“Hayes, this is important.” I clasp my hands together, pleading. “When he gets here, please don’t tell him I work for you, okay?”
Hayes is acting like this is the most amusing situation he’s ever been in, a lazy smile stretched across his face. “What’s in it for me?”
“Jesus Christ, Hayes,” I hiss. “You already have my entire life. What more could you possibly want?”
It’s then that Matt spies me. He looks stricken, as if he’d forgotten I even fucking existed, and the sudden reminder is a shock. And then his face breaks into that smile—the one I used to love. The one that made me feel like I was the most adorable, special thing in the entire world. Now half the planet loves it just as much, and I finally realize it was never really mine at all.
He skirts around a group of men, ditching the actress he brought without a word, and then he’s here, pulling me against him.
I freeze in response. My limbs are stiff, unmoving, unable to behave normally. These are the only arms I had around me from ages fourteen to twenty-four, and being in them again is surreal. I’ve only kissed two other people, and had sex with one other, in my entire life. Standing here is like being reunited with a missing part of myself, one I know is diseased but still feels right.
“God, it’s so good to see you, Tali,” he says, finally pulling away. His hands frame my jaw as he stares at me. It’s too much eye contact. It’s too intense. I feel sweat beading down the center of my chest. “How have you been?”
I’m about to stammer a reply, when Hayes’s arm wraps around my waist, pulling me away from Matt. His lips press to my head in a show of casual possession, and Matt has to look up to meet Hayes’s eye, a fact I enjoy way more than I should. Matt always did wish he was taller. “Uh...Matt, this is Hayes Flynn. Hayes, this is Matt. Better known as Noah, I guess.”
Matt’s smile fades as his gaze flickers back to Hayes’s arm around my waist, but he extends his hand. “Nice to meet you,” he says.
“A pleasure,” replies Hayes in that way only a British male can—he sounds polite and dismissive simultaneously.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Matt says, turning to me, looking…amazed, as if this is some incredible stroke of luck. He seems to have forgotten how ugly it ended. “I texted you so many times and you never replied.”
Ah, yes, all those rambling texts, half of them drunk. Always looking for forgiveness. I will never cheat again, I swear. Can we just talk? You’re still my best friend. It’s weird not speaking to you at all.
I really have no response. I’m not sorry I ignored him. He deserved worse.
“How’s the book coming?” he asks, as if everything that went wrong between us never happened. As if he isn’t the person who tried to squash all my dreams in one fell swoop—not two weeks after my father died. I’m not about to tell him it’s still a disaster. I’ve made some progress, thanks to Sam’s suggestions and the addition of Julian, but I still need to spit out about two hundred pages in two months’ time.
“It’s great,” I lie. “They gave me an extension…because of my dad.” I’m grateful my voice doesn’t sound as shaky as I feel.
His smile flickers out. “I heard about Charlotte,” he says. He appears earnest, but who knows? He’s an actor, after all. “I’m sorry.”
I know I should ask him how he is or mention his movie, but small talk doesn’t interest me. What I really want to say to him right now is how could you? How did I never see it coming? And how much of our relationship was a lie? A part of me still can’t believe it turned out the way it did. This is the boy I attended prom with, graduated college with. I still remember our first apartment, how walking through IKEA with him felt like the start of a grand adventure. I thought I’d gotten so lucky, and I wasn’t lucky at all. I was just fooled. But even looking at him now, I can’t find it, the sign he’d betray me.
Hayes’s arm tightens, pulling me closer. “Sorry, Max,” he says, sounding anything but sorry. “I need to steal her away for a moment. Excuse us.”
He pulls me down the hall, his arm still around me. My body moves on auto pilot, relieved one of us knows what to do right now. I don’t look back at Matt, but I can feel his eyes on me as we walk away.
When we’re finally out of sight, I suck in a few desperately needed breaths as Hayes leans me against the wall, his hand on my hip as if I might not be able to support my weight. I focus on Hayes’s chest, right before me, trying to get my heart rate back under control. When that doesn’t work, I close my eyes, resting my head against the wall behind me.
