by Julie Kriss
Aidan was waiting, so I said, “All right, I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think about it,” he said. He grabbed a folder from his desk and handed it to me. “Here’s your plane ticket and an advance check for expenses.”
My CEO brother might be the boss of a lot of people, but he wasn’t the boss of me. “I never agreed to go.”
“But you will.” He was still holding the folder out. “I’m asking you to do this, Ava. Please.”
I thought about arguing with him some more, about telling him about my full life and my busy job and all of the important stuff I had to do. Instead I took the folder and glanced inside it. At the check.
Oh my God, that was a lot of money. Enough that I wouldn’t be eating ramen noodles for months. Behind it was a printout of a hotel reservation—at the Langham. One of Chicago’s poshest five-star hotels. Starting tomorrow, I was staying at the Langham for a week.
I thought of my cramped Brooklyn apartment. My roommate and the boyfriend she had over often—and loudly. My empty bank account. My near-empty schedule. The guy who had dumped me a week ago, then totally ghosted me. My sore feet.
My brother was offering me a check and a week at the Langham. He really was the devil.
All I had to do was spend that week with Dane Scotland.
How bad could it be? Clean him up, buy him some clothes, show him which fork to use. Try not to sleep with him. Try, Ava. Just freaking try.
“Well?” Aidan asked. He probably had some other appointment to go to.
“I hate you,” I said, still looking at the check. I couldn’t quite look away.
“I know,” my brother said. “Thanks, Ava. Go home and pack your bags.”
Three
Dane
* * *
“True or false,” the voice coming from the speaker said. “In a sentence with both a conjugated and an infinitive verb, the reflexive pronoun is placed after the infinitive.”
“False,” I said. I turned up the speed on the treadmill I was on and increased the incline. “The reflexive pronoun is placed before the infinitive. Example: Je vais me laver.”
“Correct,” came the response. “Example verified. Ten marks awarded. You’ve improved by thirty-five percent since the last module, so the next lesson plan will modify accordingly. This module is now complete.”
Still running, I tapped the screen in front of me, scrolling through the modules. They looked pretty good: Anyone wanting to learn French without a human teacher would be able to do it with my interactive program, which learned as it went. The questions you got wrong, it taught again in a different way. The things you found hardest to learn, it spent more time on. It was artificial intelligence—rudimentary, maybe, but there. And it worked. Even the testing seemed to be successful, after months of working out the bugs. “Finally,” I said as sweat rolled down my temples. “It took long enough.”
The voice came from the speaker again. “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize that input.”
“Disregard,” I told it.
“I’m sorry, I don’t recognize that input.”
I changed my command. “Go fuck yourself.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t recognize that input.”
I was about to curse it again—more creatively this time—when a video call came through on the screen. It was the security desk downstairs. I answered it. “Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Scotland,” said the security guard. “I have a visitor here who says she’s authorized, but she isn’t on the list.”
That was easy: Except for me and my three partners, no one was authorized to be let upstairs to my penthouse. Whoever it was would have to go away. But then I realized what he’d said.
“She?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. Her name is Miss Ava Winters.”
My fist came down on the Stop button on the treadmill, and everything went silent. There was just me, panting and sweating, staring at the video screen. “Ava Winters is downstairs?”
“Yes, sir. Should I send her up?”
For a second I couldn’t say anything. It had been seven years since I’d seen Ava in person. I’d heard updates about her through her brother and the other partners, and she’d probably heard updates about me. But since the last time I’d seen her before she left for New York—that awful fucking day—we hadn’t been face to face.
This was Aidan’s doing. After I’d hung up on him the last time—I was pretty sure I’d told him to go fuck himself, because he really needed to go fuck himself—he’d sent me a single text afterward. It had said: Fine, I’ll send Ava.
