I reached out to cup her cheek in my palm and rubbed the skin below her lips with my finger. I wanted to kiss her, but after all the lipstick she’d applied in the car, I knew she wouldn’t thank me for it.

“We’ll go somewhere else afterward, okay? I think she’s on first, so we won’t be here long,” she assured me with a small smile, her eyes going soft. She knew I wanted to kiss her; my hand on her face was a familiar gesture.

“Okay, baby.” I leaned in and kissed the tip of her nose gently. “You look beautiful. Did I tell you that yet?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you do.”

She smiled and started walking toward the building again, and I brushed my fingers through the short hair on the back of my head.

It wasn’t that I disliked Kate. Quite the opposite, actually. When we were kids, we’d been friends, and I’d thought she was funny as hell. She had a quirky, sometimes weird sense of humor, and she’d been the most genuinely kind person I’d ever met. But for some reason, all those years ago, she’d suddenly focused in on me, and the attention had made me uncomfortable.

I wasn’t into her, and her crush had made me feel weird, uncomfortable in my own skin. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but shit, she just didn’t do it for me. She was too clean-cut, too naive and trusting. Even then, I’d been more attracted to women who were a little harder, a little darker, than the girl who still had posters of fairies on her walls at seventeen.

So I began avoiding her as much as I could until she’d brought home a girl wearing red lipstick and covered in tattoos after her first semester in college. I’d ignored the way Kate had watched me with sad eyes as I’d monopolized her friend’s time and completely disregarded her hurt feelings. I’d never liked Kate that way, and I hadn’t seen anything wrong with going after her new friend.

I’d ended up married to her roommate, and from then on I’d acted like Kate and I had never been friends. It was easier that way.

“Come on, baby,” Rachel called, pulling me into the darkened coffeehouse. “I see a table, and my feet are killing me.”

Why the fuck did she insist on wearing those damn shoes?

“Can I get you anything to drink?” a small waitress asked us. Like, really small. She was barely taller than the bistro table we were sitting at.

“Can I get a green tea, please?” Rachel asked.

“Sure! The green we’ve got is incredible. When are you due?”

“Not for a while.”

“Well, congratulations!”