“It’s . . .” she trails off, “different.”
“Bianca,” Chloe says with a snort. “The man calls you boss. I mean, are you guys like . . .”
“No, not like that,” she insists because it’s true. That’s never been quite her thing. “He just . . . I think he really gets off on consent.”
Chloe nods. “I mean, hearing someone wants you, knowing it, is incredibly hot.”
“Exactly,” she agrees, finishing up the final screw, “and it sometimes feels like a, I don’t know, a feedback loop? Like he gets turned on by my consent and I get turned on by him wanting that consent. And it’s just . . . a lot. All the time.”
“And on top of that, he is extremely your type.” Chloe shakes the headboard, testing the job they’ve done. It holds firm.
“Wow, you’re the first person to notice that,” Bianca says, rolling her eyes.
“I’m just saying, I’m glad you decided to go for it after pretending forso longthat you weren’t interested. He’s pretty much the only guy you’ve mentioned at all in the last five years and he clearly adores you. You deserve someone who loves you like that.”
Bianca swallows down the guilt that even a nearly full set of apartment furniture can’t quite overpower. “You deserve that too and you’re going to find it, you know that, right?”
“Of course I deserve it,” Chloe agrees, with a heavy sigh, sitting down on the mattress and then flopping back against it. “I just don’t know if I’m ever going to find it. You’re lucky. You weren’t even looking, right?”
Bianca shakes her head and then joins her friend on the bed, staring up at the ceiling with her. “I wasn’t, but then he was just there in front of me and it was like . . .”
“Like what?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I absolutely can’t promise that.”
“Ugh, fine, it was like,” she thinks back to that first class together, after the one she missed, which he was clearly pissed about even though he probably thought he hid it well, “like magnets snapping together. It was like that from the first day. He had an answer for literally everything I said, would find the one weakness in my argument and exploit it, twist it around, and by the end I’d be making his argument for him. But somehow we’d end up with the same conclusion, just coming at it from different starting points.”
“Of course you got off on academic debate.”
“I got off on the extremely hot archaeologist debating me,” she corrects.
“Fair enough.”
“And he lives up to the looks and the banter?”
“Exceeds them,” she admits, “like, exponentially.”
“In English for the human resources manager.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve never . . . It’s never felt like this before. Sometimes I feel like I might lose it just from him looking at me.”
And that part, it’s always been true. She’s never had to fake how attracted to him she is.
“Those eyes are something,” Chloe says with a nudge of her elbow.
“Ugh, his eyes, and in the low light, they’re just . . . I’m still not exactly sure what color they are, but when he’s turned his focus on me, it’s . . . God, I sound ridiculous.”
“No, you sound in love.”
“Exactly,” Bianca teases. “Ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous,” a deep voice that is definitely not Chloe adds from the doorway, “is that we have been working our assesoff for hours and there was no pizza, but don’t worry, I made an executive decision about twenty minutes ago and now there’s pizza.”
Bianca sits up and takes him in, leaning against Chloe’s bedroom doorframe, filling it almost entirely, in his white t-shirt and well-fitted jeans, that one curl from earlier still dancing against his forehead, teasing her, like it knows exactly what she was talking about before he walked in.
Wait, when exactly did he walk in?
