Her face turned scarlet.

A smile made the corner of his mouth twitch. “Sammy. Are you blushing?”

“No. I don’t blush. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. Sexual appetites are healthy and normal. And I am sex positive. So there’s no embarrassment that resides within me. And any that I may have felt I rooted out when I confronted my feelings about the poorly named walk of shame.”

“You’re just human, Sammy. Shame is part of being human. Shame is what makes some things fun.”

“That can’t be true,” she said.

“Sure it is. A little bit of guilt amps up the heat.”

“I don’t... I don’t think that’s true.”

“Clearly you were not raised Catholic.”

“I wasn’t.”

His lips twitched. “You’re missing out.”

She made a strange huffing sound.

“What?” he asked.

“This is weird,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because we are talking. We always talk. And I’m distracted by the fact that I know how you look naked. And that I would like to... There’s not really a delicate way to say it.”

“Don’t say it delicate, then,” he ground out.

His whole chest was tight. His body primed for her. It didn’t take anything. A side-glance. The brush of her fingertips against him.

This.

She bit her lip. “It’s messed up.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. Because you’re my friend. You’re my friend before you’re anything else. And being so distracted by the fact that I want to climb you like the tree outside your window is a problem.”

“Not for me.”

“You’re a man.”

“That’s stupid. When has what we had together ever been based on something that simple? I’ve been a man the whole time. It was never that simple. It was never like that. And you know it. What happened between us isn’t about just a simple chemistry between a man and a woman.”

He didn’t know why he cared about that at all. He didn’t know why he felt the need to belabor the point. It was fine to let her think that it was just that simple. Why did he need to make her understand what he couldn’t?

He didn’t know. Only that he apparently did.

She looked over her shoulder, and then back at him. “They’re staring at us,” she said, indicating the table full of his family.

“They are not,” he said, directing his focus to them. Well, hell. They were.

When his eyes connected with Iris’s she lowered them quickly, going back to her beer and playing like she hadn’t just been staring. But she had been.

Which meant they really were giving off some kind of a weird energy, because he and Sammy talking to each other shouldn’t draw attention. Not from his family.

They were too used to them.

He was certain the whole town figured they slept with each other. Most people would never understand the kind of relationship that they had. Hell, at this point he didn’t understand it, either, but that was what happened with introducing sex into the mix.