“Is that what you do? Because I do not want to sip from whatever Kool-Aid put that stick up your ass,” Oakley growled.

I could have punched him in the jaw. “Careful,” I began. “That stick just saved you from going to jail,” I reminded him, and I hoped he didn’t fucking forget it.

He stood up and stretched his hands over his head and rolled his neck in a stretch that had me salivating. “How about we go grab something to eat? We can start over or something, okay?”

My stomach growled at the mention of food. I didn’t really want the temptation of a restaurant, but the opportunity to put this feud behind us was too good to resist. “Okay, I’m down,” I replied with a fake smile.

Oakley looked me up and down, wiping his hands on his pants, as if he were trying to figure me out. “Okay. Let’s go, Solver.”

The nickname made me pause. “After you, Problem.”

7

Watching Oakley eat was disgusting but oddly fascinating. Did he even chew? I guess when you worked out and practiced a sport like he did, you didn’t really need to watch your calorie intake. I must have been staring, because he paused long enough to notice that I hadn’t even touched my grilled chicken sandwich in the time he had devoured his fries and half his burger. “You gonna eat?” he grunted in my direction.

“Yes. But I like to take the time to enjoy my food. My body is a temple,” I replied as I picked a piece of chicken free from the bun. That seemed to satisfy him, and he went back to his burger, although he seemed a little more mindful that I was watching him.

“How did you know what to do with that girl? Have a lot of practice getting drunk when you were in high school?” he asked. He looked at me and grinned like the thought of me having a scandalous past was hilarious. He had these really fucking sexy dimples when he smiled like that. Dimples that made me think of what it would be like to kiss him. What it would be like to kiss down his chest and follow the ripples down into his abs with my tongue.

“Well?” he asked, snapping me out of it.

“Umm…” I stalled. “I’m sure I had the same amount of fun as everybody else did,” I replied, not really wanting to get into the details in a diner in the middle of the night. I took a bite of my sandwich so that my mouth was full.

Oakley snorted with laughter. “Yeah, I bet you were the life of the party,” he teased. “Did you follow everybody around, telling them shit like ‘the things you put on the internet last forever’ and ‘make good choices’? Is that how you got interested in being a publicist?”