Friends to lovers via the written word

I find him sleeping on a book, sprawled over the lending desk like an exhausted octopus. An octopus with only two arms, but somehow he still manages to cover the whole desk. His head is resting on his elbow, and underneath it is some kind of encyclopedia.

I chuckle to myself. Only Darren could fall asleep in public, at his job. Of course, there’s no one here at this time of night, but still. If he were awake, he would quip that libraries are quiet places, what the fuck? And I would laugh and concede the point.

Leaning with my hip against the desk, I pat his shoulder. He makes a cute little noise through his nose, and then cracks an eye open.

“Tough day?” I ask, unable to keep the laughter out of my voice.

He grunts and stretches his arms. “If by ‘tough’ you mean suicidally boring.” Straightening up, he bends his neck this way and that, cracks his joints. Then his eyes catch sight of the encyclopedia, and he hastily closes it. “Whoops…” He glances up at me, apparently wondering if I had time to see what I’m reading before he fell asleep. I didn’t, but his reaction makes me curious.

He slips the book into his lap, away from my sight. “You wouldn’t believe how many erogenous zones there are. I mean, in women. You thought they only had a G spot? Think again.”

He’s babbling. I’m mystified. If he uses the G spot as a cover for what I’m really reading, it must either be something extremely scandalous or something so geeky he would rather die than tarnish his cool image with it.

Seeing me frown, he throws his head back and laughs too loudly. “Oh, Corey… You really are an innocent, aren’t you?”

I’m not, but I shrug and smile indulgently. Best play along. “Trust you to read porn at work,” I say pointedly, and he grins and waves the tome in the air.

“Encyclopedia, Corey. As respectable as it gets.”

“Depends on what you look up.”

“It’s not my fault what they put in there!”

He’s right. If someone wrote it, why shouldn’t we read it? Actually, now I really, really want to read it, because if there’s one thing I want to know about Darren, it’s what can make him blush. I didn’t think there was anything that could, but apparently I was wrong.

Intriguing.

Pretending to forget all about it, I ask, “So did you get a chance to read my book?”

I see it in his face: how he’s preparing to lie.

My heart sinks. Okay. It’s a piece of crap, I know that, but I thought… What? That he’d see something in it, something in me? Ridiculous. Well, now I know that writing a whole damn novel to tell your friend you’ve got the hots for him is not the genius idea I first took it for.

Besides, for that idea to work, you actually have to have two male main characters, but I chickened out. I just thought he’d recognize himself in the thinly veiled Adriana and fall at my feet. Pathetic, right? Six months of sweat and tears, and he hasn’t even got the message.

Seeing me flounder, Darren mumbles, “Aw, c’mon, it was alright.” For a guy, he’s quite tuned in to people’s feelings, and he knows I’m disappointed. “I did like it, you know,” he adds, but his voice is so strained that I don’t know what to think. “It’s just…” He sighs and shakes his head. “I guess romance isn’t my thing.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

How can Corey make Darren see the truth?

Coming soon on Amazon.