“Yeah, good idea.” I cranked the engine and blasted the heat. The windows started to fog up from the moisture in the car. After a few minutes, we started to warm up.
The rain was still coming down thick and fast. “Where is your car parked?” I asked.
“I walked here from my parents’ place. It’s about a ten-minute walk.” Skylar rang out her hair. She shrugged out of her coat, which was dark with water.
“I can drive you over there,” I offered.
“Or we can wait here for a little while. You know, until the rain dies off.” Skylar quirked an eyebrow, her lips turning upwards into a smirk.
We reached for each other, making up for the lost time.
And I was happy not to come up for air.
Chapter Nine
Skylar
I’ll meet you there at five.
I was grinning like an idiot and I didn’t care. I didn’t even bother to hide it. Kyle Webber, one of my oldest and dearest friends kicked me under the table.
I hadn’t seen Kyle in several weeks, so I was happy when he messaged me on his day off. He invited me over as he and Whitney were home for once and they wanted to see me. I jumped at any chance to see their adorable daughter, Katie, so I headed straight over.
“Wanna tell ol’ Web why you’re grinning like a loon?” he asked as he handed his two-year-old daughter, Katie, a muffin.
“It’s nothing. Really—” I started to deny, but then stopped myself. Why would I hide this from the Web? I didn’t do secrets. I never have.
“I’m meeting Rob later,” I finally told him.
Kyle raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Robert Jenkins?” I nodded. “Wow, when did that start back up? I thought you had sworn him off. I seem to remember you saying you were done with him.”
“Yeah, well things change. Don’t go preaching to me about people changing their minds. Need I remind you of what your love life looked like six months ago?” I reminded him with enough of a barb to get him to back off.
“You’re so defensive,” Kyle complained.
“And you’re so nosy.” I stuck out my tongue and Katie laughed.
“Don’t teach my daughter bad habits, Murphy,” Kyle warned good-naturedly.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied, making a silly face at Katie, who erupted in a fit of giggles.
It had been a little over three weeks since I met Rob in the park. After making out with him in his car for over an hour, he had driven me back to my parents’ house. I had felt a little unsure of what to do, or how to proceed.
Luckily, Rob took the reins. He called me later that night. “Just to make sure you got home okay,” he had said. We then talked until the early hours of the morning. We talked about anything and everything. And the deep stuff too. He talked about how worried he was about his brother. How he felt incredibly protective of his family and was terrified that one day he wouldn’t be able to take care of them.
We talked about happy stuff too. We traded stories about our friends and plans for the future. “I’d love to take you to this private beach I found when I was backpacking across Asia after law school. There wasn’t a soul around. It was beautiful,” he had said softly in my ear.
“We should go there then,” I told him.
“There are a thousand places I want to see together.” His words sent tingles throughout my body.
“Do you ever feel like it’s all been time wasted?” he went on to ask.
“What do you mean?” I was lying on my bed, with my feet up the wall like a teenager. I felt like a teenager. Full of butterflies and excitement.
“That all this time I should have been with you.”
God damn, the man was a poet. Mac never had a romantic thing to say and “pass me my beer” definitely didn’t count. But Rob was different. He felt things deeply even though you’d never know it on the outside. He and I were so similar in that way. It made us together sort of perfect.
We had spent nearly every day with each other since then. We were moving at a pace a snail would think was slow. It was agonizing but sweet at the same time. Robert seemed concerned not to rush things. We made out like horny teenagers and there had been some above-the-clothes action, but that was about it.
We spent most of our time talking, which for me, was better than anything. Where Rob had once been a closed book, he was now giving me whole chapters. He told me stories about his dad. What had been like for his family when he died. He told me what a dork he had been in high school and how he hadn’t even gone to his senior prom because he was too shy to ask anyone. He shared with me how hard it was for him to leave his mom and brother and go off to school, even though he was only thirty minutes away. But how he enjoyed the taste of freedom all the same.
I knew some things about him already. I knew about his hike along the Appalachian Trail that was now in the record books. And I knew about how he dabbled in app-building when he was younger, then selling it to a bigger company for a ridiculously low price when he was nineteen because he was naive and didn’t know any better.
He was giving me so much and I gobbled up every morsel.
Kyle had no idea that Robert Jenkins was everything I had ever wanted and then some.
“I’m only nosy because I care about you. After the whole Mac situation, I don’t want you jumping into something where you could get hurt,” Kyle went on.
“My friends don’t have much faith in my judgment,” I muttered.
“It’s not that we don’t have faith
