by Chloe Cox
“I wish I had another pillow to throw at you.”
“I deserve it,” Lola said, leaning back against the other end of the couch and propping her feet up on Adra’s legs. “Are you ever going to tell me about it?”
For once, Adra didn’t quite know what to say. She didn’t find it difficult to talk about her past, necessarily, but Ford…Ford felt so raw. She could barely think about it, let alone find the words to talk about it.
“Maybe when I finally stop wishing that things were different,” she finally said.
“Don’t wait too long, honey,” Lola said.
Adra looked up. It didn’t seem like Lola was just talking about opening up anymore.
Lola raised a sympathetic eyebrow. “You’ll kick yourself for it later.”
Adra looked down and fumbled with her phone for a distraction, suddenly uncomfortable under the glare of Lola’s insights. There were a lot of things that Adra might regret, but that didn’t always mean she had the power to change them. Case in point: the texts waiting for her on her phone.
They were from Derrick Duvall. A phone number she hadn’t deleted just so she’d know to screen his calls if one ever came. It never had, until now.
“I hear we’re going to be working together again,” it said. “It will be good to see you, Adra.”
How exactly was she supposed to react to that? She’d had no contact with Derrick since he’d literally disappeared from her life. Was she just supposed to pretend this was normal?
Adra hated doing that, which was ironic, given her job as an agent. But, she was a professional. She could do the job. She could always do the job. And she could remind herself that even though Derrick Duvall had confirmed what she’d always known—that trusting men was a losing proposition—he did it because he was an ass, not because of anything Adra had done. He’d probably left a dozen women high and dry in the intervening years. Perhaps not admirably, that made her feel better.
And then she read the next text.
“Just an FYI, Ellen’s going to drop by the set the first day. Don’t make it awkward.”
Don’t make it awkward.
Wow.
Ellen Rice was the woman Derrick had left her for. Another sub in the same club at the time, some awful place that had long since closed, but the only place Adra had known about at the time. Derrick was still with Ellen. He hadn’t left because he was a serial abandoner; he really had left her.
“Well, if that’s not a kick in the fork,” Adra muttered.
“What’s that?” Lola laughed.
“Nothing,” Adra said, shaking her head. She plastered a smile on her face for Lola’s sake.
“You ready for Friday?” Lola asked.
“Ready to kick ass, ma’am,” Adra answered.
She even meant it, kind of. Didn’t mean she was looking forward to spending all that time with the two men who had rejected her most profoundly, even if technically Ford had only rejected her after she’d kind of, sort of rejected him. Somehow it was worse to lose Ford’s friendship than it had been to lose all of Derrick, but they both still stung. So no, she wasn’t looking forward to having all that loss shoved in her face all day, every day.
Except that was a lie. She always looked forward to seeing Ford. Even when it hurt.
Maybe she was a little bit of a masochist.
Three
Ford cursed and jumped up to do another round of pull-ups on the bar he’d had installed in his office. He had never needed to burn off excess energy like he had the past few days, thinking about this freaking movie situation. No, not the movie. Adra and the movie.
The meeting with that insane producer had been bad enough. Ford had arrived on edge already, worried that something was wrong with Adra only to find out that if there wasn’t already something wrong there would be soon, because they’d have to work on this movie together.
He was pissed.
And then Adra had walked in just in time to hear Ford talk about what a mistake he’d made. Ford had been talking about the movie contract, but Adra didn’t know that. The look on her face had told him everything he needed to know: she’d looked hurt. Sad. Heartbroken. She’d assumed he had been talking about her. The worst part was that he could have been talking about her—sleeping with Adra the way he had obviously had been a mistake, because look at them now.
The difference was that was a mistake he could never bring himself to regret making.
Jesus, just looking at her. Just thinking about her made him insane with lust.
