Big Shot | ✓

36 | career girl

Reid and I left before everyone else had woken up on Friday morning, thereby not giving the more perceptive ones of the family time to decipher the prior night's revelations and activities. My dignity was thankful for that.

The ride back to Clemson was mostly silent (given I slept through almost half of it), but not the awkward type of silence that had lingered the morning after our previous late-night endeavors. Those were biting and cold, the way the winter wind would sting your exposed cheeks. This was more like a calm summer breeze on the lake. It was almost December, and yet I was still warm.

We didn't kiss when he dropped me off, but he stayed and watched me walk inside, and I wondered if all this time that was what love was, and I just didn't know it. I walked into my apartment as if I was walking on clouds, and I leaned back against the door to gently shut it behind me.

"Jo?" I heard Bree call from her room.

"No, it's actually a pack of thieves who've come to steal all of your One Piece Funko Pops," I called back with a grin.

"You know, if I thought that was actually true I'd come running in here armed." Bree emerged from her room and dropped onto our living room couch. "Some of those are very valuable collectables."

"Oh I'm sure," I snickered as I walked past her towards my room, swinging my overnight bag as it hung off my shoulder and discarding it on the floor beside my bed. I took better care as I took off the sweatshirt Reid had leant me, folding it and placing it on top of my dresser.

I couldn't really be bothered to otherwise unpack, given the hurricane my weekend was about to be with College Gameday coming to campus, along with the metaphorical unpacking I had to do from the holiday. My insides shuddered at the memory of him, as if I could still feel his body so perfectly entangled in mine.

"You seem like you're in a good mood," Bree continued from the living room. "You have a nice time?"

I took my rings off and dropped them in my oyster jewelry dish before leaving my room and making a beeline to the kitchen.

"Yeah, it was...nice," I mused with a soft smile, taking my sugar out of the cabinet under the kitchen island.

In one of our bouts of comfortable silence on the car ride home, I'd decided I was going to be elusive about the information I shared about Reid and I. It wasn't that I didn't trust Bree or anyone else I chose not to tell, but for now, I just wanted it to be mine. It felt sacred.

"But you're baking. Which means it was not nice, or..."

Too bad most people in my life were far more perceptive than they had any right being.

As I rummaged through the fridge for eggs, I heard her get up from the couch. When I spun around to begin assembling my ingredients on the kitchen island, she approached me slowly, wagging her finger at me. "Oh no. I know that look."

"The look of someone trying to make peanut butter cookies?" I arched an eyebrow at her before spinning around again to pull out my master mixer.

"Oh my god Jo. You slept with him again, didn't you?"

"Technically we slept together both nights since we had to share his room," I replied coolly. "And even if we did, you didn't seem to have a problem when you picked me up from his apartment on Halloween. Why does it matter now?"

"I thought you were just...getting it out of your system." Bree shrugged. "This? This is different."

I scoffed. "How so?"

"You stayed at his family's house on a holiday. That is textbook relationship stuff."

I heaved out a sigh. "We're not in a relationship."