by Jordyn White
We’d been home from the Perched Owl only ten minutes when I realized I forgot my bag on the patio. I don’t usually carry a bag when I go out like that. I prefer to tuck my keys, my cards, and my phone in a pocket and leave it at that. But because of the sacrificial champagne glasses, I’d needed a bag. At one point in the evening, I’d dropped my phone in there.
I didn’t realize my error until I went to charge my phone for the night. The other two were in the bathrooms changing, so I knocked on one door, told Ashley where I was going, and headed back.
Fifteen minutes later, as I walked up to the entrance of the Perched Owl, there were Grayson and Mr. Greek God, waving their goodbyes to each other. His friend walked off, but Grayson stood still, having noticed me.
I managed to keep walking. My skin began to tingle all over, as if my body knew before I did what was coming.
“Ah, you came back for me,” he said, teasing. He gave me a crooked smile. That was the first time I noticed his dimple. Just one. On his left cheek.
“I left my bag on the patio,” I said, still walking, “and when I find it I’m going to tuck you inside and smuggle you out.”
Don’t ask what possessed me to make such a flirty comment.
“In that case,” he held open the door for me, “I’d better help you look.”
Grayson fell into step behind me as we made our way through the main bar and toward the double doors leading to the back patio. I felt his eyes on me the whole way.
There was a cluster of guys around one of the patio tables and I quickened my step, wondering if they’d seen (and perhaps taken) my bag. I went through the doors and glanced at the table nearest the fireplace, where the girls and I had spent the last part of our evening. The black strap of my bag hung from the back of the chair I’d been sitting in and I exhaled in relief.
“I see it.” I hurried toward it. I was acutely aware of Grayson’s presence as I grabbed my bag and did a quick check of the interior.
“Everything there?”
It was mainly the empty box that had held the glasses, but there was my phone, right next to it. I nodded and looked up at him. He was giving me a most delicious-looking grin. “Ah, well. I’m happy for you and everything, but how am I going to be able to talk to you now that my Knight-in-Shining Armor strategy didn’t pan out?”
“You already had a rescue strategy?” I smiled back. It was a flirty smile. I’ll admit it.
“A guy’s gotta be quick on his feet if he wants to capture the attention of a beautiful woman. Maybe I can join your spy ring instead.”
“My what?”
“Aren’t you ladies spies? What with your top-secret mission and everything.”
How Grayson managed to pull off mentioning that without embarrassing the hell out of me, I don’t know. He was just so easy-going and... I don’t know, accepting. I didn’t feel the slightest bit awkward. In fact, I felt inclined to play along.
“Well, only the best of the best can be admitted to the Firework Spy Network.”
“Oooh.” His eyes lit up. “You even have a name for it.”
“And now that you know our top-secret name, you definitely need to pass the spy test or, I’m very sorry to tell you, I’ll have to dispose of you.”
His grin turned devilish then, as if he couldn’t imagine anything more pleasant than being tested by me. I grew pretty tingly myself.
As I said, I’ll just blame it on his sex appeal and my sex-deprived state.
My phone dinged and I pulled it out of my bag.
Ashley: Well?
Me: Got it. Thanks.
I dropped my phone in my bag. “Sorry. My friend just wanted to make sure I found it.”
“So what was the mission?”
I explained what we’d done with the glasses, gesturing toward the beehive fireplace. He nodded with approval and headed over, leaning in to inspect the ashes.
“I think we got all the pieces out,” I said, watching him. My heart had been beating at an elevated rate ever since I’d seen him out front. Being free to take in his profile at my leisure only made things worse. Grayson Piers is impossibly handsome.
He straightened and looked at me. “Much more creative than burning photos.” He grinned. “Did that get him out of your system?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know that he’s really been lingering in my system, to be honest. Does that seem strange?”
His smile broadened as he considered me. “No. I’d say that makes it your good fortune you weren’t stuck with him for life. Maybe it was my good fortune, too, or I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you.”
I smiled and wondered if he found it as unusual as I did that we were talking about my Almost Husband so easily, and that it didn’t lessen the draw I felt between us at all.
It is strange, right? But it didn’t feel that way at the time.
I’m not sure how we managed to advance things from there, but we ended up settling on the wide stone hearth that wrapped around the front of the beehive fireplace. After a half hour of talking and tossing those first little flirtations at one another, I received another text from Ashley that read: You okay?
I glanced at him, sitting next to me looking intolerably sexy. I still hadn’t gotten used to his looks. Actually, I don’t know that I ever did. “Sorry. My friends are wondering about me.”
“Roommates?”
“No, they’re just in for the weekend. They leave at o’dark thirty in the morning though. I figured they’d be asleep by now. Hang on. It’ll take just a second.”
“Take your time.” He gave me that delicious crooked smile. Yeah. I didn’t plan on leaving any time soon.
Me: Just talking to someone. Don’t wait up.
Ashley: Say WHAT? Who are you talking to?
Me: No one. Just someone. I’ll fill you in later. Get to sleep. Seriously.
I silenced my phone and turned back to Grayson. Our conversation picked back up easily. When I mentioned I’d just graduated from Hartman College with a degree in Business Management he tilted his head and smiled.
