Three Little Words

by Jenny Holiday

  He’d been sitting cross-legged on the bed before, but when he came back with his drink, he mimicked her position, leaning back against the headboard and extending his legs in front of him along the bed. Not that she could see him doing it. She could feel it. He was close. There were only a couple of inches between her shoulder and his, between her thigh and his.

  He took a long drink before speaking. “I don’t even know, really, and that’s not just me trying to get out of answering the question. For a long time, I wanted to not care. They weren’t in my life for so long, and I always thought if I could just wash my hands of them, that would be ideal, but…”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “Basically. I went about my business. It wasn’t like it crippled me or anything, but I suppose I always had this unresolved junk hanging in my mind when it came to my parents. For God’s sake, it kept me from ever going back to Charleston, and I love Charleston. That’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?”

  “Eh, I think it’s pretty normal. Human beings will go way out of their way to avoid facing uncomfortable truths.”

  She set down her half-eaten chicken wing.

  “So, as for what I actually want…Well, you could probably surmise that my father’s reaction to my appearance was unexpected, to say the least.”

  “I did.”

  “And this idea you floated, of them coming to the restaurant…”

  “I’m sorry again about that. I overstepped. It’s not my business.”

  She felt him turn toward her. “No. It’s perfect, actually. Because I think the best-case scenario, one I never even dared to imagine, is some kind of meaningful relationship with my father.” He laughed in what sounded like disbelief. “If you’d asked me yesterday if that was possible, I would have bet the restaurant against it. But having him come to me, having him see what I’ve made. He might…I don’t know? Get it?”

  “He will.” Of that she had no doubt. No one could see Bennett at work in his restaurant, eat his food, and not be blown away by his utter mastery. By his unmitigated success.

  “And as for my mother?” He snorted. “I guess we all have to have at least one terrible relative, don’t we?”

  She reached across the few inches of darkness between them, found his arm, then slid her hand down it until she reached his bottle of tea, and clinked her wine bottle against it. “Here’s to terrible mothers.”

  “Yeah, I think I’d like to have a word with yours.”

  “Ha. It’s your turn. Dare me to call her, while your phone still has juice, and you can have a word with her.” But then, lest he think she was serious, she quickly added, “But you can’t, because I pick truth again.” There was only enough room in this crazy day for one of them to confront their fucked-up families.

  “Okay,” he said. “What’s the deal with the ladybug earrings?”

  She jumped a little. She had not expected an easy question like that. But also, it was kind of weird to be asked about the earrings while they were sitting in the pitch darkness. It wasn’t like he could see them at the moment.

  “Elise gave them to me. She’s the fourth bridesmaid.”

  “Right. You, Jane, Wendy, and Elise. You four are tight? Or is that another question?”

  “Nah, that’s just backstory. Yeah, we’re…” Best friends was the answer, but sometimes those words didn’t seem strong enough. Embarrassingly, her throat tightened. She swallowed hard. “They’re my people.”

  “They don’t give you the shit that those preteen harpies did?”

  She laughed. “No. That’s why I love them. And also probably why I was such a bitch when you met me. It sounds dumb, but I would do anything for those girls. So I lost my mind a little about getting the dress to the wedding.”

  “You’re loyal. It’s a good thing.”

  “Well, I’m loyal to them. Everyone else can fuck right off.”

  He chuckled. “So why do they inspire loyalty when no one else does?”

  “Because they know me.”

  “They know you. The you that’s more than your beauty, you mean.”

  “Well—”

  “So you admit that you have more to offer besides beauty.” He spoke with a triumphant, teasing tone as he referred to their previous conversation about her skills—or lack of them.

  “I don’t admit it.” He started to object, but she kept talking. “It’s not like I have bad self-esteem, Bennett. I know I’m not book smart. But I am self-aware, which, of the two, I’ll take any day. I don’t have any other skills, but I do have feelings. Likes and dislikes. That sort of stuff. Those girls know about all that stuff. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “But you do have—”

  “So there’s the four of us.” She interrupted him because she wasn’t getting into this argument again. “But we also kind of sort into pairs of best friends. Wendy and Jane go way back to childhood. They went to university together, where they met Elise. I was younger than them—I was in first year when they were seniors. Elise was my resident assistant. So it was her job to like me, which she teasingly reminds me of when I’m being a brat.”

  “But you became real friends.”

  “Yep. Right away. I mean, she did her job—she counseled me as required and made me come to excruciating group events where we practiced rolling condoms onto bananas. And she was a great sounding board when I was considering quitting school to really give modeling a go. But from the start, it went beyond that. It was like, with her, I just knew.”

  “Like love at first sight.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, the earrings: Elise gave them to me when I left school. She used to call me Ladybug, because when I started school, I’d done my hair in this black-to-auburn ombré. It looked horrible.”

  “Ombré?”

  “It’s like where one color gradually bleeds into another.”

  “Like a peach. Kind of red in the middle, near the pit, but it becomes yellow as you move toward the skin.”

