Anne of Manhattan by Brina Starler

Now

“I hope you wanted a hard cider, because the only other options were beer, more beer, and also, beer. Which I know is not really your thing.” Diana appeared at Anne’s elbow with a foamy glass of amber cider in one hand and a dark brown bottle in the other, eyes widening as she noticed their old classmate. “Gilbert Blythe!”

She thrust both drinks into Anne’s hands and threw her arms around Gil. Some of the other patrons made noises of irritation as her momentum pushed him back a step, bumping into people. But he just laughed, steadying her as she planted a loud, smacking kiss on his cheek. The unguarded, warm affection for her friend was so different from the way he had always looked at Anne.

Why couldn’t she find her mad? After how he’d acted, shouldn’t the sight of him disgust her? But it didn’t. It didn’t and she couldn’t understand why.

After another tight hug, Diana took her beer back from Anne, then nailed him in the shoulder with her fist. “Where have you been? You don’t call, you don’t write. Not cool.”

“Ow, geez.” He dramatically clutched the spot she’d hit. “What, are you still playing field hockey? That’s some punch, D.”

“I’m sure you’re in agony,” she said, rolling her eyes. Anne stood in silence as they started chatting, awkward with a lack of anything to add, taking a sip of her cider instead. Bubbly foam coated her upper lip, and without a thought, she swiped her tongue across it. Gil abruptly shifted next to her, their arms bumping, and she looked up to find his eyes on her again. For a second, they flickered down to watch her lips, then darted away as he turned back to listen to what Diana was saying.

Oh.

Breathe. Anne let air out on a slow, measured exhale.

It was just nostalgia combined with a dearth of non-self-induced orgasms in the recent past, combined with the slight buzz of alcohol, combined with being confronted by sinewy, tanned forearms dusted with a light coating of wiry hair. Forearms that looked like they would have no problem holding his body in a plank position. Fora while. Any girl’s libido would be doing an internal mamba in that situation, it had nothing to do with the actual man involved. She pulled her gaze away from said forearms and took a much larger gulp of cider than before.

Too large, as it turned out. The liquid stuck in her throat and she choked on the sting of carbonation. Thank God, she managed to swallow it down instead of spitting it all over herself, eyes watering from the herculean effort.

Up and to her left came an almost imperceptible snort of amusement.

“Gonna make it?” One of those indecently capable-looking hands patted her between the shoulder blades. Clearing her burning throat, Anne sidled out from under the touch of his palm against her back, before something terrible happened. Like her shivering.

Letting his hand drop away, Gil shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans, his gaze going thoughtful. She just concentrated on avoiding eye contact and sipping her cider instead of aspirating it. Oblivious to the thrumming undercurrent of tension between the two, Diana grabbed their third roommate around the wrist and hauled her forward.

“Hey, you haven’t met Phil! Gilbert Blythe, Philippa Gordon. She was Anne’s first-year roomie and now we all share a place.” The impeccable manners he always used around everyone but her kicked in as he shook the other girl’s hand with an expression of polite interest on his annoyingly handsome face.

Diana turned to Phil, explaining, “Gil is from Avonlea, we all grew up together, but he lives in Cali now.”

“No one who lives in California calls it Cali, D.”

“LL Cool J did.”

“No one who lives in California calls it Cali, D.”

Diana opened her mouth to retort, but Phil beat her to it, ever the peacemaker. She smiled warmly at Gil. “So, California. My aunt lives in Pasadena, it’s a pretty area. But how funny that we ran into you in Brooklyn, then, of all places.”

“Ah. Yeah, well . . . my dad has cancer. Prostate. He got the diagnosis in the spring, but I had to finish last semester before I could come home. The doctors are pretty optimistic, but we won’t know more until he starts chemo.” If Anne hadn’t spent years glaring at Gil across a classroom, she would have missed the way the smile left his eyes, even as it lingered on his lips. Accepting the noises of sympathy from Phil and Diana, he hitched one shoulder up in a “what can you do?” gesture. “I figured I’d just hang around and drive the old man crazy until he gets well enough to boot me back to California himself.”

Anne raised her eyebrows. “Oh, well, if that’s the plan, then don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be back in Berkeley in no time flat.”

“There’s the girl I know, never passing up an opportunity to give me shit.” The grin that flashed across his face was real again, even if it settled more into a smirk than a smile.

