He shifted uncomfortably. "I am rather hungry. Eggs would be very greatly appreciated, thank you."
Maria stared at Xavier in surprise--she'd worked for me for several years, and the only people I'd ever had over were Martin, Lindsey, Marco, and my parents. A strange man was an enormous aberration in my life, and she wasn't sure how to react.
"Si, si. Eggs. You like onion? Queso?"
Xavier hesitated. "However Low is having them is fine."
Maria glanced at me. "Low? Who is low?"
He gestured at me. "Low?"
"Oh, Senora Grace. Si, si."
I grabbed a couple bottles of water from the fridge, and headed to the outdoor dining area. Xavier followed, gazing around at my home, saying nothing.
Pale pink stucco walls, dark wooden beams, Spanish tile flooring throughout; an open-plan kitchen and living room, with an entire wall of glass doors that opened to create a seamless transition from indoor living space to outdoor. There was a pool lined with more Spanish tile and hand-laid, interlocking slate around it, a four-foot-high rock wall forming the perimeter around the deep end. Beyond the rock wall and the pool was a little oasis--a stand of towering palm trees, flowering cacti, a marble bench, and a small recirculating water fountain, with a ten-foot-high stucco wall surrounding the entire property.
"This place is amazing," he said, after taking it all in.
I smiled, taking a seat. "Thanks. It's actually the smallest house in the entire neighborhood, but it's just me here, so I didn't see the point in buying a huge place I'd only rattle around in."
He frowned. "Small? It must be six thousand square feet, at minimum."
"Seven, including the basement, plus there's a pool house. But by Beverly Hills standards, this place is a dinky little shack."
"I see."
"It's just a house, Xavier."
"I said nothing."
"You only say 'I see' when you don't understand or don't want to sound judge-y."
"The boat, the cars in the garage, this home, the cook...it's a transition for me, to see you in this setting. A reminder that you are far more to the world than just Low."
"Maria isn't just a chef, she's...well, everything, around here. She's like family to me," I said, between long sips of water. "You don't like being reminded that I'm rich and famous."
He glanced at me. "Fame is something I don't really comprehend. But I have wondered how wealthy you truly are." He blinked. "I think that is a rude and inappropriately personal question."
"For anyone else to ask, yeah, it would be. But...you can ask me anything." I twisted the cap back on the bottle. "I'm worth fourteen million, currently. Most of that is from the last two films. I didn't get all that much for the first one."
"Fourteen million dollars." He sighed. "That is an unfathomable amount of money."
"I suppose it is. I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about it, and I didn't get into acting for the money. It's nice to have, and I know I'm spoiled and beyond fortunate. But it's not why I became an actress."
"Why did you?"
"Because I love the craft. I acted in plays all through high school. I fell in love with pretending to be someone else, putting on a mask, channeling this other person who only exists in my mind, and on a piece of paper. I love exploring emotions and characteristics that don't always exist in my own life."
"I watched your films."
I shot him a surprised look. "You did?"
He nodded. "I wanted to know what you did. To try and understand you a little better."
"And what did you think?"
He was silent a moment. "I--it was strange, to be truthful." He shrugged. "It was like...it was you, but not you. It was like watching someone I didn't know occupy your body."
I laughed. "I suppose that's a compliment."
"You are pretending to be someone else, and you are very convincing, which is your job as an actress, so yes, that is a compliment."
"Thank you." I eyed him, seeing something unsaid in his features. "What aren't you saying?"
Maria came out, then, with a tray. She set plates in front of Xavier and me, and then silverware, and then a carafe of coffee and mugs, and a bottle of sparkling water.
"You like anything else, senora?" Maria asked.
I shook my head. "No, thank you." I glanced at Xavier, and then made a decision. "In fact, with my--um, with Xavier here, I think you could take the rest of the day off."
Maria's eyes widened. "I only work one hour. I make food for manana. And much housework, also."
"Take the day off, Maria. Paid, of course."
"If you say so, senora." She wiped her palms on her apron. "It is my daughter's birthday today. Maybe I bring her out of school and get her ice cream."
