“All right. It’s the middle of the night and I need to go through twenty pages before I send this episode that I’m writing. I’ll let you rest.” I got up reluctantly, getting ready to walk back to my room.
“Oh, and Nik?” Adam added, making me stop in his hall.
“Yeah?”
“I’m not the same wishy-washy eighteen-year-old. Now that you’re here and I know the truth, know how you feel…all bets are off.”No one had ever accused me of being overly sophisticated, so there was little point in trying to adapt cultivated tactics to make Adam Mackay notice I was no longer sixteen.
The way I saw it, we were both single (I knew he was single, because I’d spent the entire night cyber-stalking him, something I’d refrained from doing for a decade, and yes, I would like the Nobel Prize for my notable self-restraint to be mailed to my current address, please). We both liked each other and shared the same hobbies and love for movies. We made each other laugh, and if we were half as good between the sheets as we’d been at rolling on the carpet doing our so-called freestyle wrestling, fireworks would explode every time we touched each other.
Now we’d officially graduated from clearing the air to The Seduction Game.
The morning after Adam’s confession about faking it with Maya, I strolled out of my room in a small yellow bikini, carrying my laptop – No big deal, scriptwriters kill off and resurrect characters in soap operas in their bikinis all the time, right?—and headed straight to Adam’s balcony.
He had a kidney-shaped pool, bracketed by palm trees for privacy. The Hollywood Hills view made me feel like I lived in a fairytale. I settled on one of the sunbeds, ignoring the fact that I couldn’t read anything on my laptop with the sun pounding on the screen, and waited for Adam to wake up.
He dragged himself out of his room an hour later, carrying two cups of coffee. He came to the balcony shirtless, his six-pack on full display. His arms were the width of my thighs and corded with muscles. I wanted to climb him like one of the palm trees.
He sat beside me, placing one of the coffee cups on the table between us. I murmured my thank you as he squinted at the pool. I still couldn’t believe he had a freaking private pool in his condo. I mean, he resided in the penthouse, but still.
“Slept well?” I purred.
“Sure. How’s my guest room treating you?”
“It’s really nice. Thank you.”
There was a pause. The awkwardness lingered in the air. At least it was nervous awkwardness, and not the-only-reason-I’m-not-chasing-you-with-a-steak-knife-is-the-law awkward.
“You don’t need a bikini to seduce me. Fucking breathing does the trick. Always did.” He still looked at the pool.
Good thing, as my face turned bright red. “I’m not trying to seduce you.”
“Oh, yeah? Then your scriptwriting skills need some fine-tuning.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, for one thing, your laptop is turned off.”
Shit. I slammed my laptop shut, but this time around, didn’t let my pride and embarrassment get the better of me.
“Well. This is embarrassing. Then again, I’m a little rusty in the seduction department.”
“When in doubt, just take your clothes off?”
I laughed. “That’s no way to talk to your best friend’s annoying baby sister. I swear, that’s how I thought you looked at me all those years.”
“I did,” he deadpanned.
I cocked my head, waiting for him to finish his thought.
“Until I didn’t. Somewhere along the line, my best friend’s annoying baby sister became irresistible. I knew it would look better if you initiated whatever it was between us. If I was the prey, kissed by the girl and not vice versa. But you never budged, no matter how much dry-humping we did on your carpet or how much time we spent together. I went crazy going back home every day with blue balls and a hard-on from hell. I wrote you letters that I never sent. I fought with Val just for the sake of fighting with him, because I secretly resented him. It was pretty pathetic.”
“But you always had someone else.” I sucked in a breath.
“Having no one would have looked bad. Val already knew how I felt about you, and I didn’t want the invitations to your house to dry up. Besides, I was in love, not a saint.” He cocked an eyebrow. “I moved on by getting back out there. Trying to find the right girl. Guess what? She doesn’t exist.”
I whipped my head in his direction, my mouth slacking. Had he just said the L word?
Adam shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “I thought it was clear.”
“Not clear enough for me, apparently. How come you’re single now?”
It made no sense that he would be. He was the entire package. And, judging by the way he’d pressed against me when we were teenagers, he had a package to go along with the package.