“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this,” I say.
He chuckles. “It was just something I noticed. That’s all. Guess I’m just trying to make up for some of the things we missed out on.”
I can assure him, he’s the last person a younger me would have ever approached for dating advice.
“Aerin reminds me of your mother in a lot of ways—”
Leaning forward, I rap on the partition. “Stop the car.”
“C.J.”
The driver rolls down the glass. “Did you need something, sir?”
“Yes, I need you to let me the fuck out of this car.”
He’s not allowed to talk about her. He’s not allowed to wax poetic about all the things that made him love her, all the things that were great about her. He’s not allowed to feign nostalgia about the woman whose life he intentionally cast aside so that he could have a better one.
Not to mention the fact that Aerin Keane and Gwyneth Welles couldn’t be more dissimilar. My mother was effervescent and carefree. Aerin is uptight and collected. The only thing they have in common is their hair color, and even that might be a stretch.
“C.J.” My dad’s voice is lower, his chin tucked. I’m embarrassing him, but it’s about damn time someone did.
The driver glances over his shoulder before pulling into a no parking zone, and I waste no time showing myself out of the Town Car and hitting the pavement.
“Where are you going?” he yells after me. “Was it something I said?”
I don’t answer.
“Get back here this instant. We have reservations!”
The sky above rumbles and the drops of water pelting me grow heavier by the second, but I’ll be home soon enough.
I keep walking until I lose myself in a rain-splattered crowd, and I wait a couple of blocks before checking to ensure he didn’t have his driver follow me. As soon as I get a chance, I text Aerin my address, telling her to grab the files off my desk and meet me there in half an hour.
HIS PLACE ISN’T AT all what I expected.
It’s a third-floor walk-up. No doorman. No elevator. It’s modest and modern, all granite and stainless in the kitchen, wood floors throughout, West Elm-esque furniture carefully placed, but there are no chef’s-quality appliances, no collection of Baccarat tumblers backlit in some fancy corner bar.
It’s actually impressively humble and completely contradicts the man I’ve been working for the past week or so.
“You can put everything on the table there,” he points to a corner, toward a table covered in randomness. His hair is damp, whether it’s from the shower or the rain, I don’t know. And a white t-shirt and dark jeans cover his muscled body.
Stacks of mail.
A laundry basket.
An empty Nike box.
“There’s a table under here?” I tease. It’s Friday. Despite the fact that we haven’t spoken much this week, I’m taking the liberty of lightening things up a little.
I place the stack of files on a chair and begin clearing off the table, though when I glance around his apartment, I’m not exactly sure what to do with any of this. There doesn’t seem to be order to anything. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a slob, but it seems he just sort of … puts things wherever.
My skin crawls, but I force the sensation away as best I can.
I also force away the overwhelming urge to organize every square inch of this place, starting with the pile of shoes by the front door.
How can anyone live like this?
I sit the items neatly on one of the dining chairs, piling and stacking them so they don’t fall over.
“All right. I guess I’ll see you Monday?” I ask, slinging my bag over my shoulder.
“It’s only two o’clock,” he says. “You’ve got three more hours on the clock yet.”
“Right. I was going to go back to the office,” I speak slowly and point in the general direction of north.
“It’ll take you a half hour just to get back. Makes more sense if you stay here,” he says. “I could use help going over next year’s marketing presentation.”
He has a point. It’d take me a half hour to walk back to work, and Rush’s place isn’t all that far from here. It’d be more convenient for me to stay. I guess.
“Sure,” I say, taking a seat and hanging my bag on the back of my chair.
Calder sits beside me, wasting no time poring over files of printed presentations. Marketing wants to increase their ad spend by 35% for the next fiscal year, but they have to support that with data and projections galore.
I suppose anyone could make a case for anything if they tried hard enough.
His nostrils flare and his breathing grows louder every few minutes, and sometimes when I glance up to steal a peek, I spot the indentation above his jaw flexing.
“You okay?” I ask, daring to step outside the lines we drew in the sand this week.
“What?” Our eyes meet and he’s practically scowling, though I’m not sure he realizes it.
“You seem, I don’t know, upset about something.”
“How would you know what I look like when I’m upset?” he asks.
“Never mind,” I say, convincing myself to quit while I’m ahead. I reach for another file, aimlessly flipping through it. I’m too distracted to read right now, my mind too intent on figuring out what’s eating Gilbert Grape over here. “Forget I asked.”
I don’t expect reverse psychology to do the trick, but it couldn’t hurt to try.
Calder flips to the next page of the marketing presentation, and I catch his jaw doing that thing again where it flexes. His fist is balled and pressed against the side of his face. He looks like he’s reading, but I don’t think he actually is.
“Sorry.” He exhales, closing the folder and leaning back in his chair. “My father said something today and it got under my skin. You’re free to go. I don’t think I’m going to get much done this afternoon.”
