by Fields, MJ
“Xander’s a big boy; don’t feel sorry for him.”
El’s shoulders snapped up, and she clapped her hands together. “Okay, so you were about to tell me what it would take to prove that I can be carefree.”
Right.
“What’s your schedule like tomorrow?”
“I’ve got a morning meeting at 9:30 and an appointment with a client at three. I was planning to do some venue research in-between. Why?” she asked, narrowing her eyes skeptically.
“That’s perfect. If I come meet you at the office or at the inn after your morning meeting, give me the rest of tonight without thinking about work.” She opened her mouth, but I continued before she could protest. “And I promise we will be extra-productive tomorrow. Come on, Uno, let go and live a little tonight.”
A smiling blonde quickly set down a basket of mozzarella sticks while Elliot considered my offer. She wasted no time picking up the fried goodness and biting into it, letting out a little moan.
“Well?” I prompted, mostly to put a stop to the food-moans.
“One condition—after, if I’m not satisfied.”
She paused, hitting me with a wink in case I missed her insinuation (I didn’t), and the urge to clarify that she’d always be satisfied after being with me was almost too strong to resist.
“If I'm not satisfied with our progress," she added with a grin, "we reconvene after my afternoon meeting.”
“Deal. Told you, El, I’m not opposed to working late nights together.”
Sixteen
Bryce
Another basket of mozzarella sticks later, we’d successfully avoided talking about anything work-related. Instead, we swapped stories from our respective college experiences. If it had been a Friday or a Saturday night, the music would’ve been pumping through the speakers at an obnoxiously high volume. But as it was, we sat across from each other and could converse without straining to hear.
“You did not!” she shrieked with a mixture of shock and humor. “Bryce. You actually tried to climb the rec center? After how many games of beer pong?”
“Somewhere between three and fourteen. I went a little nuts that year. But that’s what freshman year is for, right? To make all the stupid mistakes you’ll eventually learn and grow from?”
“I guess so. But now that I think about it, I never really had a nuts phase. Do you think that makes me boring? Am I lame for spending freshman year studying instead of allowing myself a ‘real’ college experience?”
She lifted a hand and drummed her fingers against her lips as her brows knitted in contemplation, and I fought the urge to run my fingers over the lines along her forehead like I had last night.
“Actually, no,” she continued. “I don’t regret that I spent more time at the library than at house parties. I studied a lot, but I also had fun. Sometimes. My lack of regrettable experiences isn’t what made me lame back then. It was…”
Her eyes fell, and she started fidgeting with the foil that lined the empty basket between us.
“El? It was what?”
“You know what’s funny?” she asked abruptly, directing her gaze back up to me. “The way we use the word ‘nuts’ to mean crazy. I’ve never understood that. How did that start? Who is this person with a nut vendetta? What did nuts ever do to them? They must have had a nut allergy. But to most of the population, they’re perfectly normal, delicious treats. I happen to love nuts. If we’re going to use a food as a synonym for crazy, it should be something like ‘pluot’ because really, whoever thought to cross plums and apricots is the crazy one.”
I arched a brow and lost the battle to contain my grin. “Okay, I think that’s enough whiskey for you,” I said, sliding her glass over to my side of the booth. I was half-joking, but also didn’t want to be responsible for her dealing with the hangover from hell tomorrow.
She crossed her arms and huffed in mock-annoyance. “That wasn’t drunken rambling, Bryce! Buzzed at best. It was a perfectly relevant tangent.”
“I know you’re not drunk, El. But that was a blatant attempt to distract me from what you were about to say. You teed up the ‘deez nuts’ joke too well with the ‘I happen to love nuts’ comment. What were you going to say?”
She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t remember.”
“Elliot, look at me. Whatever it is, you don’t have to tell me. But you can. You can tell me anything, Uno. No judgment, remember?” I nudged her leg with mine.
She slowly lifted her eyes, raising the curtain of long lashes blocking my view of her beautiful blues. There she is.
“Full disclosure," I added. “There will be a tiny bit of judgment if your confession is that you still squeezed into your pink Power Ranger Halloween costume from second grade. Though, I’m not opposed to seeing you in an adult version of it. Preferably of the slutty variety.”
Her soft laughter filled the air, and a familiar warmth seeped into my heart, further soothing the scars it bore.
“Definitely not what I was going to say, but I’ll be sure to add that to my list of ideas for Halloween costumes. If you’re lucky,” she said with a wink. Before I could make any kind of remark, she cleared her throat and lost all traces of humor. With her fingers woven together in front of her, she spoke her next words softly. “I was going to say what made me lame freshman year was the fact that I was so freaking terrified of becoming Helen that I avoided all remotely risky situations and played it safe with a mediocre, moderately boring boyfriend whose idea of a good time was watching documentaries on Netflix and chilling…and not the kind where chilling is a euphemism for sex. I didn’t let myself live, Bryce. At least not the way I should’ve. I was convinced that the only way to ensure I wouldn’t turn into her was to cling to anything and everything around me that was stable. It took me until a year ago to realize I could create my own stability.”
