they do have a van, a white one with tinted windows that’d look super creepy if it didn’t have a massive logo painted on the side, telling exactly how much the thing costs to rent by the hour to everyone Xavier drives past, while she follows behind in the Jeep.
They find Chloe where they left her and she looks up with a grin when they pull up.
“That was fast. Locksmith will be there in an hour. Let’s do this.”
The furniture fits easily enough in the van, which Xavier handles like a pro.
“You’d be surprised how often driving a van with heavy shit inside is actually a compulsory skill for an archaeologist,” he says, as they’re unloading the boxes back at Chloe’s place.
There’s a service elevator in her building, thank God, which saves them the potential disaster that would be trying to lift everything up the stairwells, since the normal elevator is absolutely too small.
“You two get started on that,” Xavier says, once they get the bed, in pieces, inside the apartment. “I’ll go get the rest.”
Bianca follows him out, leaving Chloe reading the directions.
“I don’t think I said it before,” she says, when she catches him waiting for the elevator. “Thank you, for this. I know you could be doing literally anything else and instead I sort of bulldozed you into this and . . .”
“Hey,” he cuts her off, “if I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be, okay? Some things are more important.”
“Furniture assembly?”
“No,” he says, but he doesn’t elaborate. He just holds her eyes with his and with every second that ticks by, an inch of space between them disappears.
Was it just last night when she woke up in his arms, the full length of his body pressed against hers, when he told her exactly what her body does to him, when the only thing that kept her from kissing him was the niggling thought that she probably had morning breath, and not any of the other incredibly legitimate reasons why she shouldn’t be kissing a man that’s going to disappear from her life, probably forever, in a couple of months?
And now, even that reason doesn’t seem good enough, because he’s spent the day helping her support her friend through an awful moment – hell, he volunteered to do it – and it was all for her.
Ducking his head, a dark lock of hair falling into his eyes, he leans forward, but not fully, not closing the distance entirely. His eyes are asking for him, so clearly she can hear his voice in her head.Well, boss, what’s it gonna be?
She wants to kiss him, she’s desperate to feel the press of his lips against hers, to feel the nip of his teeth against her bottom lip, to have his arms wind around her body and pull her in close and let the hard edges of muscle and sinew press into her softer curves, let his hands map them out with reverent touches, but . . .
DING!
“Uh, hi, did someone call for a locksmith?”
Chloe’s giggles are absolutely worth recounting just how close Bianca was to the locksmith, who is currently hard at work swapping out the front doorknob and bolt with a new one, witnessing her absolutely mauling Xavier out in the hallway.
“Okay, but enoughalmosts. You need to spill actual details, Dr Dimitriou. You’ve been incredibly silent about it up until now and don’t give me thatI don’t kiss and tellbullshit. I know for sure you absolutely do. Remember Gavin Walsh?”
Bianca laughs at that. Gavin Walsh, the absolutehottestguy at camp, and the only thing she and Chloe ever fought about.
It had been a late-night underground game of spin-the-bottle in one of the cabins after their counselors had snuck out, probably to party way harder than twelve-year-olds could possibly imagine. And Bianca’s first spin had landed on Gavin, an athletic blond who was rocking that terrible Justin Bieber bowl haircut with swoopy bangs that was standard at the time.
It was a terrible kiss, obviously. Neither one of them knew where to put their noses or how to breathe and his braces had cut her bottom lip a little.
It was also the greatest moment of her life, up until that point.
Until they went back to the cabin and Chloe refused to talk to her that night and then the whole next day, where Bianca’d actually had to participate in archery since she didn’t have anyone to sneak off with.
She’d apparently missed that the camp-wide crush on Gavin had snared her friend way harder than it had her.
“I wassopissed at you,” Chloe says, shaking her head. “And then I had to kiss Ian Tuthill. He always smelled like old Doritos.”
“And tasted like them too, didn’t he?” Bianca teases, focusing on screwing one side of the headboard into the bed’s base.
Chloe shudders, holding her end of the headboard steady. “Ugh, so bad, I nearly gagged against his lips. But enough, spill.You’re not getting off easy just because you bought me furniture. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
