Not Pretending Anymore by Ward, Penelope (big ebook reader .TXT) 📕

week had been tough—so much so that I’d given in and called Dr. Spellman back home. Molly had clearly picked up on the fact that I wasn’t myself, and I didn’t want her to think it had anything to do with her. But she’d just returned from a difficult time away dealing with her dad. I didn’t want to burden her. I needed to snap the fuck out of it.

“I just wanted to say sorry again about Julia coming over like that.”

“It’s fine. You don’t have to apologize for your girlfriend stopping over.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

Molly tilted her head. “She’s not? Does she know that?”

Blowing out a deep breath, I felt my shoulders slump. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Moll.”

“What do you mean?”

I decided to go back to the beginning. “For the last year, I’ve had a giant crush on Julia. We’ve been traveling together more over the last few months, spending a lot of time alone together, and as you know, I’d hoped our chemistry would make her second-guess things with the guy she was dating. It finally did, and now she seems totally into me. And yet I’m the one keeping things moving slowly now.”

Molly bit down on her bottom lip. “It doesn’t look like you’re going slow, the way she’s hanging all over you and how much she says you like her bones.”

I shook my head. “We haven’t… You know...”

A look of surprise crossed Molly’s face. “Are you saying you haven’t slept together?”

I shook my head again.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “You seem pretty cozy.”

“I don’t know what happened. I was so into her, and then…I guess it fizzled out.”

That wasn’t an entirely true statement. I knew exactly what had happened. Molly happened. The fucked up part was that I’d had no problem being with other women while I crushed on Julia. I hadn’t been celibate for the last year while I was biding my time with her. Maybe that was a shitty thing to admit, but it was the truth. Yet my crush on Molly seemed to make me incapable of sealing the deal with Julia. I’d slept at her place once, but only because I’d fallen asleep while we were watching a movie. Though lately, Julia had been asking me to stay over and had also made it her business to let me know she was on the pill. I had zero doubt that if I hadn’t been reining things in, I would’ve fucked her already.

“Perhaps you only wanted her because you couldn’t have her,” Molly suggested. “It’s human nature to want things that are off-limits.”

I looked down for a long time, giving it some real thought. When I raised my head, my eyes locked with Molly’s. “I’m pretty sure that’s not it.”

Molly’s lips parted, and my eyes fell to stare at them. Her breathing seemed to speed up and become shallower, and I became acutely aware that I was sitting on her bed. Has her room always been this small? The longer I sat there, looking at her luscious lips, the more the walls felt like they were closing in around me.

The talk we’d been about to have when her father ended up in the hospital really needed to happen. And I really needed it to happen in a safer room.

I stood. “Do you think we could talk…in the living room?”

Molly looked confused but lowered her knees and began to get up off the bed. That’s when I noticed she’d taken off her bra.

I cleared my throat. “Hey, Moll?”

“Yeah?”

“Could we talk in the living room and can you put a bra on?”

The corner of her lips twitched. “Yeah, sure. I’ll be right out.”

***

“You want another margarita?” I asked.

“Are you having one?”

I’d already had one and knew it wasn’t a smart thing to do since I’d just had a medication adjustment. “I shouldn’t. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

Molly pouted. “Have one with me.”

She was pretty much impossible to resist. What the hell? I was determined to get out of the funk I’d been in all night anyway—well, the funk I’d been in for over a week now.

“Alright. One more.”

While I went to the kitchen to whip up a fresh batch, Molly got herself settled in on one corner of the couch. After I finished, I walked over to the sofa and handed her one of the drinks in a salt-rimmed glass. “For you.”

“Thank you.”

I went to sit beside her, then thought better of it. The chair adjacent to the couch was probably a smarter idea, mostly because it was as far away from her as I could sit without leaving the room.

She sipped her drink and spoke with it still at her lips. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit in the kitchen? I think that would put another four feet between us.”

I squinted at her with a smirk. “Wiseass.”

Molly took a gulp of her drink and set the glass on the coffee table.

“Can I ask you something, Declan?”

“Of course. Whatever you want.”

“What’s going on between us?”

Shit. Okay. We were having this conversation. Maybe I should’ve taken a shot of tequila in the kitchen instead of sipping this margarita.

“That’s a pretty big question.”

“I know. And I can’t believe I just came right out and asked it. But I’m so confused lately.”

I let out a deep breath. “When you were a kid, did you ever play the fill-in-the-blank game?”

Molly’s forehead wrinkled. “I don’t think so. How do you play?”

“It’s easy. One person starts a sentence, and then you go around the room and each person has to fill in the blank for the rest of the sentence. Sometimes they use it as an icebreaker at corporate events for people to get to know each other. Like, someone will say, ‘When I was little, I wanted to be a blank, and then everyone fills in the missing word by saying fireman or whatever.”

Molly nodded. “Sounds easy enough.”

“It’s usually played with a group, but it’ll