Page 69 of Beautiful When He Breaks

I grip the cue tighter and tell myself to breathe normally.

“Your turn,” he says, still not looking at me.

“Yeah,” I answer, and my voice is rougher than I’d like.

The game keeps going, but it’s not really about the game anymore. Every pass around the table feels tighter. Every shared glance lands harder. Eli starts standing too close under the pretense of checking angles.

I can’t tell if he’s doing it on purpose or if I’ve finally lost my mind and everything normal between us now carries a second meaning because I want it to. The worst part is that I don’t think it’s just me.

He reaches across me once for the chalk instead of walking around the end of the table, his chest barely brushing my arm as he does, and then pauses just slightly too long before pulling away. My skin burns there after he moves.

Later, I step behind him to line up my shot and put my hand on his hip to shift him out of the way. It’s something I’ve done a hundred times in a hundred harmless contexts, except tonight my hand lingers one breath too long and his whole body stills under it.

“Sorry,” I say automatically, even though I’m not.

He glances back at me over his shoulder, and whatever’s in his eyes makes my stomach tighten. “You’re not.”

I don’t answer because there is no answer that doesn’t light the whole room on fire.

He turns back to the table and misses another easy shot.

I laugh under my breath mostly because if I don’t, I’m going to do something much dumber. “Your game is going to shit.”

“Maybe you’re distracting.”

That makes me nearly drop my cue again. I look at Eli, and he finally looks at me fully—whatever I’m supposed to call the expression on his face, it isn’t innocent. Heat, yes. Panic too. Desire, maybe, or at least enough of it to make the rest of me stop functioning. It’s there and then gone so fast I almost doubt myself again.

Except I don’t.

Not this time.

I set my cue down carefully because my grip’s become unreliable. “Eli.”

He swallows. “What?”

I keep my voice low and leave the distance between us where it is. “If you want to stop playing, we can stop playing.”

I do not mean the pool game, either.

His chest rises and falls once, deeper than before. “I didn’t say I wanted to stop.”

The tension in the room ratchets up so abruptly that it almost becomes its own sound. The normal life of the Sin Bin keeps happening around us while I stand across a pool table from my best friend and try not to shake from how badly I want to know what happens if I say the wrong thing.

So, I say nothing.

I just pick my cue back up and gesture toward the table. “Then take your shot.”

He does, and he sinks it so cleanly I almost laugh from the sheer aggression of it. “Happy?” he mutters.

“Suspicious, mostly.”

“About what?”

“You suddenly remembering how to play pool.”

That finally gets another grin out of him, fast and bright and gone again. My whole chest aches at the sight of it. God, I’ve loved that smile in ways I still can’t think about too directly.

The game ends two turns later with me winning by dumb luck and Eli calling me a cheating bastard, when the only thing I cheated at was continuing to breathe through the last ten minutes.