Room for You by Beth Ehemann Page A

drop trou and splash around for five minutes. I had two minutes left when a couple of bike cops pulled up and dragged my ass out of there and cuffed me. They realized who I was and might even have let me go had I not made some obnoxious remark about them ringing a bell instead of having a siren. They didn’t appreciate that too much.”
    “Viper, huh? Sounds like someone who would definitely be involved in the sport of fountain skinny dipping.”
    “Speaking of skinny-dipping…” I raised my eyebrows at her.
    “Not a chance,” she said, shaking her head back and forth.
    I grabbed the collar of my shirt and acted offended. “I wasn’t asking, geez. Who do you think I am? I’m not that easy.”
    “Oh, I highly doubt that.”
    “Someone who is sitting on a pier in a white tank top should be careful of the jokes she makes, don’t you think?”
    She laughed nervously, wondering if I was brave enough to toss her into the lake. I wasn’t.
    “Speaking of the pier, how did you pull all this off, by the way?”
    “Well, it’s not always easy for me to sit in a restaurant or bar and talk in peace, but I wanted to get you out of the house and have you to myself for a while—just as friends, of course—so a picnic was the next best thing. And what better place to have a picnic than on a pier? I looked out the window from inside the house and saw that it was private, so I put my plan into action.”
    “I’ve never had a picnic on the pier,” she said matter-of-factly.
    I reached over and high-fived her. “Me either.” I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly and continued. “I’ve also never had sex on a pier.”
    She shook her head again, pushing the pizza box out of the way.
    “What are you doing?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t cleaning up to go in.
    “It’s pretty dark, let’s lay on our backs and look up at the stars.”
    God, yes.
     
    Who knew something as simple as looking up at stars and talking could be so enjoyable? Conversation was easy with her. It felt like we’d been friends forever. We talked for hours about everything and nothing. At one point, probably because of the beer, I got ballsy and reached out for her hand. She didn’t skip a beat. She just intertwined her fingers with mine and kept telling me about her and Alexa’s crazy high school adventures. What a fucking coincidence that the place I ordered her flowers from was her best friend’s shop. That might come in handy later, actually.
     
    A few hours later, she swatted at her leg for the hundredth time and sighed. “We should probably go in, I’m getting eaten up.”
    I pulled my phone out of my pocket and lit it up to check the time.
    12:45
    “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I promised Fred I’d be up by 6:00 and out here on the lake with him.”
    She crawled over and blew out the candles while I folded the blanket.
    “He’s really crazy about you, ya know? He’s so glad you’re here.”
    I looked straight into her eyes. “Is he the only one?”
    She stared back at me, frozen. Her eyes looked sad and she bit down on her bottom lip. “Don’t do that, Brody. We can’t go there.”
    I smiled a sincere, genuine smile at her. “That’s fine, I’ll let you off the hook … for now.”

 
     
     
    I lay in bed, listening to the girls giggling in the next room and replaying last night over and over in my mind. I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time and it felt amazing. A day that started out with crappy texts ended with us lying hand in hand on the pier, watching the stars. My head was still spinning, and that was the problem.
    Brody was like a drug. When I was with him, my mind was in this hazy, euphoric state, but once the smoke cleared, I realized that I was just setting myself up for disaster. How many red flags did I need?
     
    He was a professional athlete.
    He lived an hour and a half away, even when he wasn’t traveling.
    He admitted last night that he’s never been in a serious relationship.
     
    All of those