"Good idea."
Maria gestured at the kitchen. "Yesterday I make chimichangas, and also, there is a salad."
"We'll be fine, I promise."
She hesitated a moment longer. "I go now?"
I nodded. "Yes, you can go. Thank you, Maria."
"De nada, senora."
When she was gone, we ate in silence.
"Why did you send her home?" Xavier asked.
I set my fork down, hesitating over how much of the truth to tell. All of it, I decided. "So we could be alone."
His eyes searched mine. "Low, I..."
"Why are you here, Xavier? Why did you come all this way?"
He finished his omelet in silence, set his fork down, dabbed his mouth with the napkin, and leaned back in his chair, coffee mug cupped in both hands. "I told you: I had to see you."
"But...why?"
"Because I shouldn't have let you leave in the first place." He paused, the silence heavy, thick, tense. "I should have...I should have been stronger. I should have been braver. I was scared."
"Of what?"
"You." He sighed sharply. "Of how you make me feel." Another silence. "Of how I feel about you. Of what I want."
"Tell me," I whispered. "Tell me how you feel. Tell me what you want."
He set his mug down, scooting his chair out and standing up. He paced away across the slate paver stones, following the perimeter of the pool to the alcove in the corner, where the huge palm trees provided shade from the rising sun, and sat down on the marble bench. I followed him, and we sat side by side on the bench.
My hip nudged his, and my thigh brushed his, and his heat radiated against me; I smelled his leathers, a thin, tangy, sharp scent.
Was I a coward for wanting to hear what he was going to say before I admitted how I felt?
Probably.
The only hint I could give, the only action I was capable of, was to thread my fingers between his, and rest our tangled, joined hands on my bare thigh.
His breath caught. His eyes went to mine. "Low, I..." He exhaled shakily. "I was miserable when you left. I'm here because I want...I want you. I want us. I want this." He lifted our joined hands. "The things I feel for you are so powerful and chaotic and strange and frightening...it's hard to admit how I feel, because telling you is to...to allow you that power over me."
I blinked back tears--damn this man. My power over him? God, if he only knew.
"Why are you crying?" he asked, sounding utterly baffled. "Did I say something wrong?"
I shook my head, sniffing. "No, Xavier. This is just what you do to me."
"I make you cry?"
I laughed, sniffling again. "Yes, dammit."
"I'm confused."
"You make me cry because you make me feel so much...and I don't know how to handle it. I'm not used to being like this. I'm an actress--I'm used to being in control of my feelings. I can cry on command, or laugh, or look sexy, or angry...I can summon all of that at will, because I'm always in control of my feelings. Always in control of myself. But you--you just...you strip away my sense of control. I've been weepy since I've been home, and cranky, and bitchy, and difficult, and miserable. I've been horrible!"
"Why?"
"Why to which
part?"
"All of it. Why do I make you feel that? How do I strip away your control? Why have you been weepy, cranky, bitchy, and miserable? This doesn't seem like a good thing to me."
"It's not!" I said, laughing. "It's just...you."
"I still do not understand."
"I want you, goddammit!" I said, the tears I'd been holding back emerging full force, now. "I want you! I want us. I want this. I want it all just as bad as you do! And I--you may not understand this either, but I don't want to want you as badly as I do. But I can't help it."
"You want me? And us?"
"Yes."
"Then why did you leave?"
"Because I'm scared too!" I shouted. "I'm terrified!"
He tensed as I raised my voice. "Please do not shout at me. It negatively affects me, and makes it hard for me to retain my equanimity."
"Sorry--I'm sorry." I sniffled. "I'm sorry. I just--you make me crazy, and I can't handle not being in control. Which is part of why I left."
He looked at me. "I feel equally out of control. There's so much I want to say, but don't know how. So much I want to do, but I'm scared to let myself do it."
"Like what?"
"Show you the things I don't know how to say."
My blood raced, boiled. "What if I told you I wanted you to show me all that?"
"Why would you want that?"