And then he’d seen her hurt, and it had hurt him about ten times more than he’d thought possible. He’d spent the rest of the meeting trying to find some damn way to let her know that’s not what he’d meant without embarrassing the hell out of her. Well, he’d managed to focus on that until the bomb was dropped.
Derrick Duvall was Adra’s ex.
It had taken all the self-control Ford had not to lose it. In that moment he was pretty sure he could have literally killed Roman.
It wasn’t until later, when he’d had time to calm down, that he thought about all the other implications of this little revelation. First and foremost, he hadn’t known about any of Adra’s exes, let alone one that was fucking famous. She’d been his best friend, and he hadn’t known this basic fact about her past. Adra knew practically everything about everyone, because everyone inevitably confided in her, because she was always taking care of everyone. But no one knew about her, not even, apparently, Ford.
He’d just assumed that what Adra had told him had always been true—that she didn’t do relationships. That she couldn’t get “involved.”
Ford had been straight up dumbfounded when Adra had told him that after they’d slept together, not least because they very obviously already were “involved,” whatever she wanted to call it. He’d almost laughed—it was this weird role reversal, the kind of thing you’d expect a young guy to pull on some poor woman after a one-night stand. Except Ford was a grown man, and he knew what he had in front of him. He knew what they’d both felt. He knew what they were to each other.
And it wasn’t nothing.
And then he’d been so goddamned wrong.
So why did he feel like he was the asshole here?
He’d trusted what he’d felt for the first time in years with Adra, and he’d been wrong. But then, the more Adra retreated, the more she tried to steal looks at him and then ran away when he looked back, he knew he hadn’t been wrong about what she wanted, or about what she’d felt. Maybe he’d just been wrong about her. She played games.
And Ford couldn’t do that, ever again. His ex-wife had seen to that. And he was too old to go chasing after women who gave him mixed signals. More than that, he was a goddamn Dom. His whole existence revolved around consent. If Adra told him she couldn’t do something, he would respect it. So he had removed himself.
But he couldn’t shake the memory of Adra’s heartbroken face when she’d heard him say the word “mistake.”
Where the hell was she?
Ford checked the time. He’d spent too long thinking about Adra and trying to work off all this aggravation—that producer’s schedule had them meeting about five minutes ago. Cursing, Ford jogged down the stairs, descending into the madness that was a movie production crew.
Club Volare was overrun.
These people had brought power tools. There were construction workers and electricians and people with light meters running around. Ford had no idea what went into making a movie, but whatever it was, it wasn’t magic—it was work. All those people were busy running wires and setting up giant lights and in general messing with his club. They’d wanted the entire compound, but Ford had put his foot down. They could have access to the public club, nothing more. The rest of Volare was still for the members.
He wouldn’t know it to look around, though. Pure freaking chaos. And in the middle of it all, there was Adra.
She looked pale. Weak. Unhappy. And Ford recognized who she was tal
king to from the billboard on Sunset. It was Derrick Duvall.
“Dammit,” he muttered.
That was the last time he’d drop this particular ball. He wasn’t going to let Derrick Duvall add to Adra’s stress. Just because Adra had messed with his own head and turned out to be someone he couldn’t be with—and, he reminded himself, who didn’t want to be with him—didn’t negate all the other wonderful things he knew about her, and he’d be damned if he saw her hurt anymore.
Adra was drowning.
She’d thought she’d be able to handle it, sort of. But the truth was, this was the first time she’d seen Derrick since he dumped her, and this was the first time ever that she’d met the woman he left her for—Ellen Partridge—and she was having to do it all in front of the actress who was cast as the female lead in Submit and Surrender, Olivia Cress.
To make everything about a million times worse, Ellen Partridge was really, really nice.
Couldn’t you just…be awful? Try being awful. Just try, Adra urged silently.
Nothing.
Adra actually kind of felt sorry for Ellen, because Derrick had not changed. Or, maybe he had. It was actually way more comforting to think that he had changed, and that he hadn’t been this obviously lascivious and leering when she was with him. But Adra knew better.