“I would never have asked you to come if I’d known he’d be here.” His voice is soft and apologetic.
My eyes open to find him standing far closer than I realized. I reply to his chest instead of his face. It’s easier that way.
“I still don’t see it,” I whisper. “I thought maybe, in person, I’d see whatever I missed before, how I could have been so blindsided. But he looks exactly the same.”
He pulls me against him, and he’s so big it feels like I’ve half-crawled inside him when his arms go around me. “He was an idiot. Anyone who’s met the two of you already knows. Jonathan said, and I quote, ‘Matt’s the stupidest SOB who ever lived. He’s never going to do better than Tali.’”
I blink back tears. I wasn’t going to cry over Matt, but Jonathan’s loyalty is worth more than gold to me. “Jonathan’s a good friend.”
“It had nothing to do with being a good friend. It was just common sense. I’d never even met Matt”— he says the name with a sneer—“and I knew he couldn’t do better than you.”
It’s sweet, but I know he’s just saying that to make me feel better.
“Did you see the girl he’s with?” I ask. “I’d say most people think she’s an upgrade.”
His hands cradle my jaw, forcing me to meet his eyes. “You have the purest face I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says quietly. “A face I couldn’t possibly replicate, and if I could, she and every other female here would ask me to.”
I stare at him. He’s so earnest right now I almost think he means it. “She looks like all the women you bring home,” I reply.
“Yes, well, one drinks wine from a box when Chateau Lafitte isn’t available,” he says briskly, releasing me. “As you are clearly in no state to remain—”
“I’m fine,” I cut in. I’ve suffered worse losses than Matt. I’m not letting him run me out of here. “Really.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” he says. “There’s not anyone here I want to talk to anyway.”
He wraps an arm around me, tucking me close to his side as he starts making his way through the crowd. It makes me feel small and safe and cared for, a sensation I like a little too much.
We are halfway to the door when he stops suddenly, pressing me to one side of the circular bar, his hands cradling my face once more.
“Matt’s looking,” he says softly. “Just go with it.”
And then he kisses me.
He has the warmest, softest, most perfect lips I’ve ever felt, and he kisses exactly the way I imagined he would...unhurried but as if he’s already a step ahead, already planning to pull my dress over my head and take me right where I stand.
I taste the scotch on his tongue, my lungs full of the scent of him.
His hands hold my hips tight, and he presses closer, until our bodies are flush. We have more than proved any point we are trying to make, and I know I should stop him or object, but I can’t. There’s some wild impulse running through me, destroying every neuron, killing off every reasonable thought. My fingers slide into his lovely, thick hair; his hand tightens around my hip...and then he inhales, sharp and surprised, and pulls back.
His eyes are nearly black under the bar’s dim light, his lips swollen. “He’s jealous as hell right now.”
It takes me a second to even remember Matt was here.
I press my palm flat to the barstool beside me, trying to get a grip. “You’re not even looking a
t him, so how could you possibly know that?”
“Simple,” he says, grabbing my hand. He begins fighting the crowd again, pushing toward the exit. “Because I’d be jealous as hell if I were him.”
When we finally get outside, he plucks the valet ticket from my hand while I take one lungful after another of the warm air, wishing I could think clearly. Because the kiss is over, but inside me, it’s still occurring. It feels like he just let something out of a cage, something too dangerous to be set free. We stand in silence, waiting for our cars, my body so taut I’m certain it would snap like kindling with little effort. It’s all I can do not to grab his collar and drag his mouth back to mine.
When my car arrives, he looks at me for one extra moment, and I feel a pulse, low in my abdomen. There’s hesitation in that gaze of his, uncertainty. As inexperienced as I am, I suspect if I asked him to get a drink, he’d say yes.
And if I asked him to go home with me, he’d say yes to that too.
“See you Monday,” I say instead.
It’s the wise thing to do. But it’s one of those nights when it feels like wisdom is really overrated.