I didn't bother hiding the tears, then. "Because I'm falling for you, Xavier."
"You are?"
I nodded, sniffing, dashing the back of my wrist across my cheeks. "I am."
"There was no falling," he said, holding my gaze with his. "Not for me. I did not fall in love with you."
I choked. "You--you didn't?"
He shook his head. "I drowned into love with you. I flew into love with you. I have been consumed with and consumed by love for you. Love for you swallowed me, became all of me, replaced my blood and bones and organs and thoughts and feelings with you, and you, and you."
I was breathless. "Xavier--"
"I am scared to let myself love you, Harlow. I am afraid of giving in to it. I am afraid I will become obsessed. Addicted. I will smother you. I will need all of you, all the time. I am afraid I will love you with such all-consuming intensity that it will frighten you away. Loving you is--the force of it, the power of it inside me--Low, it is so much, so, so much it scares me." He let out a gusting, shuddering breath.
"Xavier, I--"
What to say?
Yeah, that's how I feel?
Same?
Ditto?
Nothing could compare to the way he'd said it.
He wasn't done, though:
"I cry your mercy--pity--love!--ay, love!
Merciful love that tantalises not
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmask'd, and being seen--without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole,--all--all--be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,--those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,
Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom's atom or I die,
Or living on, perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes,--the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!"
I sniffed a disbelieving laugh. "Did you really just quote Keats at me?"
He nodded. "Yes. I did."
I leaned against him, twisting to face him, resting my forehead against his temple. "As if your own words hadn't melted me enough, you had to go quoting Keats at me?" I whispered, laughing through tears. "Damn you, Xavier."
"Damn me? It was a declaration of love, Low. Why should I be damned for that?"
I laughed again, crying, and slid my leg over his, straddling him, facing him, taking his stubbled jaw in my hands. "Because I'm so fucking in love with you I don't know how to feel it or express it or handle it any more than you do."
He blinked up at me, his hands lifting hesitantly, pausing, fingers fluttering like birds, before settling on my waist. "You...you truly feel that way? For me?"
I nodded, laugh-crying still, leaning forward to bury my face in his throat. "Yes, Xavier. I fell for you the moment I saw you running down the dock toward me. I fell for you when you helped me and looked at my ankle with such gentility and strength and care. I fell for you when we watched the eagle catch the fish together. I fell even harder when you kissed me for the first time, and I fell for you when you kissed my breasts like they were...like they were the most beautiful and precious gifts you'd ever been given. I fell for you when you went down on me and made me come harder than I've ever come in my life, and I fell for you hardest of all when you told me why you were afraid of letting me touch you, yet still trusted me enough to let me touch you like that anyway."
"We spent a matter of days together, Low," he murmured. "How could we have fallen in love so hard, so fast?"
"I don't know. I'm asking myself the same question. How can this be real? Am I deluding myself? Am I just mistaking my sexual attraction to you for love?"
"Hearing your doubts should worry me, I would think," he said. "But it doesn't. It reassures me that I'm not the only one feeling this way."
I leaned back, sitting on his thighs and resting my hands on his shoulders. "If this was only a week after we'd met, and we'd never spent any time apart, I might think it was just infatuation or lust. But we've been apart for nearly a month. I spent that entire month trying to pretend I don't feel how I feel. Trying to make the feelings go away. Trying to tell myself I was better off here alone without you, and trying hardest of all to pretend leaving like I did was best for you. But I can't keep pretending any of that is true. Because none of it is."
His hands glided down my hips, and his fingertips traced the hem of the white stretchy fabric of my shorts, which had rolled up around the inner creases of my thighs, outlining my core in a V. His touch made my heart skip a beat, made my nipples harden inside my sports bra.
"Why do you not want to feel the way you do?" he asked, his eyes meeting mine briefly before skating over my chest and down to where his fingers continued to toy idly with the bunched fabric of my workout shorts. "Why do you not want to be in love with me?"
"I'm afraid of getting hurt. I'm afraid of being vulnerable. As a woman in Hollywood, particularly being as young as I am, I've had to be strong, and in charge and in control at all times. I've put on this strong, in charge facade for the world my whole life. I've never really let anyone in."