  “That’s actually totally right.” Leave it to him to come up with a food example. “So that’s it. Not much of a story there. What made you ask that question?”

  His hand came to her ear, and it sent a bolt of awareness down her neck. A finger traced the outer shell, and then came down to the lobe until it found the earring.

  “I don’t know.” His voice was hot and dark, like the room. “I like them.” His hand lingered.

  She had to force herself to keep still. She wanted to roll her neck, to shove her head toward him and purr, like a cat begging for a caress. His touch felt so good.

  “Dare,” he said suddenly, and oh, she was tempted. The setup was perfect to ask for something dirty. That’s what you did when you played truth or dare in the dark with boys, right? What would she ask, if she could? The first thing that popped into her mind was I dare you to put your head between my legs and eat me out until I scream.

  Which…hell. But she wouldn’t go there. She wasn’t a jerk.

  Well, she was kind of a jerk a lot of the time, but not of the sexual-predator variety.

  She huffed a sigh, half-aroused by her dirty imaginings, half-frustrated by the knowledge that they would never come to be realized.

  “What?” he said.

  She had to think of something else. She cast around, trying to remember the things they used to make each other do when she was a kid. Usually it involved consuming cayenne pepper. “Um, I dare you to do twenty push-ups.”

  The hand on her ear disappeared, and she wanted to howl in protest.

  “Okaaay.” He stretched the word out to signal his skepticism.

  She didn’t blame him. It wasn’t a good dare. Or at least it wasn’t a good dare for the dark. If he was going to do push-ups, she wanted to watch him. You know, just to continue torturing herself.

  He got off the bed, and she heard him drop to the floor.

  “Don’t cheat just because I can’t see you,” she teased.

  “I never would.” S
he knew it was true. He was a man of his word.

  The dare wasn’t entirely unsatisfying because after what she assumed were the first few push-ups, he started huffing and grunting, which was…affecting. She shifted around on the bed, restless. Achy—but she told herself that was from the sedentary driving day. The knee that had been giving her trouble since the Vogue shoot still hurt.

  “Twenty.” He got up, breathing heavily. “Damn, it’s getting hot in here without the AC.” Then she heard the swish of fabric. Was he taking his shirt off? That would be an entirely reasonable thing to do in this heat, post–twenty push-ups, but…gaaah.

  “Dare,” she said as he sat, heat radiating off his torso.

  He chugged his tea and leaned back against the headboard where he’d been before. “I dare you to tell me something no one else knows about you.”

  “That’s not fair. That’s more like a truth.”

  She sensed rather than saw him shrug. “I dare you to tell me a truth.”

  The answer popped right into her head. Or maybe not—maybe it was already there, just waiting to be found. She’d certainly been thinking enough about it in the last couple days.

  She didn’t have to tell him that truth, though.

  There were any number of things she could say. She could tell him about the time she and another model broke into the pool at the Ritz Paris after hours—Elise knew about that, but it would sound credible as something she’d never told anyone. She could tell him that she was thinking of getting an apartment in Toronto, because she’d lately been overtaken by this weird compulsion to put down roots somewhere.

  But there was something about this night that invited confidences. That was ripe for truth. No, that wasn’t entirely it. There was something about the particular combination of this night and this man. He’d told her so much, so easily, about his life. Opened himself to her, a person who hadn’t been very kind to him initially.

  And, astonishingly, despite the darkness, he seemed to see her, to really see her, in a way that no one besides the girls did.

  And the answer to his question was right there in her throat, bubbling up. It wanted to be out in the world. So she opened her mouth to free it. She spoke in the barest of whispers, but she knew he would hear her, because he paid attention to her.

  “I have a problem with food.”

  Chapter Ten

  I know,” Bennett said. When she didn’t say anything else, but rather expelled a loud breath that sounded like it was partway to a sob, his heart broke a little. “Oh, sweetheart.” He set down his tea, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her to his chest. The dark made it easy to make the probably-too-familiar gesture without overthinking it.

  “I just…I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted and never gain weight.”

  She spoke haltingly. He stroked her back and held her, sensing she was working through her thoughts as she verbalized them.

  “But not anymore. Now…I don’t know.”

  She sounded disgusted with herself.

  “That’s normal,” he said. “That’s just, unfortunately, what happens to your metabolism as you age. It’s true for all of us.”

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know that with my mind.”

  He tightened his arms around her, feeling a little bad about how sweaty he was, but she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she burrowed into him, so her next words were somewhat muffled as she spoke them against his skin.

  “I’m stuck. Modeling is my thing. It’s what I do. I’m good at it. But I’m getting too fat to keep doing it.”

  “Okay, you’re not fat. That’s just objectively not true.” He knew she knew that—she must know that—but he couldn’t let that one slide.

  “You know what I mean. I already have a rep in the industry for being difficult.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t take shit.”

  “What do you mean by shit?”

  “Oh, you know, sexual harassment mostly.”

  Jesus Christ. Something inside him, some sleeping monster he’d had no idea was in there, got to its feet and bared its fangs. With great effort he leashed the monster and forced his tone to be measured so as not to puncture the astonishing intimacy they seemed to have achieved. “That doesn’t sound like ‘difficult.’ That sounds like ‘smart.’”

