Page 16 of Thank you, Next

She hated when he noticed things about her. It meant that she couldn’t keep up the lie that he didn’t really see her and that’s why he’d been indifferent to her charms all those years ago. “Do you have Band-Aids?”

A muscle in his neck ticked, and the corner of his mouth rose as he gave her a sidelong glance. He grunted, and when they got to the kitchen, he picked her up—like she was nothing, and she was not nothing because she was tall—and placed her on the counter.

Even though he was manhandling her, he was very gentle about it. She couldn’t appreciate that. Wouldn’t allow herself to appreciate that. But it was hard when she was busy trying not to appreciate the way his ass looked when he bent over to rifle through a cabinet across from where she was sitting. It was difficult not to appreciate how gentle he’d been with her when his white T-shirt, the expensive kind that you bought already looking broken in, stretched across the muscles of his back.

He’d gotten bigger since the divorce, but not in the dad-bod way one might have expected. The same thing happened with some of her clients. They realized that they’d have to go out and date again if they wanted to find someone new to have sex with, so they got trainers, did keto, and lifted heavy things. As though being hard on the outside could stifle any of the vulnerability that getting a divorce had exposed in their bodies.

A lot of the women starved themselves, and Alex had more than once had to have a talk about disordered eating with a client. Divorce was hard enough without being hungry the whole time.

Alex wondered if Will worked out because his failed marriage made him seem soft. Knowing him, he wouldn’t have thought about it much. If he’d no longer had his woman in bed with him to occupy his morning—she hated thinking about him with his wife, and she hated that she hated thinking about it—he would use that energy someplace else.

When he straightened and turned back to her, she said, “You look good,” before she could stop herself. He kept advancing, and she had to crane her neck up to meet his gaze, which was still amused until he looked down and saw the wicked scrape on her knee. Then he scowled.

Something at her center clenched. She must have flinched and squeezed her legs together because Will put his hand on her thigh.

He’d never done that before. They’d never had the kind of flirty relationship that made a hand on the thigh appropriate—even though that kind of relationship was the only thing that Alex had wanted that first summer. Back then, every single punch on the shoulder had sent her spiraling through fantasies of what it would have been like to press her whole body against Will’s.

For more than a decade, she’d ruthlessly cut off thoughts about Will’s body. Why couldn’t she ignore them now? Maybe it was because he’d made himself truly unavailable by getting married and now he was divorced. And now that she was having a moment of vulnerability, a scintilla of uncharacteristic emotion, she was open to those dangerous, useless feelings again.

“You really did a number on this knee.” He crouched down to inspect her injury. Alex tried not to gasp out loud. His motions mimicked one of her favorite fantasies about Will—the one involving him crouching in front of her, spreading her thighs, and eating her out.

The power with which her adolescent crush on Will Harkness still affected her should have shocked her. She’d wanted Will for longer than she’d wanted anything—even though she’d done her best to put her feelings for him out of her mind while he was married. This storm he stirred up inside her wasn’t a surprise to her body, even after all this time. He showed a moment of tenderness toward her that wasn’t incidental to his love for Lexi and she was ready to fall back with her legs open.

If they didn’t have such a complicated history—if she didn’t know that opening her legs to Will would definitely lead to her opening her heart to him—she would be even more tempted to make a pass at him. But she knew that he would turn her down. He didn’t think of her that way. She was like a sister to him. He’d technically been her step-uncle the last time she’d made a pass.

She’d kissed him, and he’d called her a weird little pervert.

And she was definitely having perverted thoughts about him now, even as he sprayed antiseptic across her knee. It made her flinch, but she was focused on the dark strands of his hair. She wanted to reach down and thread her fingers through it. It looked like it might be damp.

Her face heated with the thought that she was getting turned on when he was doing just a minimal act of kindness.

But it was more than minimal. He could have made her limp into the kitchen under her own power and slid the first aid kit across the counter for her to fend for herself. He didn’t have to be on his knees, fixing her up himself.

“Why are you doing this for me?” Usually, he would have been so frustrated by her presence that he’d just let her bandage her knee herself.

It was their pattern.

He looked up at her, and she struggled to breathe. He was so close, and the part of her that was shoving the teenage crush hormones into her body wanted him to say something like “I want you desperately.”

But he didn’t say anything close to that. “Lexi would murder me if I let you bleed out on my watch.”

Alex rolled her eyes, and Will grunted at her. She would not think about how much she’d thought about his different flavors of grunts. And she would not reach out to brush the tips of her fingers through his beard. The beard was making her feral.

At seventeen, he’d had no beard. Just a jaw that would have been at home on a quarterback but instead found itself on a boy who liked to read and cook. Who didn’t even check her out in a gross way when she wore a tiny bikini around Lexi’s pool.

Maybe Lana was right and she had a truly fucked-up attachment style. That was the only way to explain her reaction to Will today. Or maybe it was because seeing Will next to Andrew had knocked something loose in her.

She’d never let Will meet anyone she’d dated. And maybe that was because she knew that she’d never felt the rush of chemistry with any of them that she’d felt just being around Will. Even the ones she’d really liked and contemplated keeping around for a while.

Obviously, she’d been making good choices. Then.

Now she’d made the very poor choice of coming to see Will. Except, instead of figuring out what Andrew had said about her, she was sitting on a kitchen counter and Will was touching her.

“All done.”

Alex looked down and saw that her knee was indeed bandaged. It still throbbed, but that was her own fault for wearing stupid shoes.

“Thank you.” Even though Will didn’t like her and there was nothing she could do to change that, she was going to remember her manners. Lexi would definitely hear about this, and Alex hated feeling like Will was her favorite, even though he was.