“Really? You don’t strike me as a Business Management kind of girl.”
“I don’t?” I tried not to look too pleased. “How do you see me?”
A slow smile spread across his face and I felt my cheeks get warm. I got warm in other places too, and let me tell you, I don’t know that I’ve ever quite felt all that for a guy I’d just met. So quickly. So willingly. As fast as things happened with us, I suspect it still could’ve happened much sooner.
“I don’t know,” he answered, still smiling, “but something that doesn’t involve a cubicle.”
I was, in fact, working in a cubicle. I’d tried camouflaging its prison-gray panels with a few decorations, but it still felt like a damned cubicle.
“If you could do anything,” he leaned closer, ratcheting up the electricity in the space between us, “what would it be?”
Have my way with you until you beg for mercy?
That should’ve been my first warning I was getting in too deep, because I definitely never thought anything like that about someone I hardly knew. Hell, I don’t think I’d ever thought that about anyone. But Grayson. Grayson. He hooked me in every way a man can.
I managed to keep my cool, and ended up answering his ‘If you could do anything’ question more honestly than I’d planned. “Write a wildly successful food blog and make six figures a year doing it.”
His eyebrows raised and I tried to not look mortified. I wasn’t sure why I said it. True, I’d mentioned it to Brad a couple of times, but we both agreed it was a highly-unlikely scenario.
Brad said it would be better to apply my natural head for business and my organizational skills on a more sensible path. You know, degree. Job. Career. It had all made sense at the time.
And it worked. I did have a good job. At that shipping company in south Swan Pointe, I was making more than any of the Firework Girls (not including Isabella’s trust fund), and fresh out of college. How
could I argue with such a good starting salary, especially knowing I’d probably be making twice that amount in a few more years?
But I did want to argue with it. I did. I didn’t realize just how strong that desire was until I confessed my nearly-forgotten dream to this dreamy stranger.
Just when I thought his raised brows indicated the same disdain Brad had for the idea, Grayson said, “Well that’d be a hell of a lot more interesting, wouldn’t it? Just think, if you were famous, people would pay you to eat the food in their restaurants and you could write your reviews right there on your tablet.”
He nodded as if he approved of the idea more and more. He smiled in such a way I wondered if I needed to hang on to something to keep from kissing him right then. I was losing control of myself a bit, but with a smile like that, he really wasn’t playing fair.
In the middle of all that, I did not fail to notice what he was smiling at. My idea. My ridiculous, head-in-the-clouds idea. I found him more desirable for that reason alone.
“Yes, that sounds more like a Chloe thing to do.”
I smiled and shrugged, trying not to reveal just how much I really would love to follow my silly dream. “Well, we all have our little fantasies. How many people actually make money blogging about food? A tiny minority. It’s such a shot in the dark.”
“Like YouTubers.”
“Exactly.”
He held his hand in the air for a minute. “Sorry, I should’ve been more clear. That’s me. I’m a YouTuber.”
“You’re a... huh?”
He dropped his hand, still smiling.
“Sorry,” I said, caught off guard. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”
He furrowed his brows and laughed. What is it about hearing a person really laugh for the first time that feels so exhilarating and intimate? Like you’re seeing the first glimpse of the real them.
“How did you insult me?”
“Well, you know. The whole struggling to make it to the top of the heap thing.” I’d read about how hard it is to make it to the top as a blogger. I knew vlogging was no different.
“Actually,” he said easily, “it’s how I make my living.”
I blinked at him. He was still smiling. He didn’t look like he was kidding.
I mean, I knew people did this. I knew. But... I’d never met one in person before and... well, I guess never knowing a real live successful YouTuber made it all seem like a pipe dream.
It was. Wasn’t it?
I leaned in a little closer, my auburn hair sliding over my shoulder. “Really?”
“Is that so strange?” He laughed again. I smiled. I liked his laugh and wanted more of it, but suddenly I was zoomed in on the topic at hand.
“You really make a living doing that?” Even I could hear the desire in my own voice.
“Pretty cool, yeah? It’s a lot of work and it took us a while to get it off the ground.”
“Us?”
“Me and my friend Tom. We’re both photographers and started filming how-to videos a couple years ago. Just kind of screwing around. About a year into it we were starting to see some income from ads and decided to go full broke. It took off like crazy a few months after that. Shuttersky Studios. Ever heard of us?”
I shake my head. “Where do you film? What’d you do to market your channel? Do you guys have jobs too or just this?”
“Whoa, one question at a time.” He laughed again, looking completely yummy.
If Sam were here she’d say ‘completely fuckable.’ She’d be completely right.
But my attention was divided. I had a million questions. For one shining moment it seemed as if my dream wasn’t so crazy after all, but it was only for a moment. I realized everyone’s definition of ‘making a living’ was different. For all I knew he and Tom were splitting rent on a crappy apartment somewhere and living off beans and rice.
“We have a studio at Tom’s house. Lights, backgrounds, a couple cameras. The whole works. But we’ve started spotlighting other photographers, so sometimes we travel to their studios or shoot outdoors instead.”
