by Sharpe, Elle
Then again, it wasn’t as if I was an expert on music. Maybe what Norah could do was more normal than I thought. She might think I was a moron for acting so impressed.
I wanted to ask her about it, but everything I could think to say made me sound like an awe-struck idiot. I’d already admitted to her that I liked her. I didn’t need to give her any more of an upper hand tonight.
In the end she was the one who spoke first.
“So...your family is...interesting.”
I let out a light laugh.
“Yeah, sorry about Barron. He is, as he himself would proudly say, ‘a lot.’”
“Your mom is also...a lot. Maybe a lot of something else, but still. She was pretty intense.”
I was a little surprised to hear this, but not entirely. My mother was known as a formidable character. It wasn’t rare for people to be intimidated by her.
“I’m not sure she liked me very much,” Norah murmured into her lap.
My heart quickened, just for a second, at the idea that Norah would care so much what my mother thought of her. Wasn’t hoping for parental approval one of those things that went along with liking someone?
In another few seconds my logical brain caught up. Of course she cared. Mom was a hugely influential figure in the arts. If Norah did have other aspirations for her career, having mom on her side would be a big advantage.
“She liked you,” I assured her. “She gave you her card. She doesn’t do that for just anyone.”
“Hmmm,” was all Norah said. She seemed unconvinced.
I finally stole a glance over at her. She had let her hair down, and it was tumbling delectably over her bare shoulders. As she gazed out the window the bright nighttime city lights cast a sensuous play of light and shadow over her neck, her collarbones, and the swells of her breasts beneath her low-cut gown.
I looked away quickly.
“She and Barron don’t seem to get along so well,” Norah said. Somewhat reluctantly I turned my attention back to the subject of my family.
“Yeah, well, there are certain things that don’t agree with Barron. Such as having self-respect.”
“Whereas you have a great deal of self-respect. An over-abundance, some might say.”
I could hear the smile in her voice.
“Some might,” I agreed.
“So tell me, how did two brothers with matching jawlines and dark hair turn out so very different from each other? I’m intrigued by this mystery.”
“It’s really not much of a mystery,” I said. “at least if you were reading the tabloids in the mid-2000s. When we were teenagers our parents got divorced. They asked us each who we wanted to live with. Barron chose our dad, I chose mom.
“Mom taught me to be aware of how I presented myself. That I had to be responsible in the way I acted, because I was representing our family to the whole world. That it was okay to spend money on important things, like supporting the arts, but that gaudy displays of wealth were arrogant and in poor taste. She taught me to have higher expectations for myself than that. She said, ‘Everyone will be watching you, to see what you do with what you’ve been handed. As they should. You’ve been born with an enormous amount of privilege. It’s your job to live up to it.’
“On the other hand, Dad taught Barron how to pose with as many models as possible while getting photographed on your Saint-Tropez yacht. Does that answer your question?”
“Huh,” she said. She sounded as though she had just realized something unexpected.
“What?”
“Sounds like she made you kind of self-conscious. No wonder you’re so judgmental of other people, I guess. If you’re constantly worried about how they’ll judge you.”
That was…not what I’d expected her to say.
“Hey, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have standards for yourself,” I said, somewhat defensively. “It’s better than being a huge bag of swinging dicks like Barron is.”
“And that’s why you’re so annoyingly hard to criticize,” she went on. “Of course. You’ve made yourself too perfect. Luckily now I know it was all out of fear that people would think you’re a bad person. So I can go back to thinking of you as an ego-driven asshole.”
I turned to face her, ready to argue, but saw her looking back at me with a twinkle in her eye. I turned back to the road, satisfied that she was teasing in more of a friendly manner now.
“Why do you like thinking of me as an asshole so much?” I asked her. “Because history suggests that you do like it.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw some color rise into her cheeks. I felt that delicious sense of triumph again. I knew which images we both had in our brains. I knew she was remembering being helpless under me. And liking it.
For a second she said nothing, I wondered if I had made the right move. Maybe I had overplayed my hand. She might freak out. She might go quiet on me. She might never talk to me again.
But instead she came back with a retort.
“Why do you like me thinking of you that way?” She asked. “Because recent history suggests that you like it too.”
I thought about her angry eyes flaring at me, her hand pumping around me.
Touché.
I chose to ignore that inconvenient observation and turned the subject back to her.
“I think that if you think I’m an asshole you don’t have to worry about liking me. I think you’re afraid of liking me.”
“Maybe you like not having to worry about me liking you. After all, if I started liking you I might stop.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I wanted to tell her she sounded crazy. But when I tried to open my mouth to say so my brain got caught on the idea.
I did want her to like me. Or at least, to acknowledge that I liked her. To admit that she was wrong about me. Now that I thought about it, it sort of amounted to the same thing, didn’t it? I wanted her to like me, to feel about me the way I felt about her.
