I yanked my hand out of his grip and stood up to pace. “Fun? Fun? Didn’t you hear what I said? She’s with Nolan. Probably sleeping with Nolan. On your honeymoon.”
Parker tilted his head at me. “Yeah… you told me. So?”
I flapped my arms up and down like a deranged chicken. “Are you kidding? Your fiancée—”
“Ex-fiancée,” he interrupted from the sofa.
I glared at him. “Ex-fiancée is sleeping with him. How is this okay with you? How is any of this okay with you?”
Parker shrugged. “I don’t know. Just is.”
“It can’t be. You’re repressing, or—”
“I’m not.”
I shook my head. “You haven’t processed—”
“I have.”
“Then for fuck’s sake, explain how you didn’t even want me sharing a room platonically with the guy the night before the wedding ago, and now you’re perfectly calm at the fact that he ran off with your fiancée!”
“Because she’s not you, damn it!” he exploded, nostrils flared, then blinked as what he’d said caught up to him. He didn’t back down, though. “She’s not you,” he repeated softly. “And once again, she’s my ex-fiancée, Jules.”
“For now.”
“Forever.”
“And what does that even mean,” I whispered, almost afraid to look at him. “She’s not me?”
Parker stood up and grabbed my hands to hold them down by my side. He suddenly seemed so close. Uncomfortably close. Intimately close.
I sucked in a breath.
Meanwhile, Parker looked as calm and unruffled and confident as I’d ever seen him. “It means she’s not the person I obsess about when they’re gone. She’s not the person I want to run to when I have something cool to share.” His eyes pinned me with an intensity that made my stomach drop to the floor. “And she’s not the person I want so fucking badly to kiss right now.”
What. The. Ever-loving. Fuck. Was happening.
I stepped backward and nearly fell over a side table. I turned to grab it before it fell, and then I scrambled to right the few items that had fallen over. “Nope. Nope, you didn’t just say that. Stop doing this. You’re saying things you don’t mean. You’re upset. Understandably so. You were left at the altar. On Valentine’s Day. That has to cut deep. So… so, yeah. That’s all this is.” I turned back and glared at him. “Confusion.”
Parker stepped close again, that sexy little smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “I’m not confused. Not anymore.”
My breathing came fast and jagged. “Well, I sure as fuck am. This is ridiculous. This… this week was supposed to be… not about this,” I said frantically, running my hand palm out in a circle between us to indicate everything encompassing the two of us. “This week was supposed to be… supposed to be…”
He leaned in until our noses almost touched. Almost.
“Supposed to be?” he asked in a low, breathy voice that made my balls ache.
“Supposed to be me moving on from you.”
9
PARKER
My dick was hard.
My dick was hard for my best friend, and my heart felt like it was going to skyrocket out of my chest. I wanted him so fucking much. It was like someone had popped the cork on a bottle of champagne I’d spent twenty years inadvertently shaking.
For the past two days, I’d been staring at a bunch of troubling puzzle pieces, trying to make them make sense. I couldn’t be gay, since I still had zero desire to kiss Tiller, or the guy at the bar, or any other man I’d ever met. But then, why had I been subconsciously cockblocking my best friend for years? And why was the idea of Julian having a crush on me so damn thrilling and satisfying? And why was my cock suddenly malfunctioning every time Julian grinned or stretched or spoke or breathed, like it was a radio permanently tuned to the Horny Channel?
I’d been subtly trying to avoid Julian—well, as much as it was possible to avoid someone you couldn’t resist sneaking into bed with every damn night, anyway—because I didn’t want to talk to him about any of this until I was a hundred percent sure what it all meant. I was done making half-hearted promises and getting swept up by the tide like I had with Erin. Julian was too important for anything else.
But then Julian had been standing in front of me, yelling at me, looking so desperate and angry and concerned and loving and mine, and suddenly, all those puzzle pieces fell into place like click click click, and the picture became perfectly, amazingly clear.
Of course I hadn’t felt a spark with Tiller. Because I wasn’t in love with Tiller. Just like I wasn’t in love with Erin… which was why I could never have been the partner she needed, no matter how hard I tried.
Julian was all I could think of.
He always had been.
His body, his smile, his infernal ability to both get under my skin and also be the ultimate comfort.
His words took a minute to sink in.
Supposed to be me moving on from you.
“You don’t get to move on from me,” I growled in a low voice. I was trying my hardest not to yell at him, not to grab him and shake him the way he’d shaken me just by being himself lately.
“You don’t seem surprised that I had feelings for you.” Julian’s eyes flared. “Oh, god, please don’t tell me you’ve known all along—”
I shook my head. “Mikey mentioned it at the bar the other night. He wanted me to stop giving you mixed signals, but I hadn’t known I was. I hadn’t known I could. I didn’t know my own mind. But you know I’d never hurt you—”
“But you have,” he whispered, his voice raw and small in a way that Julian’s voice should never be. “You didn’t mean to, but…”
My chest felt tight, and it became harder to pull in air. The thought of hurting him was excruciating.
“Talk to me,” I pleaded. “I can’t fix it unless you tell me.”
“You can’t fix it at all. It’s ancient history, and none of it is your fault. Like, did you know that I was going to ask you to homecoming the same day Erin did? Yeah.” He nodded when I grimaced. “I made you a poster. A whole big prom-posal thing, with puns and glitter—”
“But you went on a whole rant about prom-posals,” I reminded him. “You told me they were elitist, and exclusionary, and heteronormative. I figured it was because no one had given you one. That’s why I did that whole stupid fake prom-posal thing at the Rockies game—”
“I know. But what was I supposed to tell you?” he said tiredly. “That I had glitter under my nails for two weeks because she got to you first? That I cried myself to sleep? What good would that have done, Parks?”
“I would have been more careful, at least! I wouldn’t have, I dunno, kissed you as much. Or slept in your bed. Or snuggled up on your couch when we watched movies.”
Julian huffed out a breath. “Don’t you get it? I didn’t want you to stop doing any of those things. I told myself that was all I’d ever get of you. I tried to convince myself that was enough. For more than a decade, Parker. And I swore to myself that it was going to end this week. This—” He waved a hand at the cabin around us. “—this was my wallowing hole. The place where my unrequited crush was going to end once and for all.”