Charlotte nodded, grateful that he understood. “I keep thinking I’m in a time warp.”
“I got the worst case of déjà vu when I checked in yesterday,” he said. “They put me in my freshman hall. I’m like two doors down from my old room.”
“Weird.”
Reece sank the ball again. “It’s not like I want to go back to college, my time here was brutal. I was so messed up over my dad.” He raked his hand through his hair. “But living with your best friends? Sleeping until noon? Shit, I miss that.”
“The real world is lonely.” Charlotte bit her bottom lip as she calculated the angle of her toss.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Reece said. “But everyone is so busy. And I’m exhausted at the end of the day.” He winced as her throw landed perfectly in one of his last remaining cups. She only needed one more shot to win. “Jeez, how are you so good at this?”
She chuckled as he fished the ball out of the cup. “I always loved beer pong. It gave me something to focus on at parties other than the noise.”
He hummed in understanding as he brought the cup to his lips. She watched his throat move as he took a deep sip, his eyes never leaving her face.
Reece set the empty cup in the growing stack beside him. “Should I stop talking?” he teased. “Am I distracting you?”
Yes.
“You wish.” Charlotte drummed her fingers on the edge of the table. He laughed, a stomach-deep chuckle that made her want to curl her fingers around the collar of his shirt. “I like talking to you,” she said before she could think the words through.
The humor vanished from Reece’s face at her rare confession. He palmed the ball as he stared at her, momentarily at a loss for words. Finally, just as she felt like she might die from humiliation, a quiet smile flitted across his mouth. “I like talking to you too,” he said.
A comfortable silence fell between them as Reece lined up his next shot. He chewed the corner of his mouth and flexed his wrist back and forth. Just before he let the ball sail from his grasp, he said, “I think you just don’t want people to know how fun you are.”
Charlotte gulped. There was something sinful in his pronunciation of the word fun.
Reece kept staring at her, unconcerned as his ball bounced off the rim of a cup. “Am I wrong?”
Instead of answering, Charlotte kneeled to find the ball. It gave her a moment out of his eyeshot to hide the blush spreading across her cheeks.
Fun could mean a lot of things. For example, fun like him littering her thighs with bite marks when they should both be in class. Fun like sucking him off in the stairwell at the art studio when she needed a break from her thesis.
She pulled the ball from the crevice between tiles on the patio floor. When she stood up, she avoided his eyes. “I’m not all that fun anymore.”
But she wanted to be.
Reece tutted like a daytime television therapist. “Charlie Thorne, all grown-up.”
She intentionally missed her next shot, enjoying the game too much to bring it to an end. “Hard to feel grown-up here, though,” she said as she watched him crouch down in pursuit of the ball, his ass delightfully firm in his jeans.
When he popped back up, he gave her a smug look that made it clear he knew she’d been staring. “What, is mediocre trap music not good enough for Miss Brooklyn?”
She stuck out her tongue instead of dignifying that with a response.
“Real mature.” Reece gave her that dizzying smile again, lined with just a hint of mischief. “You know what I think?”
“What?” she asked, her voice breathy.
He stood still on the other side of the table, his palms pressed against the surface. “I think you’re overdue for some grade-A collegiate fun.”
Charlotte could only stand there, stunned, as Reece threw the ball in a perfect arc. It landed neatly in her second-to-last cup, splashing water onto the table. The next person to score would win.
His joke was an offer. There was no mistaking it. She knew the way he flirted, she knew this lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry. She’d stuffed the memory of it in some neglected corner of her mind under her blue cap and gown and her absurdly expensive textbooks. But it was back like a hot shock, a searing burn. She didn’t know how this kind of attraction could exist with someone she hadn’t touched in years.
She took the Ping-Pong ball out of the cup and whiffed the shot badly, hitting the rim of her last cup.
Reece groaned. “You’re letting me win!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice shaking.
He squatted down, his eyes even with the table. “Just making sure it’s level,” he explained as she rolled her eyes.
Reece pressed down on the corner and watched the cups for any wobble. Satisfied, he stood up and cracked his knuckles. “Okay, are you ready for this? Reece’s revenge? Are you watching?”
Charlotte waited patiently, her hands on her hips. “I’m ready.”
She’d never felt less ready in her goddamn life.
Reece took a few steadying breaths. He feinted a throw before stepping back to recalculate his angle.
“Reece!”
“I’m going, I’m going.”
After giving his arm a few experimental flexes, the ball cradled between his thumb and index finger, Reece let it go. It soared across the table before bouncing off the rim of the cup.
The ball disappeared into the grass behind her. Charlotte groaned as she lost sight of it in the darkness.