She was pretty sure that Derrick had already undressed her with his eyes. Like as some sort of bullshit proprietary ex-Dom thing that made her feel vaguely dirty. So here she was, having to play nice, disgusted by Derrick and yet still overrun with insecurity. She had to admit, though: she kind of liked that Ellen apparently insisted on meeting Olivia. Adra would feel the same way if her Dom had been cast to star in the first major Hollywood movie about a BDSM relationship: she would want to meet that on-screen sub. And if a real-life ex-sub was the one consulting on the sex scenes? Ouch.
Yeah, Adra actually felt for Ellen. Even if Ellen was shooting dagger eyes at her the entire time.
So there was some tension when Ford arrived.
And then there was considerably more when Ford actually touched her.
It was just a little thing. Just a hand on her arm, pulling her gently back, putting space between her and Derrick. Adra hadn’t even realized how much Derrick had encroached on her space until suddenly Ford was there, between them, like a human shield.
And she hadn’t realized how much she had missed Ford’s touch until it had set fire to her skin.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ford said. “What’d I miss?”
God, his voice. Gruffer than usual. Rough, with that deep undertone. Like the palms of his hands—rough in some places, smooth in others.
Not a helpful thought, Adra.
She cleared her throat, fought to find words, and tried to ignore the very interested expressions on Olivia and Ellen’s faces.
“Nothing,” Adra said, perhaps more forcefully than she needed to. “We were just getting to know each other.”
“Some of us already know each other,” Derrick said and extended his hand. “I’m Derrick Duvall. This is Ellen, my girlfriend, and that’s Olivia Cress.”
There was a pause before Ford shook Derrick's hand.
“I’m Ford Colson,” he said, nodding to both Ellen and Olivia. “I’ll be working with Adra here to show you guys the ropes.”
Olivia laughed and raised an eyebrow, but didn’t manage to hide her nervousness. “Literal ropes?” she said.
Ford smiled politely. “Maybe. I don’t know what the script calls for.”
Adra felt vaguely ill. Which is possibly why she tried to change the subject, even if she changed it to, well, an even worse subject.
“We’re supposed to give them a tour,” she blurted out.
Which, of course, Adra was dreading. It meant giving a tour of all the rooms, the equipment, the whole shebang. That was specifically what the producers had asked for: “the whole shebang.” They’d also said, “You know, like a kinky orientation,” principally for the benefit, Adra guessed, of Olivia.
Because Derrick, of course, was already very familiar with all of it.
So now she got to go on a tour of kinkdom with both Derrick and Ford. Yeah, she wasn’t looking forward to this at all. Which must have been obvious, because the next thing she knew, Ford was standing a little closer, his brow all furrowed, his eyes worried.
His hand on the small of her back.
“Don’t worry,” he said, smiling gently. “You give the world’s best tours. As long as you don’t make me dress up this time.”
“That sounds like a story,” Olivia laughed.
It was.
It just took a while for Adra’s brain to realize there was anything else in the world going on except Ford’s hand on the small of her back.
When she did? When she remembered what he meant? She almost wanted to cry. It was how they’d become friends, when Ford had first come out from New York to L.A. to help set up the new Club Volare location.
“It is,” Adra said, trying to recover her voice. She looked up at Ford, afraid of what she might see there. He was smiling, his eyes dancing like he was remembering, too. “I told Ford I’d show him around L.A. when he first moved out here, but he was such a New York snob about it—”
“Hold on. I wasn’t, and never have been, a snob,” Ford objected. “A realist, maybe.”
“A snob,” Adra went on, smiling herself now. “So I thought I’d mess with him a little bit.”
“Just a little,” Ford said.
Adra finally let herself laugh. It felt unreasonably good. “I took him to see a midnight screening of Clueless and told him it was like those midnight screenings of Rocky Horror where everyone gets dressed up.”
