“You got free ice cream,” he reminded me.
“Cause you paid him,” I muttered.
“Lies,” Coop said lightly. “That all you got?”
A half-snort of laughter escaped me. “Sixth grade. Lia Baker.”
“Who?” Genuine confusion filled his voice and he pulled back to squint at me.
“Lia Baker,” I repeated. “Reddish-brown hair, always in braids, had a huge crush on you.”
“Nope,” he said, his mystified expression firmly in place as he shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Really?” I met him stare for stare, not backing down. “You don’t remember telling her that she couldn’t crush on you because I had rules and the only person I allowed to crush on you was me?”
“Frankie, does that sound like me?” A light gleamed in his eyes. “If you had a crush on me in sixth grade, and I?—”
I pinched him and he laughed.
“Hey, party foul!”
“You’re an ass.”
“But you’re smiling. So, I did something right.”
I opened my mouth to respond but then he kissed me.
It wasn’t hesitant. It wasn’t careful. It was like he’d been waiting to do it for years and now that the door had cracked open, he wasn't wasting a second. His hands slid up my back and into my hair, anchoring me as his lips found mine—warm, sure, and just a little breathless.
For a heartbeat, I froze. Then I kissed him back.
Everything else—the apartment, the years of friendship, the ridiculous stories we kept locked away like treasure—fell quiet.His mouth moved with a kind of familiarity that startled me, like he already knew how I kissed, like part of him had always known. It was soft, then firmer, a question and an answer all at once. I gripped the front of his shirt and let myself lean into him, into this, into everything that had always been just under the surface.
When we finally broke apart, I didn’t move far—just enough to stare up at him.
“That was…” I whispered.
“About damn time,” he murmured back, voice low and rough with something new. Something real.
And this time, I didn’t argue.
When he swooped back down to kiss me again, I knew I should stop us but…
I didn’t want to.
There were a hundred reasons why this was a bad idea—reasons I tried to grasp onto but every single one popped like a soap bubble as soon as I landed on it. We were best friends. He knew all my worst moments. We’d seen each other at our absolute lowest. This was the kind of line that once crossed didn’t have a return path.
But none of that mattered when his lips found mine again.
This kiss was different. Slower. Like he was savoring it, like we had time to unfold everything we’d never said. His hand slipped to the side of my face, his thumb brushing just under my cheekbone, grounding me as my heart went chaotic in my chest. I felt like I was falling, but not in a panicked way—more like gravity had finally given up the fight and let me drift into the space I’d been orbiting for years.
My fingers curled into the back of his neck, and I leaned into him, into the weight of him, the warmth, the history. He knew how I took my coffee. He’d sat with me through fights with mymom, bad haircuts, and the death of my first cat. And now he was kissing me like he’d been waiting for me to catch up.
When we finally pulled apart again, it was slower this time, like neither of us really wanted to let go.
He looked at me—really looked—and his voice was quiet but steady. “You okay?”
I nodded, breath still shaky. “Yeah. Just… recalibrating.”