“You wouldn’t know what to do if I was sweet to you,” she scoffed.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

Her face heated at the teasing tone. Well, she’d walked right into that one.

“But I am sorry to hear about your dad,” Anne said in a soft voice, resolved to ignore his last comment. “He always asked how school was going and actually seemed like he didn’t mind listening to a fifteen-year-old girl passionately condemn algebra as the devil’s invention. If he found it annoying, he was too nice to show it, anyway.

“Not sure what happened here,” she tacked on, gesturing to all of Gil purely out of habit. Like muscle memory, their insult volleys were.

“And just when I thought you were going all soft on me for a minute.”

She almost had, God help her.

Diana let out a gusty sigh. “Phil, don’t mind these two. They’ve always been like this.”

“Have they?” Philippa looked between the pair with a gleam in her eye Anne did not like.

“Bickering like children.” Gil made a noise of protest, but Diana rolled over it. “Or cats and dogs. Or I don’t know . . . what other things needle each other constantly until one of them flounces off?”

“I have never in my life flounced.” Anne narrowed her eyes, offended at the imagery.

“I said what I said.”

“I, on the other hand, enjoy a good flounce,” interrupted Gil, leaning in toward Philippa as if confessing a great secret. He started to say something more, but a hand with the Puerto Rican flag emblazoned across the back of it came down on his shoulder, cutting off his next words.

“I was wondering where you’d run off to, but now I get it.” The tattooed man who’d been with Gil when he’d spotted Anne stood there, not looking particularly upset at being deserted. His eyes lingered on Diana, before he turned back to his friend with raised brows. “You owe me twenty, by the way, for your half of the stall.”

Gil rubbed at the back of his neck sheepishly. “Yeah, dude, sorry about that. Let me introduce you . . .”

The group snagged a table and stayed for what turned out to be a surprisingly good couple hours. Anne immediately liked Fred Wright, who had become friends with Gil in California before he decided college was not his thing, packed his stuff, moved to Brooklyn, and began an apprenticeship at a local tattoo parlor. He kept them all laughing, knew all sorts of nerdy, obscure space facts, and didn’t mind when Diana wanted to look at his body art. In fact, he didn’t mind it so much that he offered to take his shirt off for her, but when she looked him up and down with a speculative gleam in her eye, Gil practically tackled his friend in an effort to keep his clothes on.

It finally got late enough that Anne had to call it a night. She had an early-morning shift at the bookstore she’d worked in over the last few years. The bar was still as crowded as it had been when they’d arrived, the group squeezing through the press of people to get to the front door. When she was jostled by a man gesturing broadly as he talked to his friends, Gil’s hand came up to steady her. The heat of his palm, where it settled low on her back just above the curve of her bottom, seemed to burn through the thin cotton of her dress. They were almost to the door when he rubbed his thumb against her back, the half-circle motion bringing it to rest in the divot at the base of her spine. The feeling was electric, streaking up her spine, causing an involuntary shudder.

Sucking in a lungful of air, Anne practically leapt forward, spilling out onto the sidewalk right on Diana’s heels. Her friend glanced back, giving her an odd look, but she avoided eye contact and concentrated on pulling in the cool night air. It had been stifling in the bar. That was why she felt like she was overheating. Notbecause of the way Gil had touched her.

The way he touched her.

No. She was not starting this cycle again. The constant exchange of witty barbs, the competition to always come out on top, the irresistible urge to antagonize each other beyond sanity. Throw in lust and it was a powder keg waiting to be lit, and not in a good way.

Diana had been truthful when she told Philippa the two of them were always at each other’s throats, through middle and high school. They’d quarrel about who was better at frog dissection in biology. They would argue over the best way to get the answer to a math problem in calculus. Then there was that time they feuded for an entire semester of sophomore year because Anne had stated that probably half of the inventions and discoveries credited to men over the centuries were actually by women, but the patriarchy had swept them under the rug, because God forbid a woman be better at something than a man. The part Gil seemed to take offense at was that she glared at him all through the last half of that sentence. Looking back, Anne wasn’t sure why she’d done it, but she was positive it had been justified.

The point was, given the opportunity, there wasn’t anything they couldn’t find a way to fight about. From the first day she and Gil had met, excepting that lone summer night, it had been nothing less than war between them. And that’s the way Anne liked it. In safe territory.