"Why? Did someone hurt you?"
I shook my head. "No, I just...I don't know. I watched so many of my friends--famous and not--go through relationship after relationship, falling in love and breaking up, giving their hearts away and getting them broken. All through high school and all through college, I watched my friends go through this cycle of finding a guy, falling for him, and getting their hearts broken, and I just...I never wanted to go through that myself. I was the friend they called for wine and ice cream and rom-coms to get over the breakup. I was the one they cried to. I was the one they complained to about how all men were assholes. And I just...why would I put myself through that? Clearly it never worked. The one guy I ever really actually dated, it wasn't...it was companionship at most. Someone to spend time with. Someone to have the appearance of a relationship with. He wasn't in love with me, nor I with him. I think that's why our relationship, such as it was, worked as well as it did for as long as it did--because it didn't really mean anything."
I sighed. I played with the collar of his leather jacket as I spoke.
"No guy I ever met made me feel anything, so why would I pretend? Why would I put myself through the effort and the inevitable pain of a breakup for some guy I didn't really have actual feelings for? Then I met you, and you threw all that out the window from the first moment I spoke to you.
"
"How?" he asked.
"Just...everything you are," I answered. "Physically, I'm more attracted to you than I've ever been to any man, ever in my life. That's part of what's so crazy to me--I love sex. I need it. I've always had a strong sex drive and I make no apologies for that. But you...you intensify those feelings a hundredfold. Needing you, just the sheer physical need for you--that alone is so fucking intense it's scary. And who you are--you just...fit, in some way. In my mind, my heart, my body. I don't know how to put it. It's like there was this hole in my life, in my heart, in my soul, in my mind--there was a hole inside me and you showed up and somehow you just fill that hole. Like I was half of a puzzle, and you're the one piece in the whole universe that fits in the jigsaw emptiness inside me."
I pushed the jacket over his shoulders, slowly removing it, folding it, and laying it on the bench beside us, then I let my hands roam over his shoulders and chest and stomach, needing to touch, to feel, to know he was real and here, and that this was happening.
Xavier's laugh was breathless, disbelieving. "How can any of this be real? You--you--Harlow Grace...I'm sitting in your backyard, with you on my lap, touching me and telling me you're in love with me. How can this be real?"
"I'm not Harlow Grace with you, Xavier. Not here, not like this, not in this moment. I'm just...Low. I'm the girl who fell over and hurt herself trying to impress you with my fancy yoga moves. I'm the girl who went fishing with you. Who watched Spartacus on my boat with you. Who broke down crying in front of your whole family. I'm the girl who fell asleep in your arms, Xavier." I slid my fingers under the hem of his T-shirt and ran my palms up the warm solidity of his back. "Harlow Grace is...she's someone else. Don't think about her. Think about me. Just...me."
"Can't I think about all of you? Can't I be in love with Harlow Grace the movie star and Low, the girl from the boat?" He traced his fingers up the insides of my thighs, over my hips, and up my stomach to follow the underside of my sports bra. "You are yourself, and you are both of those persons--the famous actress, and just the girl. What if I'm attracted to both? What if I'm in love with both?"
"You didn't know I was famous when we met. You didn't know until your family told you."
"After you left, I talked to Bast. I Googled you. I looked through hundreds of pictures of you, and read dozens of articles about you. I researched Harlow Grace as I would any other subject: thoroughly and methodically. Many of the articles and blog posts about you--most of them, in fact--seem blatantly fictitious. Some contain what I would call kernels of truth with a thick layer of guess and speculation, and a desperation to know more. I watched interviews with you, and clips of you on the red carpet. I think I understand the cultural persona you present, as Harlow Grace, as much as someone as out of tune with popular culture as I am can understand such things, at least." He traced the lower edge of my sports bra with a fingertip as he spoke, back and forth, back and forth across my back, as if resisting the urge to hook that finger under the elastic.
Badd Boy Page 23
