“Oh, god no.” His nose wrinkled in disgust, his lips curling with amusement.

“Or me bossing you around.”

“Yeah. You bossy person.” His smile faded a little from his lips, but it was still there in his eyes.

I realized in that moment that the time between us being close friends was probably going away. I wasn’t going to get to boss him around. That would be Jen’s job. I felt my heart sinking, and I pulled away before I couldn’t hide the hurt. “Thanks for the dance. I just remembered I have to go plan a bachelor party.”

“Yeah, you have a lot of work to do to make it an epic party.”

“No, it’s going to be low key and nerdy. Like you.” I said, poking him in his chest. His hand caught mine, and I felt my cheeks flush. I was saved by a strong hand pulling me backwards.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Soo, I’ve been texting and Rio wants to play pool,” Stacy said as she stepped between me and Kent.

I rubbed my shoulder. Damn, Stacy was strong. “O… kay, that’s great. Have fun?”

Stacy stepped to the side and grinned between us both, her hands twisting her phone slowly, this was not going to end well. “He wants to play with us. Us against you two.”

“Um…” I looked at Kent, silently asking him if he wanted to do it.

“I’m game to kick some ass.” He was so confident. So falsely confident. He’d never played pool with me before. I sucked, but I didn’t want to burst his bubble.

“Ok! We’ll do it.”

Stacy squealed and bounced. “Yay!”

As we set up the game it was revealed that this was no ordinary pool game. This was like beer pong, but with pool table pockets and pool balls instead. The boys flipped a coin and Kent won. He nodded at me, I was up first.

I cleared my throat, bent over the table and put my stick into position. I looked like I knew what I was doing but I was awful. I missed the balls in the middle of the table twice but whacked them softly on the third try, causing the balls to scatter mere centimeters from each other on the outer edge. I bit my lower lip as I glanced around. Stacy and Rio were grinning. Kent looked shocked at my lack of skills. But when he looked at me he smiled and shrugged.

I moved over to him slowly. “Sorry,” I whispered. When I looked up Stacy had sunk two striped balls into corner pockets.

She pointed to us and then to the shots already on a large tray on the table. “Drink up, bitches.” Rio gave her a high five and then lined up to take his turn as we both downed two shots each.

“Don’t worry, Els. We can still make a comeback.”