I close my folder and stack it on top of his, aligning the edges. “Families are complicated, aren’t they?”
He sniffs. “This goes beyond anything you could even begin to comprehend, Keane.”
Rising, I take my bag off the seat back and roll my eyes. “How would you know that? Huh, Calder? How would you know that?”
“Are your parents still married?”
“What? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just answer it. Yes or no.”
“Yes, but—”
“—did your father ever try to kill your mother?” he interrupts me with a question that sinks my heart deep into my chest. “Does your father love money more than he loves anything else in the world?”
I don’t answer.
“I’ll take that as a no,” he says. “And so, yeah, you couldn’t possibly begin to understand how complicated things are between us.”
“I don’t have to understand it to sympathize,” I say. “And it’s not a competition. You don’t get a prize for having it worse than someone else.”
“No fucking shit.”
“My parents forgot to call me on my birthday last year because they were high as fucking kites, running around in body paint at Coachella,” I say. “My father once went on an acid trip for a week. He saw snakes everywhere. My mom had to keep him locked in the bathroom like a wild animal until he came down from it. And then there was that one year my parents wanted to drive around the country in an Airstream so they could give me a ‘real education.’ Thank God my brother put a stop to that. We never had groceries in the house growing up. I mean, sometimes we did, but mostly we didn’t. I can’t tell you how many marshmallow-saltine dinners I ate. And as far as laundry? Do you know what it’s like to be eight years old, washing your clothes in the bathtub because the kids at school won’t play with you anymore because you ‘smell funny?’ And I don’t think I had a pair of shoes that matched until I was nine. Do you know I used to envy the kids with curfews? It meant their parents gave a damn.”
>
My voice cracks, my throat constricting.
I’ve never talked about any of those things before, not with anyone but Rush.
“Do you have any idea how just … being in here … in your apartment … is making me want to hyperventilate?” I laugh because it’s all I can do. “The chaos and disorder …”
He glances around as if I’m hallucinating. He doesn’t see what I see.
“That messy pile of magazines on your coffee table. I’d love nothing more than to sort through them, put them in order. And your shoes. Good God, you need a shoe rack or something over there. And this basket of laundry … how long has it been sitting here, waiting to be folded?”
“Are you offering.”
“No.” I shoot him a look. “I’m just saying … I guess what I’m saying is that we all have issues. We’re all messed up on the inside, all broken and cracked. And we’re all just trying to do our best.” I glance up at him again. “Well, maybe not all of us. Some of us could stand to try a little harder.”
“My mom,” he begins to say, pulling in a breath. “She had this heart condition. Didn’t know she had it until she was well into her thirties. Anyway, there were a couple of different protocols, each of them with their own risks, but my father knew a guy who was patenting some experimental implant. Wasn’t even FDA approved yet, but my father pushed the doctors to try it. I was just a kid then. Twelve. Didn’t leave my mom’s side. Didn’t concern myself with any of the doctors or nurses. I just know that my father chose the experimental route when there were other perfectly viable options, and I know that when she didn’t make it, he inherited the multi-million-dollar trust my mother’s parents had left her. She wasn’t even gone a year when he shipped me off to boarding school and married my nanny. God, it all sounds so trite when I say it out loud.”
I shake my head. “It’s not trite at all. Those are your wounds, those are the wounds that have given you the scars you carry with you today.”
“I’ve never told anyone that before.”
“Me neither. All that stuff about my parents doing drugs,” I say. “Feels kind of good to get it out.”
“Anyway.” He rises, heading to the kitchen. “You want a drink or something? I feel like I need a drink after that. I have beer and whisky.”
“It’s all right. I should probably head out.”
The raindrops on his living room window are fewer and further in between than they were when I got here.
“Really?” he asks, turning toward me with one brow raised. “I just bared my soul to you and you’re just going to head out?”
“It’s better than the alternative.”
“Which is?”
“Sticking around and fooling ourselves into believing we actually give a damn about each other just because we exchanged skeletons.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think it has to mean nothing.”
My heart ricochets and warmth blooms in my cheeks before dripping down the rest of my body and settling between my thighs. His dark eyes hold mine captive, and I could drown in his musky scent if he let me. But what’s the point? We’ve been down this road, and clearly we’re both too fucked up to handle this like two civilized adults.
That’s the problem with broken people like us: it’s second nature for us to go around complicating things, especially matters of the heart, and even more than that, things that scare us.
Things like lust.
Want.
Desire.
Love.
“What are you getting at, Calder?” I ask, swallowing the massive lump in my throat, only to have it return.
“You make it seem so easy.” He brushes a strand of hair away from my cheek and ignores my question.
“Make what seem so easy?”
“Hiding your scars.” His hand lowers to my jaw, angling my mouth toward his, though he doesn’t kiss me. My lips burn in anticipation, my skin on fire the longer he makes me wait. Grazing his thumb over my bottom lip, he offers a closed smile as he breathes out his nose. “What are we doing, Keane? What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know what this is,” I say, “but I know what it feels like. And it feels like you’re about to kiss me and we’re about to do something we may or may not regret in the morning.”