Thinking that thought made me slightly queasy. Like I was standing on the edge of a skyscraper, waiting to get pushed. Not exactly a pleasant feeling. I wasn’t sure I wanted to want her to like me. Not if it was going to make me feel as unsettled as this.
Norah’s eyes darted back down to her lap. She might be wondering if she had said too much.
“Sorry, I’m giving you a hard time. The truth is, I’m not exactly a stranger to trying to please other people. Not at all,” she bit her lip, considering. Then she kept talking, quicker now. Almost like she was doing it on a dare and wanted to get it over quickly. “You were right, what you said to me four years ago. About me and business school. I was pressured into it. I didn’t really want to be there.
“It was my mom’s idea. She’s...how did you put it once? Very opinionated. She had this vision of me as a badass twenty-first century female entrepreneur, carrying the ambition that she never got to realize to even greater heights. So going to business school was always, ‘the plan.’ But then it turned out I was horrible at it.”
“Not horrible,” I said. “It’s just, you didn’t try very hard. You never seemed very passionate about it.”
“Eh. Tomato, tomahto. But the kicker is, the music thing wasn’t my ‘passion’ either. Not like you seemed to think. That was all my dad. The small-time musician who never made it, who spent my childhood honing my ‘gift’ instead. If I hadn’t kept studying music, he’d have been just as devastated as my mom would have been if I’d never studied business.”
“You really are a great performer, though,” I told her. “And you seem to enjoy it. But is that not really what you want either?”
“I do enjoy it. But then, most of the time I can’t even do it—unless I’m just practicing, or I’m ‘playing a game,’ or someone’s requested something in particular from me and I know their expectations aren’t too high. I could never decide on my own style, my own direction for a singing career. I can’t even choose my own songs to cover. Every time I try singing a song in public, and i
t’s a song that I picked out myself, I open my mouth and—silence. Like everything inside is gummed up. I don’t know, I guess I just don’t know what I want.”
“Unless someone presses you into it.”
Her skin reddened again. God, her neck looked so beautiful with a blush crawling across it.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
A visible shudder passed through her, making her shoulders twitch. It was a shudder like trying to get rid of something. Trying to banish some feeling from her body.
“I don’t like the idea of needing someone’s approval,” she said finally. “Or their disapproval, to figure out what it is I want. It’s not exactly the most enlightened, feminist look.”
“I don’t think it’s always such a weakness to not be totally sure what you want. Or to be influenced by other people’s expectations for you. I think that’s a pretty normal, human thing to do.”
I was thinking of myself and what she’d said about me as much as I was thinking about her.
“Hmmm.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, even, between what you want and what someone else wants for you,” I continued. I became aware that I was slipping into my business school mentor voice, and tried to dial it back. “Anyway, I hope that if you do figure out what you want, that you go for it. Oh, we’re here.”
It may have been fate that just then we happened to reach the front of Norah’s building. If my words hadn’t been so perfectly timed, I’m not sure she would have turned to me and said:
“Do you want to come up?”
Norah
“For coffee,” I quickly added. “Do you want to come up for coffee? I know you have a long drive back.”
I was trying to do that thing that people do. The “I think you and I both know what I mean but I’m not going to say it out loud,” thing. And I was trying to be smooth about it too, which had never been my forte. I wanted to sound sophisticated and practiced, like I asked dudes up to my apartment for “coffee” all the time. I was a modern, casual-sex-having, young urban professional woman, after all. I knew the codes. I could make the moves.
I was pretty sure that I had made the moves wrong. I was not a great move maker. Ronan should not have been looking at me with that victorious glint in his eyes.
Or maybe he should have been? Didn’t I want him to read the code? To want the same thing that I was not-quite-telling him that I wanted? This was stressful.
“Yes,” he said. “I would really, really like that.”
“Really, really, really?” I asked him.
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“You say that word a lot,” I said.
He looked me in the face, deadpan.
“Do I really?”
I nearly bit my tongue. Ronan really needed to stop being funny. It made my heart flutter around in weird ways.
I got out of the car, determined not to look at him again until I had better control over myself. I felt him close behind me as I turned the key in the lock. I had a funny sensation in the base of my spine, almost like a warning of danger. Like he was an intruder, and I was afraid he was going to lunge at me at any moment.
You asked him to come inside, you nut job, I reminded myself. Get a grip.
The moment we stepped inside, the stale smell of my apartment building’s old carpets invaded my nostrils. I’d gotten used to that odor, but I suddenly remembered how distasteful I’d found it the first time I’d walked in.
“Sorry,” I said automatically.
“For what?”
“This place is kind of a dump.”
He didn’t reply to that. Instead he patted me gently on my shoulder, as if to say, “Calm down, silly. Everything’s fine.”
Easy for you to say that now, Ronan’s hand. You haven’t seen the inside of my place yet.
When I remembered the disastrous state I’d left my apartment in, I was tempted to abort the whole mission. Turn him back around, march him back out to his car and wish him a pleasant evening. Yeah, that wouldn’t be insane at all.