19
The thing about a long-term relationship is that you persuade yourself, when you’re in it, that it’s good enough. All the little irritations and disappointments are brushed aside. No one’s perfect. Why nurture your tiny miseries like a delicate plant you want to see flourish?
Except I brushed aside disappointments with Matt having, essentially, no experience with anyone else. A kiss while playing spin-the-bottle in eighth grade and a sloppy, drunken one-night stand post-Matt are all I had to compare against him...and neither of them held up very well.
I’d believed, for instance, that Matt was an extraordinary kisser. But I could kiss a thousand men, and none of them would match Hayes.
My fingers trace over my lips on the way home, remembering. I try to look at the kiss scientifically: What was so much better? Was it his utter confidence, the way he increased the pressure so suddenly, like water reaching its boiling point? Was it just his feel and his smell, his urgency and his size and that sharp inhale of want and surprise I heard at the kiss’s end?
I don’t know. But he’s not an option, so I really pray that whatever it was, I find it again in someone else.
He appears at the counter Monday morning, all lean, unruffled beauty, that arrogant upper lip of his firmly in its arrogant place, smirking as always.
I slide the smoothie next to his coffee. “Don’t freak out on me,” I tell him. “I used more kale than normal.”
“You know, one of these days you could surprise me and make Eggs Benedict instead.”
I bite into a strawberry. “Eggs Benedict, hmmm? I’ve never pictured you eating breakfast.”
“What do you picture, Tali?” he asks, his tone and leering smile so ridiculously filthy I laugh.
“Jonathan coming home so I don’t have to get up at six anymore,” I reply, leaning my hip against the counter. “That’s what I picture.”
“You’ll miss me,” he argues. “My mother says I’m loveable once you get to know me. Well, it might have been the nanny. Someone said it. What’s on the schedule today?”
I hand it to him, amazed by how easily things have gone back to normal. They definitely didn’t seem like they would all weekend when I flopped around in bed, sheets tangling between my legs, having one dream after another about him: Hayes kissing me, my back pressed to the wall, his hands sliding up my outer thighs as he pushed my skirt to my waist.
You have the purest face I’ve ever seen in my life.
“Where have you gone, Tali?” he asks. My head jerks up as I blink the memory away. “You’re not still mooning over the idiot from the soldier movie, are you?”
I roll my eyes. “Not at all. In fact, I put up a profile on Tinder, you’ll be happy to hear.”
A muscle flickers along his temple, and his smirk is oddly…muted. “Very good. Let’s see it.”
I carry the blender to the sink. “I’m not showing you my profile. You’re just going to make fun of it.”
“Probably,” he replies. “You’ve undoubtedly bungled it. But you must acknowledge I have a lot more experience judging women than you do. And if you don’t show it to me, I’ll just create a profile for myself and find you.”
There’s not a doubt in my mind he’ll do it too. I reach for my phone and open the app, but when he takes it, he doesn’t burst into the peals of mocking laughter I’d anticipated.
Instead, his jaw tightens. “‘Not looking for a relationship’ is code for ‘mostly in this for sex’,” he says. “You’re not going to find Mr. Right that way.”
“Who says I’m looking for that?” I counter.
He runs a hand through his hair and it falls forward messily. “Have you ever even had a one-night stand?” he asks.
“That’s an extremely personal question,” I begin, but he simply raises a brow, as if to say and your point is? “Yes,” I admit with a sigh. “Matt had a costar, Brad Perez, who was constantly hitting on me. When we broke up, I...” I trail off with a shrug. It was not my finest moment. I thought I’d feel victorious afterward. Instead, I just felt empty and used.
“A revenge fuck?” he asks with a tight smile. “I didn’t know you had it in you. Literally had it in you. And you ghosted the poor chap, didn’t you?”
I snuck out in the middle of the night like a thief and blocked his calls afterward. Again, not my best moment.
“I was in a bad place at the time. Now I’m fine. I just want to be sure no one gets the wrong idea.”