I hadn’t thought much of it. Aidan wanted to clean me up for the meeting with Kaito Okada, and it wasn’t going to happen. I’d shut it down. The threat to send Ava wasn’t a literal one, I’d thought. Aidan might convince her to pick out a couple of suits and send them to me, but that was all it would be. There was nothing in the world that would convince Ava to come here in person. To be anywhere around me.
“Sir?” said the security guard, still waiting for an answer.
Damn it. Aidan had found a way to send his sister. She was here now, when I wasn’t expecting her. I had just finished a workout and I looked like shit. For a second I considered panicking, and then I remembered that it didn’t matter what I looked like, because Ava probably hated me anyway.
“Send her up,” I said. I grabbed a towel and mopped my face, my neck. I wouldn’t have time to change, but I did a quick scan of the penthouse to look for anything embarrassing: dirty underwear, balled-up socks, dirty dishes. Except for a pair of boxer shorts on the floor, it wasn’t too bad. If Ava used my bathroom, she’d just have to deal with the beard hairs in the sink. There was nothing I could do about those now.
I heard the chime of the elevator, and a second later there was a knock on the door. I slung the towel around my neck and answered it, hoping I didn’t look like I’d rather do anything, be anywhere than where I was right now.
I opened the door and she was really there—Ava Winters, the girl I’d known since I was fifteen and she was eleven. My best friend’s little sister, who had spent countless nights in the apartment I shared with her brother and our two other friends. The girl who had come to us when she wanted to get away from home, who had watched TV with us and slept on our sofa when she didn’t want to be home with her mother. The girl we had all looked out for and taken care of like one of our own.
When I’d last seen her seven years ago, she’d had chestnut-brown hair grown past her shoulders and a face that had still had some innocence to it at twenty-three. The woman who stood before me now was ten pounds lighter and had bleached-blonde hair. She wore expert makeup—a lot of it—and strappy heels, a designer handbag over her shoulder, but she was still Ava. It was in those big, brown eyes, the curve of her lip. The determined set of her jaw. She was fucking gorgeous, and when she looked at me her eyes went wide.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
I knew I looked different. I’d spent most of my life as a nerd, and a few years ago I’d gotten sick of it. I had laser eye surgery and ditched my glasses. I hired a personal trainer to work me out three times a week for a year, and even though it was agony—expensive agony—it was worth every penny and every wince of pain. I now had muscles in places I’d never known existed. I’d also grown my hair long, which wasn’t a fashion choice as much as pure neglect. I hated getting a haircut, so I rarely did it. Right now my hair was pulled back and tied with an elastic, which was how I usually wore it. I also had a beard, which I hadn’t had seven years ago. Laziness again. The beard probably needed a trim, but I didn’t care.
“Ava,” I said.
Her eyes traveled down over my sweaty T-shirt, my basketball shorts, and up again. “What the hell happened to you?” she said.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“I guess I look different, right?” She touched her hair, as if remembering the brown it used to be. “Are you going to let me in?”
&n
bsp; Like an idiot, I was still standing in the doorway. I stepped aside and Ava walked past me, balancing like an expert in those heels. I’d never paid much attention to high heels before, but when Ava walked, I couldn’t help but notice how they made her ass move under her skirt. I jerked my gaze away.
“Nice place,” Ava said, dropping her handbag on the sofa. She looked around at my penthouse—one of the largest, most luxurious penthouses in all of Chicago—and shrugged as if it was no big deal. “I see you cleaned up for me,” she said.
This was the Ava I knew. She was caustic, sarcastic, especially around me. She had a tough shell, born of her not-so-great childhood, and she knew how to throw an insult. She threw most of them at me, or at least she used to.
Even after everything we’d been through. Especially after everything we’d been through.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said.
Ava blinked, and for a second I saw hurt in her eyes before she brushed it away. “Aidan didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“I’m not really taking his calls,” I said. “He texted me something about sending you. I didn’t take it seriously.”
She nodded. “I agree, it’s odd that I would spend my precious time and expertise on you. I must have been feeling charitable.”
“Ava,” I said.
