Off Balance by Tiffany Costa

Author:Tiffany Costa [Costa, Tiffany]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter twenty

Caleb

She scoffed.

I liked annoying Juliette. She was so easy to tease. A handful of suggestive sentences and she looked like she could smack me with a frying pan.

What just happened was not that.

Turning to the pot, I worked to rein in my racing heart. I hadn’t meant to touch her.

Lies! God, that was such a lie.

What I hadn’t meant for was my reaction—or hers. It was just a piece of hair that had fallen. I shouldn’t have touched it. But I did. And then I imagined slipping my fingers to the base of her skull and pulling her in—and she’d seen that same image. I knew it. It was in the way her pupils dilated and her breathing went shallow as she licked her lips.

We couldn’t go there. Kelsey would be disgusted. She would never forgive me.

It was insanity, anyway. I had lost my fucking mind.

Clearing my throat, I faced Juliette. “Do you want to take dinner with you, or should I send it with Kelsey?” I asked, shutting off the incessant voice in my head.

“Send it with Kelsey,” she said.

Juliette jumped, remembering something, and dug through her purse. “I had a key made for you.” Rooting through it, she started taking out her planner, wallet, phone, giant set of keys on a lanyard that rattled when she plopped them on the counter, and (shockingly) a second wallet. Finally, pulling out a small brown paper bag that was taped shut, Juliette handed it to me, noticeably careful not to touch my hand with hers. “This opens the front and back door, so if you ever need to get in or Kelsey forgets her key or whatever, you have it. Just in case.”

“I—Juliette, this is all so sudden.” Her eyes went wide. I kept rambling, “I don’t know if I’m ready for this commitment. It’s all happening so fast. It’s only been,” I mock counted on my fingers, “several weeks.”

She caught up and rolled her eyes so far back into her skull they might have stayed that way. “You’re such an ass. I thought you were being serious for a second.”

“Of course I’m serious. Are you sure you trust me with access to your sock collection? One more loss at Monopoly and I’ll be channeling my inner panty thief and applying the skills elsewhere. I’ll be—”

“Caleb!”

“—taking one of each sock as revenge.” I noticed on the periphery of my senses that Kelsey was walking down the hall towards us.

“You never know when to stop!” Juliette scolded me with a look while she shoved the chaos back into her purse.

“You’ll never have a matching pair again.” I shrugged, pretending to examine my nails.

“Kelsey, teach your father some manners while I’m gone,” Juliette laughed, tossing her bag over her shoulder.

Everything in me recoiled.

I wish she hadn’t said that.

Juliette left with a smile on her face, but Kelsey and I ate under a cloak of unspoken boundaries. The weight of the word father was the one thing that had a one hundred percent success rate at smothering Kelsey.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.