Betting on You

Generally speaking, I considered myself to be a smart dipshit.

I could ace a calculus test (when I wanted to) and get every answer right on Jeopardy!, but I wasn’t always good at making mature decisions.

See: Bailey Mitchell.

I stared at the TV, but I wasn’t even listening to the episode of Seinfeld that was playing because my brain wouldn’t stop screaming, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

The volume was so loud that I could hear nothing else.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Kissing Bailey under the guise of fake dating—that was fine. Fucking funny, actually, that she and I were able to derive a little salacious pleasure from our plan to sabotage Scott. That, my friend, was what you called bonus material.

But kissing her because I looked into her eyes and just wanted to?

Such total dipshittery.

Because nothing good could come of it. I was certain Bailey was lying on the pullout, losing her shit this very second. She would freak out, things would get awkward, and everything would change.Content rights belong to NôvelDrama.Org.

It was asinine that I’d been careful enough to label her “coworker” instead of friend, just to ensure there was a mutual understanding between us, yet stupid enough to try to absorb her sadness into my body through osmosis because I didn’t like hearing her sound unhappy.

But her face; God, her face had been too much.

She’d looked at me through teary eyes, and all at once I’d seen someone whose scrape I wanted to kiss better, the funny friend I needed to convince of her worth, and a stunner whose lips beckoned to me with promises of deep, satisfied sighs.

Combine that with the emotional punch of connecting with every fucking word she’d used to describe her feelings about her family life, and what else could I do but kiss her?

Thank God for Scott, trudging downstairs like an unwieldy bear at a sleeping campsite, because I didn’t know what would’ve happened if we hadn’t been interrupted. I couldn’t speak for Bailey, but I knew I had lost total contact with my smart side. Dipshittery was in control, and I’d been a thousand percent focused on diving into the deep end and drowning myself in Bailey Mitchell.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

I had no choice. I had to fix this.