The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(66)
“Was this conversation supposed to be reassuring?”
Oh, right. Ethan reached for Naomi’s hand, wrapping his own fingers around her vent-chilled ones and squeezing. Just a little. Just for a moment. “Look, you’re happy, right?”
“Yes,” she said, not sounding very pleased at the moment.
“So I bet that’s enough for your friends to overlook a little”—he smirked—“mushiness. And, if it makes you feel better, I’m pretty confident that there’s no way your friends could possibly hold you to a higher standard than the one you set for yourself.”
“That makes a certain kind of sense,” she admitted with reluctance.
“Now, me on the other hand? I’m very aware of my own weakness. Despite the obvious honorific, I’m not always particularly good. And if these people are anything like you, they’ll have a penchant for sniffing out bullshit.”
Sometimes he had too many questions, too much desire to know, when he would be better served to accept the vastness of what he could never comprehend.
“I’m always striving to be better,” he said sincerely, “but it’s an everyday uphill battle.”
Naomi scoffed.
“What?” He let a car in ahead of him. The GPS promised they’d almost reached the final turn toward their destination. “You got to exhume all your alleged flaws on our first date. Now it’s my turn.”
She shook her head. “It’s that one up there.”
Ethan pulled up at the end of a long line of cars.
“Besides,” Naomi said as he parked, “you don’t have flaws, at least none I’ve seen.”
Ethan unclipped his seat belt. “Maybe you’re not looking hard enough.” He pressed his nose against her throat and inhaled, greedily, the scent of her skin. When she just barely gasped, the sound stifled by her lips at the last moment, Ethan opened his mouth over her pulse point, kissing her neck, soft and careful. Desire built in his body quicker than he’d anticipated at the taste of her, and suddenly a kiss he’d intended to be light, playful, wasn’t.
Naomi threaded her fingertips through his hair, shifting his face so she could get at his mouth.
Too many logs had been left on the fire between them, left to cool, but with embers still dancing, red hot and wanting. The kiss turned frantic almost instantly. Naomi’s mouth, her taste, made Ethan reckless in ways he didn’t recognize, until their bodies pressed together over the gearshift, until they were both twisting against the angle, their frustration manifesting, licks turning into bites, the scrape of teeth ratcheting them higher, further from anything resembling Ethan’s original, quieter intent.
A knock against the window, sharp and insistent, forced them apart.
“Thought you’d retired from performing, Grant?” The interruption was jovial, obviously a fellow partygoer, but Ethan and Naomi’s ardor was doused anyway.
Naomi shielded her face with her hands, her cheeks uncharacteristically pink.
“Fuck off,” she yelled back, reaching over and wiping her lipstick from Ethan’s mouth. “Classic,” she muttered under her breath, shaking her head. “Come on.” She threw open her door and started for the entrance without another glance at him. “Let’s get this over with.”
After a last, quick check in the rearview mirror, he followed her into the house. Its decor was covered—per the theme, he assumed—in papier-maché palm trees and cardboard pineapples.
Before he knew it, he was being handed a lei and ushered toward a tiki bar in the backyard, where a live band played island-inspired music and torches cast a golden glow on the makeshift dance floor.
Naomi was obviously popular; there was a playful scuffle over who would get to “lei her” that she defused by grabbing the flower garland and twisting it into a crown that she placed on her own head.
Ethan figured he’d make himself useful and ordered them two drinks from the shirtless bartender, each of which was presented in a fresh coconut with a charming mini umbrella. Armed with social lubricant, he made his way through the crowd to Naomi’s side. She accepted her coconut with a grateful hand on his forearm, steadying amid the jovial cacophony around them.
“You made it.” Naomi’s friend Clara, one of the guests of honor, made her way toward them from the center of the dance floor, looking almost luminous with happiness.
“Thanks for inviting me,” Ethan said, very pleased to see a familiar face.
Naomi and Clara embraced, and he could make out the way Clara’s lips moved against Naomi’s ear, the quick, sharp shake of his date’s head in return.
“You have to meet Josh.” Clara turned, clearly impervious to Naomi’s warning, and waved over someone still on the dance floor.
Ethan didn’t have time to react to the fact that he was about to meet another one of Naomi’s exes. Almost immediately, a man with burnished-gold hair and a terrible Hawaiian shirt appeared behind Clara, wrapping his arms around her waist and placing his chin on top of her head. He seemed to be the icebreaker others were waiting for, because suddenly Ethan was surrounded by Naomi’s friends. Hands and names shot toward him in rapid fire.
“It’s so nice to meet you, man. I’ve heard a lot about you,” Josh told him, causing Naomi to tense beside him and shoot daggers at Clara. She seemed to notice, because she extracted herself from her fiancé’s hold, stood on her tiptoes to place a quick kiss on his jawline, and grabbed Naomi’s hand, yanking her off toward the house. “We’ll be right back. Just need Naomi to help in the kitchen for a moment.”