“What’s this about a nerd meeting?” she said. “A Japanese bigwig wants to meet with you, I hear, and Aidan doesn’t want you to wear the Space Invaders shirt you had when you were eighteen.”
“That was a nice shirt,” I said.
“For dorks,” Ava corrected me. “It was a nice shirt for dorks.”
“Yeah, well.” I walked to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. “I’m not wearing white jeans to this meeting, so you can forget it.”
Her dark-lashed eyes went wide with what I could have sworn was pleasure. “Dane Scotland, you read my blog. And I was exactly on point that day. White jeans are in.”
“Once,” I clarified. “I read it once. Never again. And Kaito Okada is a software guy, like me. He’d probably actually like the Space Invaders shirt. He won’t care what I wear.”
“Huh.” Ava crossed her arms over her chest. I very much was not looking at how her dress fit over her breasts, the way the fabric hugged them. No, I wasn’t. “Well, I don’t care what you wear either, but Aidan does. So here I am.”
“Reluctantly,” I added.
The tip of her tongue appeared and she licked her glossed lip. “Reluctantly,” she agreed after a minute. “Though I’m no more reluctant than you, I guess.”
I shrugged.
She glanced away, then back at me. “Aidan doesn’t know about us. So I guess you never told him.”
“Of course not. You think I’d actually tell him?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never told him, either.” She ran a hand through her blonde hair. “It should be so easy to say, right? Oh, by the way, big brother, your best friend and I had sex a bunch of times behind your back—”
“Ava,” I cut her off.
“Why didn’t we tell him?” She stepped toward me, and suddenly she was close enough that I could catch a whiff of her scent, something with vanilla in it. The scent surprised me; if I had to guess, I’d have expected her to wear an expensive designer perfume. “In all these years, Dane, why didn’t we tell Aidan? Or the others? Why didn’t we just admit what happened between us?”
“What do you want me to say?” I asked. “Do you want me to say I’m ashamed of it? Because I won’t. I’m not.”
Suddenly, I got it. That was what she’d thought. I could see it in her eyes. She’d thought I hadn’t come clean because I was embarrassed. So she hadn’t come clean either, because she hadn’t wanted to embarrass me.
And I’d had no idea. All this time.
I told her the truth. “I didn’t tell Aidan because it’s none of his fucking business,” I said. “He’s your brother, not the owner of your life. The others, too. As far as I’m concerned, they can all butt out of what’s between you and me.”
She was quiet for a second, looking at me. Her lashes were thick, her makeup expertly done, her hair blonde. But she was still Ava.
To me, she was always Ava.
Finally, she sighed. “You need a haircut, Dane,” she said, a smile touching the corner of her mouth. “I guess we should get started.”
Four
Ava
* * *
Here are the facts of Dane Scotland and me: He’s my brother’s best friend. I’ve known him since I was eleven and he was fifteen. I practically lived with my brother and his friends during my teenage years, when I didn’t want to be home with my mother. I don’t want to talk about my mother.
I didn’t sleep with Dane until much later, when I was nineteen and he was twenty-three. I hadn’t planned to be a virgin at nineteen, but somehow I still was. It drove me nuts. I couldn’t find a likely candidate to fix the problem—someone I trusted, someone I thought was hot, someone who would help me through an experience I knew would probably be a big deal. I didn’t want it to be a big deal, but my brain always trips me up over these things. Everything is a bigger deal than I want it to be, and I never know how to stop it.
Losing my virginity was the biggest possible deal, unfortunately. I needed help with it. I picked Dane.
By that point Dane had created the software that the boys sold for an incredible forty-six million dollars. They were nobodies, and then they were millionaires. We still had the old apartment for a while, but one weekend the other three went away, off to meetings or real estate buying ventures or whatever, and I realized that Dane and I had the apartment to ourselves for two whole days.