“That doesn’t mean you were lame. That’s something plenty of people don’t ever understand, much less realize at twenty-three. Everyone paves their own path, travels their own journey into adulthood; there’s not a one-size-fits-all way. Helen made horrible choices, but they were her choices, El.” I pushed aside the drinks and basket to reach across the table and pull her hands into mine. “Whose choice was it to learn how to swim when you were six?”
“Mine.”
“And whose choice was it to take dance classes?”
“Mine.”
“Whose brilliant choice was it to watch the movie Scream when we were in middle school?”
She grinned. “Mine.”
“And your career? Whose idea was that?”
“Mine. Okay, I get it, Bryce—”
“Do you? Because you, Elliot Kincaid, don’t give yourself enough credit. These choices you’ve made are just a tiny fraction of what you have done for yourself. Not even Millie and George, who absolutely contributed to your overall awesomeness, can take all the credit for the resilient, strong, brilliant, capable woman sitting in front of me. Your choices are the ones that have molded you into who you are today.”
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it on a sigh. “I’m not sure how to explain it, really. It’s just…you. It’s how you’ve always been.”
“Okay, now I’m really gonna need you to elaborate.”
“When we were little, you didn’t see a broken girl, you just saw me for me. When we met, you made me smile and laugh when humor was basically a foreign concept to me. You made me feel normal, taught me how to be a regular kid. It seems like every time I’ve needed to hear it most, you’re there, reminding me in one way or another that DNA doesn’t determine someone’s worth. It’s like you take a flashlight and illuminate the parts and pieces of me that I sometimes fail to see myself.”
The weight and sincerity of her words were unexpected, and I sat paralyzed for a second while my brain committed El’s explanation to memory. Will she still feel that way if I tell her the truth a
bout what happened five years ago? Or will she hate me?
No. I refused to entertain that possibility.
“You’re right; when we first met I didn’t see a broken girl. I saw a girl who needed a friend, and I wanted to be that friend. All I ever wanted was to be someone you could count on, El.”
“What about now? What do you want to be now, Bryce?” she asked. I expected her to break our eye-contact, to avoid looking at me, but she didn’t. She searched my eyes like they held the key to my answer.
Surveying her for the fiftieth time today, I let myself truly study her face. If I had to create a checklist for what physical features qualify a person as beautiful, I’d start with Elliot’s. A mouth with full lips to frame a smile so bright it’d outshine the moon. Almond-shaped eyes with a hint of an upward slant each time she smiled. Cheekbones that were high and round and always sported a unique shade of pink when she blushed. Expressive eyebrows that lifted into matching, inverted Vs when something surprised her.
I put a stop to my perusal before my eyes could wander south because thinking about other parts of her right now was asking for trouble. I’d stopped drinking already, but had consumed enough that the liquor flowing through my system drowned out reason and dared me to throw logic out the window.
I want to be the reason behind all your biggest smiles.
I want to be the only one who makes you blush.
I want to be whatever you need me to be.
“I still want to be someone you can count on. That’s not changing, El.”
She exhaled a breath and flashed another one of her dazzling smiles. “I want to be that for you too, Bryce. Do you think…” Her words dangled in the air while she shifted in her seat and played out some kind of internal debate about whether or not she should continue.
“Would we be crazy to risk what could potentially be the best friendship in history by venturing into the more-than-friends zone?”
“You mean would we be pluots?”
She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Bryce, I’m serious. What if we’re making a mistake? What if we ruin us by crossing that line?”
I reached under the table and found her hands in her lap. She twined her fingers around mine, and I seriously doubted the possibility of a day when this—we—didn’t feel right. “Hate to break it to you, but what we’re doing now crosses that line, even if we’re only slowly dipping our toes into the ‘more-than-friends’ zone. I know the timing is less than ideal, but there’s no such thing as the ‘right time’ when it comes to this. That’s not the way life works, Uno. I also know you’ve got at least a dozen more ‘what ifs’ bubbling up in that overworked brain of yours. Thing is…the wrong kind of what if questions are the reason people settle. For mediocrity instead of excellence. For stability instead of passion. For status quo instead of striving for more. Consider the alternative; what if we create an even better us by crossing that line?”
That particular what if was the lifeline I held on to each time the doubt and uncertainty tried to creep in.
This was Elliot. She was nothing like Bridgette. Nothing like Helen. There was no way she’d do what they did.
“I see your point,” she agreed with a nod. “But some of those what ifs are worth at least some consideration.”
“Like what?”
“What if we have disagreements in the professional aspect of our relationship?”
“Then we work them out and find a way to leave work out of our personal lives. People maintain a separation between business and pleasure all the time.”
She leaned forward and dropped her voice. “What if we, uh, have no chemistry in bed?”
A loud snort of laughter erupted from me, and it took me a full six seconds to get it under control. El crossed her arms and stared at me. “Is that seriously a question you have? Because I’m pretty sure it’s more likely that the sparks between us will set the bed on fire.”
“Oh, right, I forgot I was talking to McMagicDick.”
“I’d be offended you forgot, but I know you’re actually dying to get me naked. You let a little drool slip yesterday when I opened the door.”
