I thought briefly about how long this was going to last, then stopped myself because I didn’t want to remember anything about what had happened today. The best-case scenario at this point would be somehow striking it from the record and forgetting anything had happened. At the moment, it seemed that Easton felt the same way. Problem was, I wasn’t sure that I did too.
11
Easton
You blew it, man.
I didn’t even know necessarily what it was, but I knew that I had fucked up. I was in bed. The room was dark, but I been lying there for so long that my eyes had adjusted. I couldn’t sleep. Either that or I didn’t want to sleep. I just wanted to replay what happened that evening with Missy over and over again in my head.
I had thought about fucking her. Of course, I had. She was a knockout; I had thought about what it would be like to sleep with her the first minute that I saw her. All things considered, like the fact that I didn’t think she liked me very much, and the other that she was my stylist and technically on my payroll, my imagination never quite got to considering that reality. Like, what really were the chances? She hated me, well, every part of me that wasn’t my cock, that was for sure. We were completely opposite. She was a fashionista and I was former military. I was in tech and she was in fashion. She looked like a celebrity and I, as she had told me many times, looked like shit.
I felt like the only thing we really had in common was that we both lived in New York. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn't really know that woman at all. Which was a little funny, considering that we had had hot, raw sex today in the changing room of an upscale boutique. I had never done anything like that in my life before. I wondered whether she had? For all I knew, that was just a Thursday afternoon for her, which didn’t make me feel better.
My phone was sandwiched under my pillow. I reached for it and opened up the search engine. I had some questions that needed answering. There was a woman out there who had given me some of the best, most exciting risky sex of my life, and I knew nothing about her. In my mind, she was this rigid British woman who had come to New York because, in a city like this, shopping was an actual skill. What were the chances that it was going to happen again? Well, I didn't need Google to tell me the answer to that. She was into it while it was happening, but very clearly not into it as soon as it was over. She looked like she wanted to jump off a bridge when we were done. I had never had that kind of reaction from a woman after having sex. Not going to lie, it hurt a little bit.
It wasn't like I was jumping for joy afterward either. She was my stylist and I just wasn't supposed to be doing those things with her. There were no excuses. I knew what came over me, it was the combination of the semi-private changing room and Missy who was hot as all hell even when she was mad at me. Adding to that the tension that had been brewing between us since we had kissed at my place, and it was just a bomb waiting to go off. She was hard to resist even when she was cursing me out. When we were at relative peace, and she was touching me, looking up at me and not pulling away when I pulled her close, what the fuck was I supposed to do?
How about not fuck my stylist? How about that? If Toby found out about this, my ass was grass.
I searched her name and browsed the entries that came up. There were more than I thought. I thought I would find a couple of social media pages, a website, or something, maybe some features or a couple of hits when her name appeared alongside celebrities that she had dressed. There were whole articles about her, some of them seemed to be about her personal life and not her work.
She was British with some loose ties to the royal family. That was nice for her, I guess. I had grown up with a single dad in the rural Midwest. We never had much of anything, but we always had enough. He didn't teach me how to dress, how to tie a freaking tie, how to adjust the tuxedo vest so that it fit just right, he taught me how to hunt. He taught me how to dress a deer and make it last through the winter. Our house was always in shambles, but we always knew where everything was. Sure, it lacked that feminine touch but I never really missed it, not until now, I guess.
Before I enlisted, I used to spend all my time building stuff. I got heavy into robotics and that turned into drones when I was in the army. By the time I was discharged, I had a skill set ready for the civilian world. By the looks of things, Artemis James had lived a very different life than I had. I switched to image search and looked at the pictures. She had posed on several red carpets. Other pictures, the further I scrolled, seemed to be candid shots taken when she was out and about or on vacation. More than a few of them featured men alongside her. I clicked one and opened the accompanying article.
Socialite Artemis James Romances Magician Beau on A Yacht. I scowled at the images. What the hell? She had dated a magician? I skimmed the article. Taking a break from her jaunt in the Mediterranean, socialite and party girl Artemis James was cited on a yacht with a mystery man later revealed to be a magician. Sources say the two met at a party of a mutual friend where the magician, identified as Horatio de Scalza (real name: Howard Morton) was performing. Allegedly, the man worked magic on the social butterfly’s heart and they have been inseparable ever since.
