Not into you
Page 17
“Noir Tease? Really? Alice Summer, oh my!” he jokes.
I point to the source of the scent. My wrists. He picks up my hands with his and brings them to his mouth. Carefully, he kisses one wrist and then the other.
“When did you start wearing perfume?” he asks.
“About a month ago.” I shrug. “It smelled nice. Plus, it comes with this little pump. I hate to admit it, but I feel like a real woman using the little pump to put on perfume.”
“I love it,” he says.
He kisses me on the mouth again, parting my lips with his tongue. At first, the kiss is reserved. Chaste. Nice. It quickly starts morphing into something else. A fire starts to build somewhere deep within me. I want to rip off his clothes and press his body against mine. Hudson’s breathing quickens. When my hand brushes against his leg, I can tell that he’s getting really excited.
His hands run down my shirt and then go underneath. Flesh to flesh. My breaths speed up along with my heartbeat. With one quick motion, he unfastens my bra and my breasts are freed. His hand brushes along my belly button and then goes up. Higher and higher.
“Wait,” I whisper. He doesn’t stop immediately.
“Wait, wait,” I say louder and pull away.
“What’s wrong?” he asks with a deeply disappointed look on his face.
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Not a thing. Except that I don’t want to do it here. We’re not in high school anymore. We have our own place.”
I wait for him to get mad, but he just shrugs. Nods.
“Are you sure? How about for old times’ sake?” he asks.
I shake my head no, trying to fit the clasps of my bra back together.
In high school, we used to do it all the time in cars. His car. My car. Our friends’ cars. There were many discreet places where teenagers had sex late at night, in cars. Our high school’s parking lot. Other high schools’ parking lots. Elementary and middle school parking lots. The library parking lot. Empty office buildings’ parking lot.
We’ve spent many hours in empty parking lots. Sometimes with friends. Drinking if one of us was able to score some beer or wine. Sometimes with our significant others.
“Hey, do you remember that library parking lot near my house?” Hudson asks.
“Which time?” I ask.
We spent many long evenings there. Unlike the office and the school parking lots, the library was almost never patrolled. It was Hudson’s and mine little secret, too. We didn’t dare share it with any of our friends out of fear that word would get out and our private spot would become public knowledge.
“Remember what happened to Rachel Prince?” he asks.
“How could I forget?” I laugh. “Whenever I think about having sex in a car, I think about her.”
“Really?” He scrunches up his face in disgust. “And how often do you think about having sex in cars?”
“Okay, that came out wrong.” I smile. “You know what I mean.”
Rachel Prince was in our grade and we were all close friends in eleventh grade. A cop caught her and her boyfriend at the time having sex in an empty office park. Instead of just letting them go with a warning or giving them a citation, he made them get out of the car and stand next to it completely naked while he looked through their identification. When it was twenty degrees outside!
“At least they were still wearing their shoes,” Hudson jokes.
Rachel’s incident went around school like a scary story intended only for teenagers. Almost everyone, it seemed, stopped messing around for a couple of weeks. Long enough for the shock to wear off and the hormones to kick in, I guess.
“I can’t believe that he actually took them to the station and made them wait there for their parents to pick them up. What an asshole.” Hudson shakes his head.
“At least they got to put their clothes back on,” I say.
“I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but I think what that cop did was probably illegal. I mean, he can’t just make a sixteen-year-old girl stand naked outside and look at her without breaking some sort of law. Right?”
I have no idea. It does sound like it should be illegal.
“Don’t you think we were lucky?” I ask. “That nothing like that ever happened to us?”
He nods. “Really lucky. We didn’t even have any close calls!”
“Oh my God.” Hudson takes his eyes off the road and turns to me.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh my God, I want to have you right now, Alice. It’s been way too long.”
“Watch the road!” I say, turning his face back away from me.
“Are you sure we can’t pull over somewhere? It’ll be fun,” he pleads.
I want him, too. I want to kiss again. I want to bury my hands in his hair. Kiss his belly button and more, but I stay firm.
“No.” I shake my head. “It’s cold. We have two great beds to choose from. I want to take a shower. Wash Simon and this whole night off me.”
Then I give it another thought. That’s not right. The night has actually ended way better than I’d expected.
“Well, not the whole night,” I add.
“Fine.” He shrugs. “You’re right. It’ll be more special at home.”
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44
“What are you doing with that thing?” my roommate, Sydney, asks, walking by my room.
I’m sitting on my bed with my hand wrapped around my knees staring at the envelope that came in the mail a few days ago. My name and address are handwritten in careful capital script and it doesn’t have a return address.
I showed it to her when it first arrived and she made fun of me for wanting to actually deposit that ridiculous check, her words not mine.
“I was thinking that this person must’ve dropped it off in our mailbox directly because there’s not even a stamp from the post office on this thing,” I point out.