With that, his hands find my hair and his lips crush mine.
If he had any idea how many nights I’ve lain awake dreaming of what it’d be like to have one more go with him. Only this time there’s no hate or animosity fueling the fire—at least not on my end. In fact, I can’t quite be certain what kind of fuel we’ve dosed this fire with. All I know is there’s an explosion about to happen and there may or may not be casualties by the time it’s said and done.
Calder tugs the zipper down the back of my dress and I shrug out of the sleeves, letting it fall to a pile at my feet. Working his jeans, I slide them down his hips before tearing his t-shirt over his head.
Within a matter of seconds, the two of us are stark naked, standing in the middle of a messy kitchen that somehow is the least of my concerns in this moment.
His hands circle my waist as he kisses me again, his lips fire and ice and my heart pounding so hard I feel it in my ears. A moment later, he scoops me up, carrying me to his sofa and pulling me into his lap.
I press my mouth against his bare chest, his flesh soft and hot and his body chiseled like cut stone. He takes a nipple between his thumb and forefinger, giving it a gentle twist and pull before tasting it with his tongue.
His cock brushes against my sex as I grind against him. I reach between my legs, wrapping my fingers around his thick shaft and pumping the length. Calder moans, his mouth against my neck now.
Reaching toward the coffee table, he retrieves a condom from a lidded agate bowl, and I force myself not to appreciate his preparedness and forget the fact that he would even need to be that prepared in the first place.
Peppering kisses from his chest to his abs to his veined cock, I slide off the couch and lower myself to my knees. Taking the tip between my lips, I swirl my tongue until his head falls back and he grips his hair.
A moment later, I take the foil packet from him, rip it with my teeth, and slide the rubber over his throbbing dick.
He pulls me into his lap again, kissing the tender space between my breasts as he grips his cock and guides me down one slow inch at a time. Resting my hands on his shoulders, I find my rhythm, stealing kisses from his soft, full lips.
Kisses that make him smile.
For the briefest of seconds, my conversation with his father earlier this week comes to mind, but I force it away.
I want to actually enjoy this.
I want to be present.
With him.
Rocking and circling my hips, I sense the build-up and ride the wave, and when he finishes, I collapse against his chest, the two of us breathless, our skin sticking together in parts.
“That was—” I begin to say.
“—don’t talk, Keane. Just be here. With me.”
I rest my cheek against his bare chest, listening to the soft thrum of a heart that just might beat a few degrees warmer than it did before.
Glancing up at him, he offers a half-smile and then brushes the hair from my cheek.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who admits out loud to being as fucked up as I feel on the inside,” he says before kissing the top of my head, his breath warm. “That thing I said on Monday? I’m sorry. You’re not just some girl I fucked in a bar bathroom. You’re so much more than that.”
I WAKE UP SATURDAY morning to the sound of water running in the kitchen, and for a split second, I forget that I had company last night—but only for a split second. A man doesn’t fuck a beautiful woman three times in one night and live to forget it.
The covers on the other side of the bed are pulled neat and tight, folded just beneath the pillow, and I waste no time disheveling them before I get up.
As soon as I slip into my boxers and grab a pair of cl
ean sweats from a drawer, I make my way down the hall. The scent of lemon and lavender and chemical cleaners fills the air and the sink is filled with soapy water.
“Morning.” Aerin’s dark hair is piled into a messy bun on top of her head and her arms are submerged in the water, all the way to her elbows. My white t-shirt, which she must have found on the floor out here, covers her body, hitting just below her perfect ass.
“How long have you been up?”
I take another look around. The magazines on my coffee table are stacked neatly—and I’m willing to bet money they’re in order now. My dining table is completely cleared, save for a candle resting in the middle like some kind of freaking centerpiece. In the corner by the front door are my shoes, all of them paired and in color order: light to dark.
“Keane.” My voice is low and deep in my chest, and flashbacks of Bridgeforth Academy fill my mind like flickering photographs.
“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” she says, rinsing a glass. “Not trying to play house. I just couldn’t sleep and I wanted to do something productive, so I thought—”
The granite counters in the kitchen sparkle and shine.
“You should go,” I say, a chill in my voice.
She laughs, like she thinks I’m kidding.
“I mean it.” I turn from her, pacing the space between the kitchen and living room before stopping in front of the window.
“Calder … what’s wrong? I was just trying to be helpful.”
“I’ll see you Monday.” I keep my back to her, and a second later the tromp of her footsteps fades down the hall.
I’m overreacting, and I know this.
Pulling in a deep breath, I count to five.
My jaw is tight, but I’m going to try this again.
When she returns in yesterday’s dress, she won’t look at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have snapped.”
P.S. I Dare You (PS Series Book 3) Page 11