Don’t ask me why, but the topic was starting to make me feel uneasy. Scared, maybe. It was too much. This man was living a variation of my own dream. Dreams don’t come true like that for people like me. They just don’t. People like me get to cancel their Almost Weddings, work in cubicles, and spend their paychecks on mortgages they can’t afford and Very Sensible Retirement Funds.
Maybe it was boring. Maybe so. But sometimes you have to be sensible. Being sensible helped me take care of myself and my brother when there was (almost) no one else to do it. I didn’t have the luxury of risky dreams.
I remember very clearly thinking those things in that moment, while Grayson sat across from me talking about an interview they just did with some photographer from Sweden.
I enjoyed his story, but steered the conversation in other directions.
Not that that saved me. No matter what we talked about (our next in-depth topic was fucking global warming, if you can believe that) it was revealing. We were revealing. The sexual draw between us increased as the evening wore on, but so too did the sense that I’d known him forever already and could talk to him about anything.
I even told him about my most mortifying moment in high school. He’d laughed and put his arm around me and made me feel like it was the sort of thing that can happen to anyone. We were sitting close then—his hand on my thigh and my fingers absently playing with the hem of his shirt. He told me about a particularly memorable family holiday gathering when he was a child. I did pity him being the youngest of so many siblings and the target of their malice.
As he talked, part of me thought it was strange the way we were sitting. As if we were lovers already. But it felt so natural.
When he finished with his story, we looked at one another and didn’t say a word for what seemed like forever. It was strangely comfortable, and so intimate for a man I’d just met. Then we kissed the most delectable kiss. I honestly don’t know who leaned in first.
It was tender and almost sweet, the way he softly pressed his lips to mine.
We pulled away slowly, but stayed close as we looked into each other’s eyes. He gave me a soft smile, which I returned.
He gently took my hand and we intertwined our fingers.
“I really love,” he said softly, “how your nose piercing matches your eyes.”
I have a little stud piercing, just above my left nostril, with an azure stone.
“Makes me want to kiss it,” he said quietly.
My smile widened slightly. I liked the idea of him kissing it.
“Just like...” He leaned in, asking.
I tilted my head, granting permission.
He came in and gently placed his lips on the piercing, “...that.” Then he planted a soft kiss on my lips.
He pulled away slightly. We hovered there, close together, and I felt like we were in our own little cocoon apart from the world.
I gave him a crooked smile. “I have a matching one in my belly button.”
I had to laugh at his reaction. He looked like a little kid who’d just been promised a giant candy bar.
“Want to see it?”
“Uh, yeah.”
I smiled and gently untangled my hand from his. I pulled the sheer fabric of my top up to reveal the stud in my navel. It’s bigger than the one in my nose, but the same color.
Not taking his eyes off it, Grayson slowly reached toward it. My skin tingled as his fingertips brushed over my belly button and the piercing.
His eyes darted up to mine. Looking at me then, his fingers brushed my belly button again. My breath shallowed and my whole body went alight.
I leaned toward him slightly.
His hand flattened out as it gently slid over my stomach and around to my side. We leaned into one another. I dropped the fabric of my shirt as we kissed again, his hand still on my bare stomach.
This time we lingered, opening to one another. That first
time I tasted Grayson Piers, my insides trembled. As our tongues gently played together, I wrapped my arm around his waist, feeling his firm back for the first time. Our chests pressed lightly against one another.
I don’t know how long we kissed, taking each other slowly, exploring, tasting. It was almost timid, that first lingering kiss with Grayson, but I felt wrapped in a plume of heat, quietly wanting him. But that kiss... it was sweet and perfect and makes my heart sigh remembering.
After we finally broke apart, we continued to talk. We sat with the top of my high-heeled foot pressed against the underside of his leg, his hand on my hip, my breasts touching his chest.
Before long, the evening took a definite turn. I don’t remember much of what we talked about from there. Nothing much, I think. This and that. I do remember we discussed our mutual love for the chocolatier downtown, but only because our comments about the pleasures of sucking on their truffles were thinly-veiled teases about something else entirely.
We kissed again, more than once. Each time, our kisses were a little more urgent and our hands roamed a little more.
By the time he invited me back to his place, I was barely able to keep my cool. Inside I was burning so hot I hardly knew what to do with myself. I was too wrapped up in Grayson to regret that I’d never felt anything like that for Brad or anyone. I was in uncharted territory, that’s for sure.
I followed Grayson’s Mustang in my little Jetta, through the downtown area of Swan Pointe, and eventually up into the residential neighborhoods in the hills.
I remember once thinking, I can’t believe I’m doing this. But I kept going.
Chapter 3
We pulled up to a gorgeous two-story house on Sinamone Street. I wondered if he had roommates or lived with his parents or something. I didn’t know anyone our age with a house like that. It’s on one of the more desirable ridges in town, with a magnificent view of the city—which glittered with lights—and the ocean beyond.
I pulled into the drive as he turned off his car and waited for me. Taking my hand, we entered the house through the garage. He flipped on the lights to the kitchen, which opened onto the dining and living areas. The far wall was lined with huge windows, presenting a view of the city lights. The soaring ceilings were accented with broad, wooden beams.