Easy

than happy to explore Lucas. But it had taken me over a year to work up to sex with Kennedy, and he was the only guy I’d ever slept with. I wasn’t ready to go there with Lucas, not yet anyway—rebound or not.
    I took a breath.
    He knocked again, a little harder, and I stopped thinking and opened the door.
    Fringes of dark hair stuck out from his dark gray beanie. In the diffuse hallway lighting, his eyes took on the nearly colorless quality they’d had that first night, when he peered into my truck after he’d fought with Buck. He hunched his shoulders, hands in his front pockets, sketchpad under one arm. “Hey,” he said.
    I stepped back into the room, holding the door wide. Olivia and Rona lounged in their own doorway across the hall, eyeballing Lucas, gaping at me, watching him enter my room while Erin was gone. Olivia arched a brow and glanced at her roommate.
    The whole floor would know I had a hot guy in my room within five minutes.
    I let the door swing shut as Lucas tossed his sketchpad on my bed and stood in the center of the room, which seemed to shrink with him in it. Without moving, he examined Erin’s side of the room, the walls above her bed covered in photos, the Greek letters of her sorority above the glittery letters of her name. Taking advantage of his distraction, I studied him: cowboy boots, scuffed to hell, worn jeans, heather gray hoodie. He turned his head to scan my side of the room, and I stared at his profile—recently-shaved jaw, parted lips, dark eyelashes.
    Facing me, his eyes flicked over me and then to the laptop on my desk, which I’d hooked to a small set of speakers. I’d set up a playlist of tracks from my collection and set it to play quietly. Another of Erin’s suggestions. She’d titled the playlist OBBP, and I belatedly hoped he didn’t inspect the list and ask what that meant. I wouldn’t tell him, of course, but my blush-prone parts would probably incinerate.
    “I like this band. Did you see them last month?” he asked.
    Kennedy and I had seen them, in fact—the night before we broke up. They were one of our favorite local groups. He’d been weird that night. Distant. At concerts, he’d usually tuck my back to his chest, legs spread just enough to accommodate my feet between his, his arms locked around my middle. Instead, he’d stood next to me, like we were friends. After we broke up, I realized that he’d made up his mind before that night—that his reserve was evidence of the wall between us; I just hadn’t seen it yet.
    I nodded, vanquishing Kennedy from my thoughts. “Did you?”
    “Yeah. I don’t remember seeing you there—but it was dark, and I maybe had a beer or two.” He smiled—white teeth, just imperfect enough to indicate that he’d not suffered through the orthodontics I had. Pulling off the cap and dropping it on my bed, he placed the pencil on his sketchbook and slid both hands through his flattened hair, and then shook it out, resulting in a bed-head look. Good God . When he drew the hoodie over his head, his white t-shirt pulled up a bit with it, and I got my answer on how far the tattoos extended. Four lines of script, too small to read, snaked around his left side. Some sort of Celtic-looking design balanced it on the right. Bonus: I now knew what Erin meant by lickable abs.
    The hoodie joined the cap, and his t-shirt fell back into place. Picking up the sketchbook and pencil, he turned to me, and I noted that the ink on his forearms continued over his biceps and under the short sleeves of his shirt.
    “Where do you want me?” More breathless than I’d intended, my question seemed a brazen proposition. Wow. Could I be any more obvious? Maybe I should just come out and ask him if he wanted to be my Kennedy-rebound, no strings attached.
    My insides went liquid from his ghost of a smile—the one that was becoming more and more familiar. “On the bed?” he said, his voice gruff.
    Oh, God. “Okay.” I moved to perch on the edge of the mattress as he swept the hoodie and the cap to the floor. My heart was pounding, waiting.
    He peered at me, head angling to the side. “Um. You look really uneasy. We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
    We don’t have to do what? I thought, wishing I could ask him if using me as a model was a pretense, and telling him that if so, it was a pretense he didn’t need to maintain. I looked him in the eye. “I want to.”
    He stuck the pencil over his ear, looking unconvinced.