My frown got deeper and deeper as I read the article. If there is one thing I never wanted to know about, it was Missy’s dating history, because from what I was looking at, it was pretty damn messy. It was also incredibly public. I didn’t realize she was semi
-famous. Not that it had anything to do with me. I knew that she had dressed celebrities and that you had to have some connections to be able to pull the stunt that she pulled at the boutique today, but this was all very unexpected.
The thought of what it would be like to date her flashed through my mind briefly. Just briefly. There was no good reason for me to actually think about it. It would never happen. I was not her type at all. It didn’t really matter how attracted I was to her or that she was to me. Stories of her dating life ended up on British tabloid websites. Mine ended up nowhere. They didn’t exist.
When you thought about it, I had my pick of the litter. I was a young, successful, rich guy in New York City. That put me miles ahead of most guys trying to get a date. I hadn’t really paid that much attention to dating in the past. I wasn’t paying much attention to it now. There had always been something more interesting to me at the time. When I was younger, it had been robotics. When I was in the army, there were no women around to really think about. Now that I was a civilian again, not much had changed. For me, Friday nights were the best times to mess with one of my drones, see whether I could improve it, and make changes. Meeting a woman in a bar or restaurant or party just didn’t appeal to me.
My social life wasn’t completely dead in the water though. From time to time, Toby and I would pick a bar but I would be out after a couple of beers, leaving him to his activities. It had never struck me as a problem before. I just never thought that much about dating. It wasn’t high on my list of priorities and that had not changed even after pursuing women had become much easier for me to do. I just didn’t want to do it.
Until now.
Was that what I was thinking about? Dating Missy? How the hell did that even look? From my research, she was the only child of very rich parents. That meant she had gotten everything that she wanted all her life. High maintenance. Hard to please. Spoiled. Not used to compromising or meeting people halfway. It sounded to me that she would make a lousy girlfriend. If I was even interested in her that way. I had so many questions now, more than I had had when we hadn’t had sex yet. She did something to me, that was the only way I knew how to describe it. She was high maintenance, haughty and a little stuck up but she had made her way under my skin and I couldn’t get her out.
Being used to a certain lifestyle, she definitely dated a certain class of men. Needless to say, I belonged to the class. If not through birth and upbringing, then through current net worth. Our upbringings had been completely opposite, but I could say with confidence that I could afford her. Fancy dinners, exotic vacations, and six-figure shopping sprees, I could cover if it ever came to that. The thing was, the kind of men she was into were likely like her. High maintenance, stuck up, didn’t know how to change a lightbulb much less a tire. Probably had hands that felt like spun silk from never doing a day of work in their lives. That might have been the case, but she wasn’t complaining earlier today.
I kept looking through the search results. The headline, Artemis James, London It-Girl Flames Former Lover on social media caught my attention. I clicked on it and read through the article. Sparks flew on the Internet a day ago when socialite Artemis James exposed her ex for cheating on her. The heated Instagram posts come just weeks after the bombshell revealed her lover to the public.
I wrinkled my nose and clicked out. I didn’t really want to read about what some tabloid rags had to say about her. I went back to the search bar and added the word boyfriend. That brought up a whole new crop of articles and images. I looked through the pictures of her with various men. They all looked like the type I thought she would be into, guys in suits with expensive haircuts and watches that could buy you an apartment in some of the neighborhoods in this city.
So what? None of these guys were in her life anymore. What made you think that she wanted you though? Now that I had seen the kind of guys that she associated herself with, why would she even allow herself to be photographed with me? She had told me a few hours ago that having sex had been a mistake. Did she need to spell it out clearer than that?
I had seen enough. I closed the search engine and dropped my phone. I didn’t have to ask her to get an answer, I knew it already. There were men like the ones she had dated, and then there were men like me. The only thing we had in common was that we were all men. They were the ones that she appeared in public with, and I was the mistake that she fucked behind the scenes one time and immediately regretted. I was the one she would lie about fucking if anyone ever asked her, and not just because of our client-stylist relationship. There was no way to get around it. We were too different. She could never stoop down to my level and I could never get high enough to be on hers.
It was decided then. We, whatever we had had for however long, were done.
12
Artemis
“Missy… Missy?”