So on Friday night, after waffling for hours about what to do, I finally picked the direct route. I got up from the sofa where I was wrapped in a blanket, watching TV, and walked into Dane’s dark bedroom, where he was lying asleep. When he woke up and said, “What is it, Ava?” I said, “I’m tired of being a virgin.”
And then he surprised me by saying, “So am I.”
The whole thing changed when he said those three words. So am I. So simple and so complicated at the same time. I knew Dane—I knew he was a geek, a software programmer with glasses who rarely changed his shirt. But he was twenty-three. And under the glasses, he was cute. Under the old tees, he had nice shoulders and a flat stomach, and he smelled really good. He had a nerdy-hot thing going on big time, and as much as I liked to tease him, deep down I’d never suspected he’d gone all the way to twenty-three without sex.
This was supposed to be an adventure with a nerdy-hot older guy who could teach me things. And then he changed the game by saying So am I.
This, I realized, was a better game. A scarier one. But one that was much more exciting.
So I took off my clothes and got in bed with Dane, and we both fixed our problem.
Oh, my God.
Most women will tell you their first time wasn’t all that good. It was fast, no one knew what they were doing, it was a race to the finish line. Dane and I should have been like that. We sure as hell didn’t know what we were doing. And both of us really, really wanted that finish line.
But somehow, while we were getting there… Oh, my God.
We did it once, and then we did it again, trying different things. Then we slept for a while and did it again, trying even more different things. We spent most of that weekend in bed, with breaks to eat and shower, and except when we were exhausted almost none of that time was spent sleeping.
On Sunday night, when the others started to trickle back in, they found Dane in his room, on his computer, while I was sitting on the sofa, watching Gilmore Girls reruns. Same old, same old. I thought at least one of them would notice that both of us were glowing and Dane’s sheets were freshly laundered, but no one did.
I thought someone might notice when I went on birth control and accidentally left my pills in the bathroom, but no one did.
I thought someone might notice that Dan
e and I made excuses to stay home when the other three went out. That if we got the chance, we’d take even an hour alone. Hell, half an hour. Twenty minutes could do it.
No one noticed.
That long, cold winter, while everything changed around us, Dane and I…well, we practiced. It wasn’t going to be permanent, or even a relationship. We both knew that. I was only nineteen, and I had plans to go to New York and get into the fashion business. Dane was a genius and a sudden, somewhat reluctant multimillionaire who should not be living in our rundown old apartment anymore. The boys started Tower Venture Capital, and they made their plans for offices in New York, L.A., and Dallas, as well as proper offices in Chicago. It was a crazy time, great and sad and terrifying all at once, none of us knowing where we were going or what the next day would bring.
I was mixed up—not a new thing for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted. I knew that I liked Dane, that I trusted him, that we had the natural ability to give each other orgasms. I knew that the future seemed wide open and impossible at the same time. I knew that I wanted a career in the fashion business, but I didn’t know what that career would look like. Like any nineteen-year-old, I knew everything and nothing all at once.
It wasn’t until later, after all of the bad things had happened, that I realized that all that winter, I was happy for the first time in my life.
Dane hurt to look at. I mean, it actually hurt. The glasses were gone, for one. His brown hair used to be tousled, but now he’d grown it long enough to tie back in a man-bun that was sexy because it was actually careless instead of a studied fashion statement. He matched it with a dark brown beard that was in need of a trim.
And his body… What had happened to Dane’s body? I remembered him as all lean, rangy muscle, taut biceps and warm, flat chest. Now he had bulk. His shoulders were muscled, as were his arms and his chest. He was wearing basketball shorts, which meant I could see the thick, defined muscles of his thighs and his calves. Did Dane have calves like that eleven years ago? I was pretty sure he hadn’t. For someone who’d had pretty frequent interactions with Dane’s body at one time in my life, it was like a crazy double vision. He wasn’t Dane—and yet he was. That was Dane’s face under that beard, those were his handsome cheekbones and his dark eyes. He still moved like Dane, sounded like Dane. And he still pissed me off like Dane.