He grabs his bag and his jacket and turns for the front door. “You sound like me now,” he says softly. He doesn’t seem happy about it.
Swiping on Tinder is addictive, like a harmless little game. I do it at stoplights, or as I stand with a contractor while he looks at a plumbing leak in Hayes’s powder room. I reject anyone whose first photo is shirtless, or who’s posing in a gym—I’m not looking for Mr. Right, but I would like someone with just a hint of self-respect. I also ditch all the men who say things like just here to fuck or must be D cup or larger.
There’s actually a very long list of things I don’t respect, as it turns out. In the end, as pretty as they are, I only say yes to a few guys, and when they write me, I’m mostly revolted.
Hey babe, says the first, which I find demeaning.
The second asks me if I’d rather have hands made of cabbage, or to spit up a full cabbage hourly, which makes me laugh but is also weird. I bet he’s got a YouTube channel where he pranks his parents, with whom he still lives. No thank you.
The third says Dam ur hot. Even if his text didn’t suck, I’d rule him out based on poor spelling.
The fourth says what r u doing 2night?
Which is when I give up. Who raised these men? How lazy must you be to refuse to type out one or two extra characters?
“Have you tried Tinder?” I ask Sam later on.
“Everyone under the age of thirty has tried Tinder.”
“Why is the spelling so terrible?” I demand, reaching under the bed for my running shoes. “And why do so many people abbreviate words? Like, is it really saving you that much time to use the number two instead of writing T-O?”
“Then I guess you’re dating again,” he says. His tone is…careful. Not excited, but not unexcited either.
I swallow. “Well, no. I was dipping my toe in the water and now I need to soak my toe in bleach.”
“Well, sort of on that topic...” he begins, and my stomach sinks. “I’m coming to LA week after next. Will your ogre of a boss give you a night off?”
My breath holds. It’s a crossroads. I either step up and tell him I’m not ready to date, or I decide to let things happen.
“My buddy John will be there too,” he adds. I’m not sure if that was always the plan or if my silence freaked him out.
“Sure,” I reply. “Just let me know when.”
I’m scared, and als
o, perhaps, a little excited.
Sam is cute and an excellent speller. We’d have plenty to discuss.
But he would not be casual. Of that I’m certain.
20
Hayes comes home for lunch, and I sit outside with him. He no longer has to ask me to do it. It’s assumed, and that’s fine. I guess I kind of like the break in my day.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
I tilt my head. “Good as ever. You’re booked solid for three weeks straight, aside from Tuesday two weeks from now.” I’ve also left a weekend open in three weeks, but I haven’t figured out how to convince him to take a vacation just yet.
I expect him to object but he doesn’t even seem to have heard what I said. “Not work. You. Your desperate quest for an orgasm that isn’t self-induced.”
I flush. I wouldn’t call it a desperate quest. More of an ambivalent one, at this point. “Poorly. There are a lot of disgusting human beings on Tinder, and even more who don’t seem all that bright.”
He stabs at his salad—I’m pretty sure he’s picking around the vegetables—and looks over at me. “Give me an example.”
I open up the app and begin scrolling. “Here,” I say, handing him the phone.
He swipes through the photos. “This one looks mostly unobjectionable. Not a single nude pic.”
“Not his photos. His write-up. I love to laugh, he says.”
His eyes are light, crinkling at the corners with suppressed amusement. “You might need to find a very specialized dating site if you’re looking for someone who doesn’t laugh.”
“That’s exactly it!” I exclaim, throwing out my hands. “Who doesn’t love to laugh? You’ve got five hundred words to tell me how you’re special and different, and you basically tell me you’re a human being with needs all humans have. Why not add that you need oxygen to breathe and take in food for sustenance?”
His mouth twitches. “You’re being awfully picky. And Matt didn’t look like the sharpest tool in the shed. You can’t convince me it was his intellect that turned you on.”
A Deal With The Devil: A Steamy Enemies-to-Lovers Romance Page 11