Blurred Lines (Love Unexpectedly #1)(23)

“Great,” I mutter. “So I don’t get good sex until I meet my soulmate?”

She smiles. “No, I’m saying find someone who you can talk to. Someone who makes you laugh. I think you’ll realize that that’s what you find attractive.”

I sigh. “So you’re saying I can’t just bone an empty shell of a man?”

Mom smiles. “It’s never that simple. But if you ever find one particularly well-endowed—”

“My ears! My ears are burning!”

We glance toward the doorway to see an appalled-looking Ben with his hands over his ears.

He shakes his head. “Since I can never unhear that, there’s only one thing to be done.”

Somberly, he makes a pistol shape with his right hand and holds it to his temple before glancing at both of us. “I want it on my tombstone that I’m one of the well-endowed ones. You two owe it to me, since this conversation was my cause of death.”

I laugh and hold my wineglass up. “Please. Last night you spent fourteen minutes explaining how you can gauge a woman’s bra size based on how her breasts fit into your palms. You can handle this.”

He jabs a finger at me. “Don’t say bra with me and your mother in the same room.”

“Don’t fret, Benjamin,” Mom says, holding up her own glass. “And Parker has the right idea. Fetch us more wine, sweetie.”

He gives a butler-esque bow and accepts the wineglasses. “Are you guys going to start talking about balls the second my back’s turned?”

“Of course not, darling,” Mom says mildly. “Much easier to discuss balls when you’re facing us.”

“Mrs. Blanton, congratulations,” he says as he turns on his heel. “You’ve done the impossible and officially scandalized me. As such, you can’t get mad at me for the fact that I’ve already eaten the outside edge of the brownies sitting on the stove.”

“That’s fair,” Mom says with a laugh.

But I barely hear this last part of the exchange.

The world has gone completely silent around me, as though I’m deep in a bubble of dangerous thoughts. Very dangerous thoughts.

Ben leaves the room, but I continue to stare after him for several long seconds before I slowly lift a finger to my lip and tap thoughtfully.

What if my mom is on to something?

What if the right guy to scratch my sexual itch is the one who makes me laugh? The one I can talk to.

What if the right guy…

…Has been right in front of me?





Chapter 8


Ben


Parker’s mostly quiet on the drive home, which doesn’t really alarm me. We’re comfortable with each other’s silences. But she was quiet at dinner, too, and that’s unusual.

“Talk or mute?” I ask.

“Hmm?” she asks, not playing our usual game.

I glance at her more closely. “You’re being weird.”

She cuts me a look across the darkened car. Her expression is unreadable, and that worries me even more. I’m not good at very many things, but reading Parker has always been one of them.

That’s what happens when someone is best friend, carpool buddy, and roommate. You start to know them as well as you know yourself. Better, actually.

“You going out tonight?” she asks.

I shrug. “Haven’t decided. Why, you want to come?”

I’m silently hoping she’ll say no. Not because I don’t want to hang out with her, but because we’ve been “going out” more often than not lately, and while I’ve had a good time—mostly—I wouldn’t mind a quiet evening. Chilling with Parks on the couch with bad TV or a stupid movie sounds way better than getting dressed up and talking to strangers.

Still, one of the things about having a female best friend is that when she asks you to be a wingman, you’ve got to do it the way you would for a guy friend.

But there’s also an extra obligation of protection. She’d kill me if she knew it, but my reasons for tagging along aren’t so much about helping her get laid as they are making sure she doesn’t end up with some *.

So, no, I don’t want to go out tonight. But if she’s going, I’m going.

“Nah, I think I’m staying in,” she says. “I’m too full to even think about putting on anything other than pants with an elastic waist.”

“Second helping of lasagna catching up with you?” I ask, relaxing a little now that she’s not being all quiet and weird.

“Says the guy who had three.”

I pat my stomach. “I would never offend your mother by eating anything less than an obscene amount.”

Parker’s mom is a decent cook, but it’s not really about the quality of food so much as the homemade factor. I don’t miss much about home, but I do miss home-cooked meals. Of course, family dinners at my house weren’t quite as pleasant as they are at the Blantons’.

I could never decide which was worse, the lectures that ensued whenever I sat down to eat at my mother’s house, or the awkward silences as my dad tried to figure out how to talk to us when we were kids.

Parker’s fallen quiet again, and this time I let her stew.

Back at home, we both head into the kitchen, her to put leftovers in the fridge, me to get a glass of water.