I like you, like you. I’ve had a crush on you for a very long time now.

“That’s bullshit,” Drew rejected. “I think you know exactly why.”

Tucker shrugged. “I’m just…familiar, I guess. She sat at my barstool almost every night for those first couple of years. She…trusts me.”

“Bum bah!” Drew made a television-game-show-buzzer noise. “Try again.”

“Screw you.”

“How about because she likes you? Really likes you. And you really like her?”

Tucker almost told Drew to go screw himself again, but keeping all this to himself had been a shitty burden. And Drew always had been the guy people confessed their crap to. He was the guy with the shoulder that girls loved to cry on, the guy dudes went to for advice in the love department. A regular Cyrano de Bergerac.

Even though he was probably the most unlucky-in-love guy in Credence.

“Yes, okay. I’m…attracted to her.” He sighed, and a weight that had sat on his shoulders forever seemed to lift. A little, anyway. “I have been for a while now.”

“Right.” Drew nodded, his face breaking into a slow grin. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Tucker snorted at Drew’s smugness. “You have no idea.”

“Do you love her?”

God…Tucker didn’t even want to entertain that possibility. All he knew was his feelings were tangled and he had no desire to try and untangle them because a temporary situation to help Della out was one thing. Tucker was very goal-oriented. He had a game plan and a final objective. He had performance indicators and outcomes he could measure.

Love was something else entirely.

“I can’t love her, man.”

Drew searched his gaze in that deeply assessing funeral-dude way, taking his time to probe thoroughly. By the time he asked “Why not?” Tucker felt like he’d had his prostate checked as well.

“Because she’s not after that. She missed out on a whole bunch of stuff, and she wants to get out and experience life. She doesn’t want to fall in love and settle down, she wants to play the field and have fun for once. And I won’t complicate that for her by mooning over her like some fucking teenager.” He slapped his hand down on the bar. “I won’t. It’s only a temporary thing. It’ll be fine.”

“Really?” Drew cocked an eyebrow that clearly said you are a dickhead. “So how does this end, Tucker? Does she graduate from your little school of advanced sexual education and you both just go on your happy ways?”

The well-intentioned questions slugged into Tucker’s chest like bullets. He didn’t want to think about after. There’d be plenty of time for that when he got there. “Yep.” Tucker nodded briskly. “That’s exactly how it ends.”