Till We Pretend

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

My head was a million miles away as I wiped down one of my tables. Well, that wasn't the only problem. Firstly I was so distracted that I'd managed to break a dish and nearly spill my customer's drink down their front. Dee had already caught me the first time I messed up and I knew her eagle eyes didn't miss the angry way I'd been hissed at by the woman sitting at table number five. Still, I didn't take her up on her offer of going home earlier. I was fully capable of completing my shift and considering it was the weekend, I wasn't in the mood to give up tips.

Pity my brain didn't get the memo because all I could think about was Kyler. Last night was definitely a first for me and maybe I could chalk it all up to getting some much needed male attention. But Kyler hadn't just been a guy I'd made out with. I kept going back to our conversations, the way he'd genuinely seemed interested in getting to know more about me and the way he'd eaten up everything I'd told him. None of the guys I had been out with more were that curious and it'd been refreshing. A part of me wondered if being such an attentive listener had been a ruse, that he just wanted to get me in his bed but a larger part couldn't reduce all of last night to something ugly. I had pretty good instincts when it came to people and my instincts about Kyler were good, all good. The sudden departure aside, he'd been nothing but wonderful to me the previous night and that's just how I'd like to remember him.

I also wasn't going to be forgetting that kiss any time soon. Just thinking about what went down in that hot tub made me blush and then want to do again. I absentmindedly touched my lips and remembered the feel of his hands on my body, the noises he'd made and the way he'd held me afterwards. It made me wonder if I'd ever experience that again and then I immediately felt bad for placing Kyler on such a pedestal. There would be other guys and surely one of them would have his kissing abilities or so I hoped but at least now I had something to compare them to. 

"You've got a little drool on your face Ells. Watcha thinking about?" I snapped out of the trip down memory lane to find Ree sliding into the booth. She grinned at me looking way too well rested for someone who'd consumed the equivalent of a small liquor store last night. But she was also one to recover from hangover quicker than I did, which explained why I never drank.
I glared at her and continued wiping the table, a little more vigorously than before. "Glad to see you're up. What finally did the trick? Was Mom singing in the shower again?"

She shuddered because lets just see Mom could rival the Fat Lady from Harry Potter in terms of her ability to damage one's hearing, sadly she still didn't realise that particular talent of hers.

Since Ree had crashed at my place, I'd let her sleep in after unsuccessfully trying to make her get up. Some cruel twist of fate had me taking an early shift today so I was sleep deprived and groggy still even after my coffee IV. I blamed Ree for this because not only had we gotten home after midnight but she'd made me regale the entire night's story for her and that I watched as she dissected it piece by piece.She'd arrived to the conclusion that Kyler had either been recruited by the CIA and that explained why he was so cagey about his past or that he was in the Witness Protection Program. Of course, it wasn't very likely that I was going to accept the theories of someone so drunk they tried to wash their face with toothpaste.

"Actually it was a text from Carter. He wanted to know how I was doing. Isn't that sweet?" She swooned.

"It is and it's also only the decent thing to do."

"You're so romantic." She rolled her eyes at me and grabbed a menu from Tricia, one of the other waitresses as she passed by.

"I texted you a bunch of times before coming here. Carter also mentioned that Kyler had my car dropped off at your house first thing in the morning with a full tank of gas." She went through the options like she'd actually order anything other than the waffles. "Why didn't you answer them? You could send him a thank you text as a way to start a conversation."