Sydney shakes her head and walks out of my sightline for a moment to change into her sweats. When I walk out into our living room, I see her boots neatly put away right next to mine in the foyer. The rain droplets skid off her coat and onto the floor where they make a little puddle, which she quickly cleans up.
I met Sydney Catalano at Wellesley College, but we didn’t get really close until our second semester of senior year. She was a double major in biology and chemistry and we met in a required anthropology class that we both put off until we couldn’t put it off anymore.
I don’t know if it’s the case with all biology majors, but Sydney is a very neat and meticulous person who always cleans up after herself, and often after me as well. Though I’m not much of a housekeeper, I take out the garbage and kill spiders to try to be a good roommate.
I pull out last night’s Vietnamese takeout from the fridge and warm it up on the stove. We each pile as much as we want onto the plates, leaving the rest on the skillet, before sitting down to eat together around the kitchen island.
“So…what are you going to do?” she asks, tying up her silky
black hair in a loose bun while inhaling her food.
My eyes meander over to the envelope, lying flat in between our two plates. Sydney reaches over her food and pulls out the check.
“Olive, this is a joke, okay? This isn’t real,” she says with a full mouth.
I stare at the numbers in the square box. They are written in the same block script as my address on the envelope.
$167,699.
The amount is written out right under my name and signed with an illegible signature. There is no identifying information anywhere else on the check to give me a glimpse into who it might be from.
“But what if it is?” I ask.
“Why would someone send you a check for this amount and not say who it is or why they’re giving you this money?” she asks.
I shrug my shoulders. Of course, I don’t have an answer.
“The thing is… I looked up the total amount of my student loans today at work,” I say, taking a sip of my water.
“Okay.” Sydney nods.
I put down my fork and turn my body toward her.
“What?” She rolls her eyes. “C’mon, the suspense is killing me.”
I shake my head. “No, never mind. It doesn’t matter,” I say, getting up.
She pleads for me to go on and explain but I just take my plate to the sink and wash it. If she thinks that this whole thing is a joke then I don’t have to tell her a thing.
“Olive, I’m sorry.” Sydney puts her hand on my shoulder. “I don’t mean to not be supportive. I just don’t want you to get hurt. Or in trouble.”
I hold up the check to her face.
“You see this number?” I ask, pointing to the amount. She nods. “This is the exact amount that I owe. Down to the penny.”
The words surprise her. She exhales slowly and takes a step away from me.
“Really?” she whispers under her breath, taking the check and looking at it more closely.
I nod.
“I had to make a payment today so I looked up the amount, just for the hell of it. Just to make myself feel a little worse about everything,” I joke. “But then, the total looked familiar. I realized that I’d seen these numbers somewhere before. I just wasn’t sure where. Then when I got home, I saw the envelope on my desk and…there it was. The exact amount that I owe in student loans.”
Sydney sits back down, stunned by my revelation. I’ve had about an hour to process this but I’m no less astonished.
“The check arrived a few days ago. So, after you make this payment, you’ll owe a little less, right?”
I nod, not sure as to where she is going with this.
“Most of it is going to interest, but yeah, I guess it will be a little less. But the check arrived before this payment was officially due. So, when it came, this is the exact amount of my debt.”
We spend the evening talking about the possibilities of what I should do, which basically boil down into two camps.
One, I tear up the check and forget all about it.
Two, I deposit the money, or at least try to.
There is the very real possibility that the check is a fake or some sort of fraud, though whom it is defrauding I have no idea. Still, depositing it is definitely a risk.
“There’s something else you should consider,” Sydney says. “What happens if you deposit the check and it is real?”
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About Charlotte Byrd
Charlotte Byrd is the bestselling author of romantic suspense novels. She has sold over 600,000 books and has been translated into five languages.
She lives near Palm Springs, California with her husband, son, and a toy Australian Shepherd. Charlotte is addicted to books and Netflix and she loves hot weather and crystal blue water.
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Also by Charlotte Byrd
All books are available at ALL major retailers! If you can’t find it, please email me at charlotte@charlotte-byrd.com
Wedlocked Trilogy
Dangerous Engagement
Lethal Wedding
Fatal Wedding
Not into you Duet
Not into you
Still not into you
Tell me Series
Tell Me to Stop
Tell Me to Go
Tell Me to Stay
Tell Me to Run
Tell Me to Fight
Tell Me to Lie
Tangled Series
Tangled up in Ice
Tangled up in Pain
Tangled up in Lace
Tangled up in Hate
Tangled up in Love
Black Series
Black Edge
Black Rules
Black Bounds
Black Contract
Black Limit
Lavish Trilogy
Lavish Lies
Lavish Betrayal
Lavish Obsession
Standalone Novels
Debt
Offer
Unknown
Dressing Mr. Dalton