  She ignored the correction. “So now I’m difficult and fat. On my last job, they had to have me trade dresses with another model because I couldn’t fit into the one they’d wanted me in.”

  He thought back to that first evening at the airport, when she’d been raging and then surprised him by blurting out how hungry she was.

  Yeah, this was not okay. He knew, rationally, that he couldn’t solve this for her, but there was no way she was going back to that fucked-up world believing that she was somehow not good enough for it. He couldn’t say it like that, though. She would only bristle and remind him that he had no claim on her. And she would be right. So instead he tried, “Maybe it’s time to do something else.”

  “But what else? That’s the problem.”

  Suddenly it all made sense. All her talk about not having any skills. Which was not true. She was funny and smart. She’d solved a bunch of his problems, little ones like what to do with all the leftovers at the restaurant and big ones like his freaking family.

  She probably wouldn’t listen to his objections, though. In fact, she was starting to get restless in his arms. She probably regretted her confession, and she was getting antsy now, in search of an escape.

  “There’s nothing else I can do.” She pressed against his chest to try to free herself from his hold. “So I just have to work harder to—”

  He couldn’t stand to hear her run herself down anymore. He also couldn’t stand the thought of letting her go, so he did what felt like the most logical thing in the world: he put his mouth on hers in order to make her stop talking.

  Hell, he still had one more kick at the can before her stupid rule about not sleeping with the same guy more than twice kicked in, and he’d already broken his rule, so why not? Because kiss his grits, but all of a sudden he would throw his stupid code, the one that had governed his whole life since he’d left the gutter, out the goddamned window for one more chance with her.

  She gave a squeak of surprise, but it was followed by a sigh, and she went limp in his arms and opened her mouth to him so fast that he might have laughed had he not been so incredibly turned on by her surrender.

  He groaned and deepened the kiss, sliding his tongue into her mouth. He was rewarded with an answering moan, but then she pushed on his chest again, and he couldn’t ignore that.

  Regret sliced through him as he loosened his hold on her so she could pull away.

  She touched his face, the way a blind person would, and perhaps it was her way of trying to read his expression in the dark. “I thought you didn’t do casual.”

  Relief replaced regret at the idea that she wasn’t necessarily calling a halt to the proceedings, just checking up on him and his morals. He grinned under her fingers. “I’m making an exception.”

  “I’m not going to be your girlfriend.” Her hands shook a little as she spoke, though, and he sensed she was weakening.

  “I know.” He gently pulled her hands down and dipped his head to press a kiss to her throat.

  She sighed and threw up another warning. “I’m not going on any dates with you.”

  “I know,” he repeated, finding her waist in the dark and letting his hands settle there.

  “So this goes against all your rules.”

  “I know.” It made no sense, but he was going to take Gia however she would have him for as long as she would have him, even if that was only one more time in a pitch-black hotel room. He slid a hand under her tank top and let it come to rest on her taut stomach. He wouldn’t go any further until he knew for sure that she was okay with this, though, so he asked the question that would make his intentions crystal clear: “Do you have condo
ms somewhere in that giant handbag of yours?”

  Please let her have condoms.

  “Yes.” And with a sigh that shaded into a moan, she was finally done objecting.

  He slid his hand up over her ribs, then over the gentle slope of a breast, and she sucked in a sharp breath as he reached the hard nipple at its center. “But first can you—” She moaned again, louder this time, and he loved being able to make her do that.

  “First can I what?” He tweaked her nipple.

  “Oh!”

  “I didn’t quite catch that,” he teased. Suddenly intent on making sure she never managed to articulate whatever it was she’d been planning to say, he let one of his hands slide down her shorts. He burrowed his fingers inside her panties, wishing for enough light to see what kind they were.

  “You bastard,” she panted, arching her back in a way that suggested she thought he was, in fact, the opposite of a bastard.

  “I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it.” He swirled his fingers lightly, the way he’d figured out she liked last night, when he’d been able to study her face as he got her off. “You were saying you wanted me to do something?” He swirled again. “Something other than this?”

  She yelped in frustration and grabbed his face with both hands, as if she was forcing him to look at her even though the dark made it impossible. Then she spoke clearly and confidently, all her problems with speech disappearing completely. “Yes. I want you to go down on me before you put on a condom and fuck me.”

  Oh, fuck. Jesus Christ. She’d called his bluff. He’d thought he had her at his mercy, but the joke was on him. For a moment, he was afraid he was going to come in his pants like a teenager. But he got control of himself and wasted no time shoving her shorts and underwear off and settling his face between her legs.

  “Oh my God!” she cried when his lips made contact with her.

  All right; that was better. He liked making her lose her mind like that. He chuckled and burrowed his tongue inside her.

  “Oh my God!”

  Yep. Oh my God—at least when it came from Gia—had officially become his favorite phrase.

  He wondered how many more times he could make her say it before the night was done.