It’s a brief, chaste kiss, but it feels like I’ve been stabbed in the chest with a steak knife.
I push the steamed broccoli around my plate with my fork, my appetite suddenly gone.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
The answer is as obvious as it is unwanted. I’m fucking jealous.
I think I should go. It’s not like I want to finish what I put on my plate, anyway. Maybe I could ask for a to go box and take it with me, in case I get hungry later.
With my mind made up, I scoot back, my chair making a screeching sound on the floor of the dining hall.
The moments I spent staring at Bex like a complete creep and the precious seconds it took me to decide to go home seal my fate.
“Hey dude.” Jamie sets both their trays of food on the table. “Mind if we join you?”
I nod, frozen in place. Bex’s eyes descend to my full plate and the words on the tip of my tongue never come out. I can’t say I’m done eating when it’s clear that I’ve barely touched my dinner.
“It’s a free country,” I chuckle. “Be right back. I need to top up my drink.” I rise from my chair, carrying my full cup to the drink station.
It’s ok. I repeat that to myself over and over, taking my sweet ass time pretending to refill my drink. I can quickly eat my food and be on my way, no harm, no foul. Right? My crush on Luke’s sister is ridiculous, anyway. I have no time for a girlfriend, and even if I did? I might be over Fiona in the way that I no longer love her. But I’m not over her betrayal. I’m in no place to trust anyone with my heart any time soon.
And Bex has clearly made her choice, so the attraction I thought I felt the night we met must have been totally one-sided.
The thing I can’t get over is that she chose Jamie. I mean, fuck. Jamie Hart is one of my best friends on the team. And since I live, eat, and breathe hockey, all my friends are teammates.
I love Jamie like a brother, and trust him with my life on and off the ice. But if I had a sister? He’d be the very last man I’d want to see my sister with. Not for any other reason than the fact that Jamie is a no commitment, no strings attached kind of guy. I can’t believe that Luke approves and actually encourages this ridiculous relationship. Bex has just broken an engagement. How can Luke think that she should date someone who changes girls faster than I change my underwear?
Then again, maybe Bex is doing the rebound thing, and that’s why Luke approves?
I eventually can’t loiter around the drink station without people glaring at me, so I make my way back to the table where Bex is practically sitting in Jamie’s lap.
Ok. Let’s do this. Shovel the food on my plate into my mouth as if my life depended on it, and get out of here. If I’m lucky, I’ll be done while they’re still making fuck me eyes at each other.
“How are you, Connor?” Bex turns to look at me. “I haven’t seen you since the other night at the party.”
My eyes go from her pretty face to the table where her fingers are laced with Jamie’s.
I make a non-committal noise. I wonder if she knows that Keene and I weren’t too pleased with the way Luke went about this whole thing. Judging by the way she’s smiling at me, she either doesn’t know that we were quite pissed, or she’s very good at hiding her emotions.
“I just wanted to say,” she begins, as if she could read my mind. “That I’m going to be quiet and clean up after myself and be respectful of your living space. You won’t even know I’m there.”
This is fucking awkward. I could try to explain why I was against letting her move in with us, but what’s the point? What’s done is done. The best course of action in this situation is to deflect the elephant in the room. “I’m sure compared to your brother, you’re going to be a model roommate.”
My words seem to surprise her. “Why? For what I could see, Luke is pretty neat. His room and bathroom were immaculate the night I arrived.”
I bark out a laugh. “That’s not what I’m talking about. First off, Luke snores. I could hear him with both our doors closed and my headphones in. And don’t start me off on the nights Shane slept over. Your brother’s a screamer.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.
Redness rises to Bex’s face at the mention of her twin’s sexual exploits. “Oh, right. Noted. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that with me. The one time in my life I had sex, I—” she cuts herself off.
My eyes meet hers. Did she really say that? She was about to get married and she only had sex once?
Fuck, she’s so pretty. Only an idiot like Priestly could be engaged to a knockout like Bex and not be all over her. If Bex had been my girl, fuck knows we’d both be in trouble. We would barely ever leave our bed. I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands, my mouth, and my cock off of her. Speaking about my cock, the fucker is hardening at the way my team captain’s sister is looking at us. Well, at me. Thank fuck there’s the table between us, so she can’t see how tight the situation just became in my pants. On the other hand, though, I was lazy and came out to the dining hall in my sweatpants and now there’s no way I can leave this table until my raging boner goes down.
Another thought that hits me unexpectedly is that maybe Jamie is really serious about this relationship. His MO usually is to hook up with his flavor of the night at lightning speed. By Bex’s tone, I have to assume that the one time she had sex wasn’t with Jamie. That’s completely out of character for him. But if he’s waiting to jump into bed with her, it can only mean that he isn’t gonna fuck her and move on.
And that makes sense because I can’t think Luke would ever approve of this unlikely relationship, if all Jamie wanted to do was get his dick wet and then continue to plow his way through the female population on campus.
