My heart plummeted inside my chest as reality smacked me like a two-by-four. “No, she wouldn’t. She didn’t come running when I dated in the past. Trying to make her jealous would just give her a reason to stay away. Maybe, if we were still in high school, I’d go that route, but not now. What else you got?”

He laughed before clasping his hands together. “Uh, you could finally make a better wine than her and win a competition for once.”

“Dick,” I muttered under my breath because we both knew that Julia had something that I didn’t when it came to creating the perfect blends.

Dane cupped his ear and leaned forward. “What? Didn’t quite catch that.”

“Even if I did somehow beat her in the next competition, how would that win her over?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’d be so pissed that she lost to you that she’d want to know what you did to win. Knowing Julia, she wouldn’t leave your side until you told her everything. You’d have her following you around the winery until you confessed it all.”

Dane was absolutely right, and I found myself smiling at the thought of a fired-up Julia hot on my heels, demanding to know exactly how I’d beaten her. It wasn’t the worst idea in the world even if it was damn near impossible.

“We’ll add that to the list.”

“Shit, am I supposed to be writing this down?” he asked as he reached for his phone and started typing frantically on the screen.

“Yes. Now, what else?” I waited for more asinine ideas from Dane that would hopefully trigger the right one in me. Sometimes, brainstorming with other people was the best way to figure out what direction you needed to take.

NO LONGER A LA BELLA

Julia

After James left this morning, I cried in my bathroom. It was as if every emotion that I’d held back my entire life came pouring out in those moments while I held my knees against my chest and rocked back and forth. I never expected to feel so much in the aftermath, but giving myself over to him, the one person who I was forbidden from even speaking to, was a whole new level of … well, everything.

I knew that I had been attracted to James before, but I’d had no idea that having sex with him would make me feel the way that I currently did, like my world had shifted. My reality seemed rearranged, different somehow. And it wasn’t because of the fact that us being together was supposed to be wrong. To be honest, no other guy had ever felt more right. James and I were connected now, in ways neither one of us could take back or erase, not that I would.