“You didn’t,” Olivia said, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Oh I did,” Adra said. “He wore a mid-nineties stoner costume. For me.”
“You did that, dude?” Derrick asked.
“You got the worst of it,” Ford said to Adra. “I just had to dress up like a stoned skateboarder.”
“You dressed up, too?” Even Ellen was smiling.
Adra laughed again. She’d grown up in the Valley around the time Clueless had come out; it hadn’t been exactly hard to pull off something a little retro. But it had involved some truly regrettable clothing.
“Well, I had to sell it,” she explained. “Besides, I make a great Cher.”
“You made a fantastic Cher,” Ford said.
There was a silence.
Or maybe she imagined it; Adra had no idea anymore. She just knew she couldn’t stop looking at Ford. He was smiling at her. He was looking at her like he used to, like Ford, like…like not a stranger. Or not like he was trying to keep something from her, like he wasn’t a million miles away anymore, but right here, back with her.
It was like coming in from the cold. Which a part of her rebelled against, because how screwed up was that? How much sway did this one person have over how she was feeling, over her happiness? How could that possibly be healthy?
And the rest of her was shouting, Just shut up and take it. Because he felt a whole lot like shelter in the middle of this shitstorm of a situation.
So of course it was Derrick who broke the silence.
“Yeah, well, how’d that turn out for you?” he said.
It took Adra more than a moment to realize he wasn’t talking about her and Ford, but Ford and the movie masquerade prank of 2012. And that he was being a little bit of a dick.
“Actually pretty well,” Ford replied. “Definitely broke the ice.”
“Speaking of which, we’ve got a read-through in a bit, so we should probably get going?” They all looked at Olivia, who appeared to be the only one capable of staying professional at the moment, even though she was doing it with a kind sort of smile. Adra liked her already.
“Tour?” Adra said.
“Tour,” Ford said. Ellen reluctantly said goodbye to Derrick, and the rest of them headed up to the play areas.
Adra, for her part
, kind of checked out at first, and let Ford give the standard intro to Club Volare and BDSM. Safe, sane, consensual, etc. Some of it was definitely old hat for Derrick, but Olivia seemed to be soaking it up. Adra, on the other hand, was mostly reveling in the relief she felt around Ford.
It was…it was intoxicating, somehow. How easy it was with him. How much she’d missed it. And given how long she’d gone without this easy rapport, this certainty that she could give him a sidelong look and he’d just get it, this feeling of comfort that he was always at her back, it was disorienting as all hell. Out of nowhere, he’d gone from avoiding her, to…what? What was this?
It was like having her best friend back, and more. That “more” was maybe the problem.
And so was the fact that she had no idea if she could trust any of it.
“Adra?”
She was startled out of her own thoughts by the voice of her ex. Adra looked at Derrick, kind of dumbfounded—apparently he’d been talking for a while. And apparently he’d asked her a question or something.
She had no idea what.
But she could tell from the look on Derrick's face, as she just kind of shook her head and shrugged, that he did not appreciate being ignored. It was a look she recognized from years ago, when he’d screwed up a scene, or when some other Dom had disagreed with him and had the nerve to be right about it. She used to dread seeing it because it would mean he’d be all sullen and difficult until she’d managed to assuage his ego.
God, had she really done that? Why?
Now Adra just hid a smile.
Derrick glowered.
“That covers the basics,” Ford was saying. He smiled. “Now to the fun stuff.”
Olivia almost seemed to shiver, but she was smiling, her eyes searching the room, resting on various pieces of equipment. Adra couldn’t help but follow her gaze, thinking back to how it had all looked when it was new to her.
It was a fun memory…until her eyes rested on the restraint table.
Oh God.
That was where she and Ford had…
They hadn’t even used the restraints at first. There hadn’t been time. It hadn’t felt like there was time for anything at all, not for talking, not for thinking, not for freaking breathing. They’d just needed each other, right then, right there, as much as possible.