It doesn’t matter, I told myself. If he really, really, really, really likes me, it doesn’t matter.
I pulled open my apartment door and surveyed the damage. It actually wasn’t too bad. Well, it could have been worse.
True, there were still garbage bags full of old clothes sitting by the door, which I’d been meaning to take down to the Goodwill for at least two months now. And true, every pair of shoes I owned was in a pile on the other side of the door. True, there were at least three unopened Amazon Prime envelopes sitting at the foot of my couch. And about ten used mugs on the coffee table. And a huge pile of dishes in the sink. And sweaters and socks strewn across the couch. And so many waiting-to-be-recycled cardboard boxes jammed behind the garbage can that they’d pushed it out a good foot away from the wall. But, honestly, my place was usually a lot worse.
If Ronan had any thoughts about the state of things he kept them to himself. I tried to remind myself that he had no right to judge—he probably had servants to pick up after him. Even so, it was hard to imagine Ronan making a mess. He seemed much too in control for that.
“So,” he asked, “coffee?”
I froze in my tracks.
“Oh, did you actually want coffee? Because I don’t actually have any.”
He chuckled, and settled himself down on my messy sofa, sitting his tuxedo-pants right on top of a dirty sock. He didn’t even seem to notice. His eyes never left me. A sly smile played on his lips—not mocking or threatening, but inviting. I was terrified anyway.
“I could get you tea, or-”
“That’s okay,” he said, cutting me off. “Do you want to sit?”
I walked over to the couch like I was moving through molasses—pushing myself through mental resistance. Coming closer to him was against every instinct of my body. It was like moving closer to a live wire. I was going to get shocked before I knew what hit me.
But I walked towards him anyway. He was here, in my house, touching my things. His stupidly alluring scent was getting all over them. I felt like I was already caught.
I sat down next to him on the couch, moving my long velvet skirt out of the way. It seemed absurd that we were both still dressed in evening wear, given our current surroundings. It seemed like a state of affairs that couldn’t last long.
“Norah,” he said. And why did his voice suddenly sound so warm and smooth, like honey? He wasn’t a live wire, I realized. He wasn’t going to shock me. He was molten lava, and if I wasn’t careful I was going to sink into him slowly and melt. “Norah, do you remember when you kissed me at the graduation party?”
I was pretty sure I’d started shaking. Just lightly shaking, in the tips of my fingers. I stared down at them, willing them to stop.
In my memories, everything he’d done to me afterwards had eclipsed that moment of the kiss on the couch. He had seduced me. That’s the way I remembered it. He’d overtaken me. Poor innocent me. He’d been a force too powerful to stop.
I didn’t often choose to remember that I had started it.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded light as air. “I remember.”
“Why did you?”
I let out a long, heavy sigh. I sigh that I felt like I’d been holding in for four whole years.
“I wanted to punish you,” I said. And then, shakily, “I wanted you to want me.”
He placed a guiding hand on my chin, and tilted my face in his direction. His face was so close to mine. So gorgeous. And I couldn’t escape from it.
He said: “It worked.” And then he leaned in to kiss me again.
I froze, panicked. Just like with the stage fright, there was no choice involved. I just couldn’t move a muscle. Everything inside me had stopped, coiled in on itself. Like an armadillo playing dead.
What else could I do? He was Ronan Baylor. He was a magnetic force. I couldn’t beat him. I never should have tried.
His lips stopped before they met min
e. He hovered his mouth close to me, like a tantalizing prize just out of reach. My body groaned inwardly.
“Norah,” he whispered, hot air brushing over me, “You’re a coward.”
And just like that, the ice thawed.
How dare he?
He was going to regret that. I planted a hand on each side of his face, and pulled him towards me.
Our lips crashed together in a stormy rage. I was going to show him. I was going to take what I wanted from him, pull it right out of his mouth. I would use teeth and tongue if necessary.
Every move I made, he matched. In no time at all, we were in a race to devour each other.
Anger made my face flush, and then desire made it flush hotter. Before long I couldn’t tell the difference. It was one big heated, melting mess. The lava gushing, rising up over my head, swallowing me. But I didn’t care.
I know, I thought, I’ll pull him closer. Claw my hands under his jacket, grip his sides like a life preserver. That will keep me from drowning.
He pulled away first, gasping for breath.
Ha. Point to Norah.
Except that he looked so good, trying not to drown. I’d managed to muss his hair slightly, and his jacket was falling off his shoulders. Even as he looked dazed, he was smiling. He looked like he thought he was winning. And since this game was all mental, he might be right.
His gaze swept over me, and I realized I must look just as flustered. And the more he looked at me like that—like me, warm and flustered, was his prize—the more warm and flustered I became.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I grumbled. I leaned forward to place an admonishing peck on his lower lip. “That’s not fair. That’s cheating.”
He laughed against my mouth. “You’re so stupid.”
“You’re stupid.”