Her mouth fell into a little ‘o’ shape, but she quickly snapped it shut and smacked my leg. “Did not! And whatever, we both know your state of undress was deliberate. Guys with bodies like yours are well aware of the effect they have on the female brain. Don’t deny it.”
“What exactly do you mean, bodies like yours?”
“I am so not padding your ego, McHotBod. But I will say that you definitely give the term ‘dad bod’ a way better meaning.”
“Too late, you already padded it when I caught you gawking.” I grinned, loving that two soft-pink stains on her cheeks totally contradicted the fake annoyance she tried to sell with an eye roll. “So, is that it for the what ifs plaguing you?”
She shook her head. “What if…Bryce, what if Peyton hates me?”
“El, she’s not going to hate you. And if she does…well, sometimes she hates me for putting shoes on her feet. Or for putting the wrong shoes on her feet. Toddlers are mercurial like that. Think of it like Texas weather—don’t like her mood? Stick around, it’ll change soon enough.”
She bit her lip and shook her head, resting her crossed arms on the table and drumming her pink nails against her biceps. “How can you be so sure? The last small child I was around was Sophia. I have no idea how to handle them. You will hate me when I screw something up.”
“Two years ago, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d held a baby. I’d never touched a diaper. Hadn’t so much as thought about things like teething rings or formula. When it comes to kids, screwing up is inevitable. There’s not a parent in the world with a magic formula for how to perfectly raise kids. Take it from the king of parental screw-ups—all we can do is give it our best and learn from trial and error.”
I didn’t fault Elliot for having concerns; I’d have been shocked if she didn’t have those kinds of questions. But what she didn’t understand—yet—was that her having those kinds of questions was exactly how I knew she’d be just fine when it came to her relationship with Peyton.
“I highly doubt that you’re the king of parental screw-ups, Bryce, but you’re right. Hypotheticals breed unnecessary doubt, and I thought the point of tonight was for me to be carefree and fun, not a Debbie-downer.”
“Good point. What’d you have in mind? Shots?” I asked, truly curious about the plan I practically felt her forming as she searched the bar. Her smile shifted from sweet to pure mischief when her eyes stopped roaming, and it sent a jolt of excitement straight through me. Well, straight through a certain part of me.
“Better!” she exclaimed, jumping up and running across the room.
A group of people hovering around the bar blocked my view of what she was doing, but I didn’t have to wait long before she reappeared, both hands behind her back and trouble dancing in her eyes.
“Did you know there’s a bucket of random games by the door?” She brought her arm around and set a deck of playing cards on the table. “I’m thinking we pick a game and the loser has to do winner’s choice of shots.”
“I’m in. But, to make it fair, I think we should each get to choose a game, then pick a third one we both agree on. Best out of three. That way there’s no way one of us can claim the other ‘cheated’ their way to victory.”
She gasped dramatically. “I would never!”
“Yeah, okay. And denial is just a river in Egypt.”
“I’m glad you’ve got a solid supply of dad jokes, Bryce. Those will come in handy when you’re trying to find the humor in defeat.”
She pulled the cards out and started shuffling, briefly looking up to put her smirk on full display. A groan slipped from my throat at the sight of her, but she either chose to ignore it or was taking her shuffling way too seriously.
Shit. How am I ever going to focus on a card game when a few taunting words from her makes my dick twitch? Add in her smirk, and I’m
seconds from contemplating the logistics of somehow jerking off right here.
“So, what’s your game of choice? Mine’s slapjack. It’s a great way to keep the old reflexes sharp, don’t you think? Gotta make sure those brain-to-hand synapses are all firing.” She paused to lean across the table, simultaneously getting within whispering range and giving me a close-up of her modest cleavage. “But I should probably warn you, Bryce…I’m really good with my hands.”
Her voice was raspy and coated in seduction, and I was certain I’d never been more turned on by a fully-clothed woman before in my life. But that’s just it. When it came to El, our banter and her brain turned me on as much as her body did. It’s how I knew she was different—this was different.
“I’m on to you, Kincaid,” I said, forcing my brain to focus on winning our games and not on how desperate I was to pin her up against the nearest hard surface. “You’re good. But I’m better. I choose crazy eights for mine, and I think it’s only fitting that we make war the third one.”
“I can live with war. You know, some people call crazy eights ‘screw your neighbor.’”
“Huh. I guess some people like to call it what it is.” I adjusted my glasses and gave her a smirk. “That’s the name of the game, after all… screwing your neighbor, I mean.”
“Not if she screws you first,” she replied coolly, but the flush that crept over her cheeks and into her neck gave away my effect on her.
I buried a smile.
Touché, Uno.
An impartial coin toss decided the first game—crazy eights. For the sake of time, we agreed eights would be worth twenty points instead of fifty, and the first person to get to fifty points won.
It only took a few rounds for me to hit fifty.
“How do you feel about kamikaze shots?” I asked, collecting the cards to shuffle. “Or maybe tequila. I do love the idea of you doing a body shot off me.”
“Don’t get excited yet, McCocky. I don’t want you to say you only lost slapjack because you were distracted by that idea.”
