Worth the Risk

Chapter eight

Three years ago

Blue, red, green. Night, day, big, small, medium. Pads, tampons, I don't even know what the fuck these are, more pads, more tampons. How many different options can there be?

I unlock my phone to send my sister a text message about which one of the mountains of options she wants because I have no clue.

"Sir, I don't want to mock you or anything, but you look a little lost," a soft voice comments, and my chuckles ring through the supermarket aisle.

"Not mocking me because I absolutely am, ma'am," I admit as I cross my arms studying the shelf filled with women's products.

"Ma'am?" Her teasing laugh makes me spin around and I meet a pair of joyful eyes who curve my mouth into a smile. God, she's stunning.

It's been a week since I walked August home.

Since she turned me down.

It's been a week since I asked for five minutes. What I got instead was a whole fucking week of her unapologetically waltzing through my thoughts.

I wanted to kiss her that night. I still do. But friend's exes are messy and I can't deny that I've been messy at drawing the line in Lucie and I's relationship over the past months. I've been postponing putting a final stop to our drunken make-out sessions because I never saw the harm in it. They're fun, sexy, and meaningless for me and even though Lucie proclaims to share the same opinion, I'm starting to doubt it. Because after all, they're dragging out something that we both agreed wasn't working. August's words warned me of the possibility I was going to hurt Lucie, so I took a step back. Not that that made ignoring the attraction easier.

I walked her home and kept my distance, which I think she appreciated. Or at least I hope she did because it was fucking damn hard not to kiss her goodbye after seeing her face light up like a candle in the night when she started ravishing about her favorite director, Christopher Nolan.

We debated about the end of Inception and the complexity of Interstellar, and every time I had a different opinion she tried so very hard to convince me. She'd go all big hand movements and 'but do you know' on me when I argued her vision. And even though she failed to lure me to her side of the debate, she pulled me in in all the other ways and she didn't even realize it.
I hadn't even realized it until she stood in front of her door, a goodbye hanging from her lips and I caught myself wishing the moment would never end.

But it did when she simply thanked me and closed the door behind her, leaving me alone in the street with my thoughts.

"Need any help?" She asks as she picks a few boxes from the shelf I've been examining for the past 10 minutes. She strolls to her shopping cart and crosses off something on what seems like a grocery shopping list.