Ruined By My Brother's Best Friend novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Kirsty's Flat

I told Mum I was staying at Kirsty's.

It wasn't even a lie.

Lev told nobody anything. He just said "Night, Mrs H" at nine, picked up his jacket and went out.

Freddie watched him go from the sofa and didn't say a word.

I left twenty minutes later by the side door, with a toothbrush in my bag and my heart going like a mixer on high.

Kirsty's studio was above a vape shop on Creek Road.

Lev was waiting on the step outside, hands in his pockets.

"You came," he said.

"It's my best friend's flat. I've got the keys."

"I meant..."

"I know what you meant."

The key stuck. It always stuck. I had to put my shoulder to the door, and I nearly fell into the hall.

Lev caught me by the waist.

We both stood there laughing in the dark.

Upstairs, Kirsty's flat was one room.

A sofa bed, already pulled out and made up with clean sheets. Fairy lights round the window. Her nail station in the corner, with two hundred little bottles of polish in rainbow order.

There was a note on the pillow in purple glitter pen.

"Clean sheets. You're welcome. K x"

I put the note face down on the pillow, fast.

Lev had read it over my shoulder. He was trying very hard not to smile.

"She's thorough," he said.

"She's a menace."

"I like her more every day."

Then neither of us knew what to do with our hands.

I'd wanted this for three years.

Now he was standing in the middle of my best friend's flat, too tall for the ceiling, and I couldn't think of a single thing to say.

"I'm nervous," I said.

"Good. So am I."

"You're not."

"Hollie." He held out his hand, palm down. It was trembling, very slightly. "Look."

I took his hand.

I turned it over and put my lips to the inside of his wrist, the way he'd done to mine at the bench.

He breathed out.

"We don't have to do anything," he said. "We can sit on her sofa bed and watch something terrible."

"Lev."

"I mean it. I'll wait as long as you want."

"I've waited three years," I said. "I'm not waiting tonight."

I reached up and pushed his jacket off his shoulders.

It fell on the floor.

"Say it properly," he said quietly. "So I know."

"I want you. Tonight. All of it. Yes."

He looked at me for a long moment, in the fairy lights.

Then he kissed me.

He kissed me and I felt it everywhere.

Three years of nothing and now his mouth was on mine like it was answering a question I'd been asking since I was eighteen.

I pushed his T-shirt up.

He lifted his arms and let me pull it over his head.

Then my hands were on him.

His chest, his stomach, the dark hair running down from his navel.

He was breathing hard and I hadn't even touched him properly yet.

"Hollie."

"Shut up."

He laughed, surprised, and then I had his belt open and my hand inside his jeans.

He was hard in my palm, hot through his boxers.

I squeezed him slow.

He made a sound I'd never heard out of him, low and wrecked, and his hips pushed into my hand.

"I want you naked," I said.

"Then do something about it."

I got his jeans down.

They caught on his trainers and he stepped out of them, impatient, and then he was standing in the fairy lights in just a pair of black boxers with a tent in them.

I looked at him.

He let me.

His chest was heaving, and his left wrist was bare where the watch used to be.

"I've thought about this," he said. "Every way. For three years."

"Tell me."

"You first."

I pulled my T-shirt over my head and dropped it.

I reached behind me for my bra and he said, "No.

Let me."

He came close and reached round me.

The backs of his knuckles brushed my spine.

I felt him fumble the clasp once, then twice, and his jaw tightened.

"Too many years of wanting this," he said. "My hands aren't cooperating."

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