I lean back in my chair, folding my arms, waiting.
“We don’t even like each other,” she says. “We can’t even talk without fighting. We’re coworkers, and fraternizing is definitely against company policy. We’ll just make each other miserable until we inevitably crash and burn, so I say we avoid all that and just don’t make each other anything.”
She’s right, but I still want her worse than anything. I watch her for a long moment, both of us silent and still though we should be furiously making birds if we want to be done by tomorrow.
“Right?” she finally says, like she wants me to agree.
So I do. I give her that. She’s right about the details even if I think she’s wrong about the big picture. I give her this, even though what I want more than anything at this moment and every moment is just to kiss her again.
“Right,” I say, lean over, and grab her iPad. “Want to watch a movie?”Chapter Twenty-OneViolet“Ninety-two,” Eli says. “Ninety-four, ninety-six, ninety-eight…”
There’s a long, long pause. I tear my gaze from the dots in the drop ceiling and raise my head off the floor to look at him.
“I can’t make two more,” I say. “I’ll die of… paper.”
Eli holds up two more cranes.
“One thousand,” he says, and tosses them into the box.
I flop my head back onto the floor. It’s seven a.m, and I know I should be doing something — someone still has to string all the cranes together, we have to get them out to the wedding barn, get them hung, not to mention that there are ten thousand other things to do for this crazy six hundred person wedding — but I’m lying on the floor, letting Eli count.
I’m pretty sure I look like a wreck. I know Eli does, though even with circles under his eyes and wild hair, he’s hot as sin. The messy, disheveled look is good on him, but I’m not thinking about that right now.
It’s been a hell of a night. We folded five hundred cranes and, between the two of us, drank thirty-two ounces of espresso. I feel like I might simultaneously fall into a dead sleep and run a marathon.
Eli walks over and stands by my feet.
“You getting up or are these my job now?” he asks.
“Are you offering?”
“Only if you’re making scallops for six hundred,” he says.
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t make scallops for one. Macaroni and cheese, sure, but I don’t even know which end of a scallop is up.
“Okay, okay,” I say, even though the floor feels really good. “I’ll do my job.”
Eli leans down and holds a hand out. There’s a part of me that wants to refuse it and get off the floor by myself, but that part is dumb.
I take his hand, and when he pulls me up, I just about fly off the ground, landing on my feet and stumbling into him. Apparently those muscles aren’t just for show, a fact that does not appeal to me one single bit.
Nope. Not one bit.
“Sorry,” he says, but he’s grinning.
“No, you’re not,” I say, not moving away.
His eyes roam my face. I realize that up close, they’re more than just green: they’re dark turquoise around the pupil, mossy further out, flecked with a gold-tinged seafoam. They look like an impressionist painting.
“Violet,” Eli says. I realize I was staring.
“What?” I ask, already defensive.
I think my heart punches my ribcage. He’s so close, and he’s got that infuriating-but-sexy half-smile on his face, and I’ve now been blatantly staring at him for several seconds, our bodies touching, and I still haven’t moved away.
I don’t want to move away. I like touching him. I like it a lot.
There, I said it.
“You better not kiss me,” he murmurs.
I swallow hard. My heart feels like it’s in a boxing match, and I just hope Eli can’t hear it.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I say.
I don’t move, one hand still on his, the other on his shoulder.
“Good. We agreed it was a bad idea.”
“It’s a terrible idea.”
“Besides…” he says, and trails off. He raises one eyebrow.
“Besides what?”
“It wasn’t even that good of a kiss,” he says.
I know he’s fucking with me. I know it, and yet it works. That’s maybe the most infuriating thing about Eli: even when I can tell what he’s up to, it works.
It was a great kiss, and that’s God’s own truth.
“And if you’re thinking about trying it again to prove yourself, don’t bother,” he goes on. “That one was dead bottom of my list, right underneath the time a golden retriever licked me on the face and got her tongue in my mouth.”
“Gross.”
“It was. And yet,” he says, eyes sparking, “it wasn’t the worst.”
“I’m sorry you had to suffer through that,” I say in mock-sympathy.
“Me too,” he says. “Thank God we had a rational talk and won’t be doing it any more.”