He moved to the corner of the room and fiddled with his cell, no doubt setting up the live video. We headed back to our mics just as the On Air sign flicked to life.
“And we’re back,” Lola said confidently. “For everyone tuned in, you know what time it is! A few months ago, our lovely Sophia agreed to enter a contest where she’d start corresponding with five different men to prove that looks weren’t everything when it came to relationships. Over time she’s whittled the five down to just one lucky guy, and today is the day they finally meet face-to-face.”
I leaned into my microphone and stepped into my persona of an entertainer. “For weeks you’ve heard me talking about each of the contestants, and I guess most of you have probably already assumed who the front-runner is based on what I’ve said. Well, I’m happy to announce that the winner of this competition is none other than BigSpoon himself. This guy has everything a woman could possibly be looking for. He’s funny, smart, kindhearted, and he’s quickly grown into someone I can trust. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our e-mail exchanges and can’t wait to meet him.”
Daphne smiled at me from her seat. “The suspense is killing me. I don’t know who’s more excited to find out who this guy is, me or our listeners. So let’s do this and put us all out of our misery, shall we? Lovely listeners of Girl Talk, please welcome the cleverly nicknamed BigSpoon into the studio.”
The door opened and the blinds to Jerry’s booth went up.
And my heart stopped.
Dominic
“Wait. What’s going on?” Lola asked. “Dom? We’re in the middle of a show here.” A man with a camera jumped in front of me and started clicking away, taking picture after picture.
My heart was pounding, my palms sweating as I kept my gaze fixed on Sophia, waiting for a reaction. She was frozen still, her mouth hanging open. “I know,” I answered my sister. “I’m BigSpoon.”
“No you’re not,” Daphne said, looking just as bewildered as everyone else in the room. “You can’t be BigSpoon. You’re Lola’s brother.”
“Holy shit,” Lola muttered before yelling, “Dominic, have you lost your fucking mind!”
“What the hell is happening right now?” Daphne yelped
“Uh… g-guys?” the kid standing in the corner stuttered while fidgeting uncomfortably. “We’re still streaming.”
Sophia still hadn’t moved. She looked like she wasn’t even breathing. The incessant noise of the camera going off continued in the background, but I only had eyes for her.
“This was your grand plan to win Sophia back?” Lola continued to shriek.
The door to the studio flew open and a guy I didn’t recognize rushed in. “Andrew, turn off the damn camera!”
“I can’t!” came the kid’s panicked voice. “My phone’s frozen. I can’t get out of it!”
“You asshole!” Daphne jumped from her chair. “You tricked her?”
“Andrew! Turn it off!” the older guy shouted.
“I’m trying!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw the man bolt across the room and start wrestling with the phone in the kid’s hand. All the commotion seemed to snap Sophia out of her daze.
“You son of a bitch!” she yelled.
“Shit! Andrew, stop filming!” the guy yelled just as Sophia let out a battle cry and launched herself at me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sophia
“Jesus Christ!” Sam cursed as he paced the length of the conference room table over and over. “Are you three trying to give me a heart attack? You are, aren’t you? You’re trying to kill me! That’s the only thing I can think of to explain the shit show that just happened in that studio!”
I remained quiet as I sat between Lola and Daphne. It was hard to believe it was less than a year ago that we’d all been sitting in this exact same room waiting for punishment to be doled out for another little on-air mishap. My two best friends and I seemed to be making a trend of getting our asses into serious trouble. And it was all because of men. Stupid, soul-destroying men. I hated all of them.
Sam had successfully cut the feed from the live video by snatching Andrew’s phone from his hands and shattering it on the floor, but that wasn’t until after I’d gone all Ali on Dominic. Now we were sitting silently, waiting for the firing squad to show and determine our fate. The only plus side was that Grayson was part of that firing squad, along with his father, Nolan, the founder and president of Bandwidth Communications. Hopefully he could sweet-talk us out of the shit creek we were currently traveling down, sans paddle.
Sam continued to rant as we waited. “First Lola goes and humiliates the CEO for all of Seattle to hear, and now Sophia attacks a guy on camera for everyone to see! You three are unhinged!”
“It wasn’t our fault!” Lola argued. “You’re the genius who decided to stream it live.”
“Are you kidding me?” Sam argued. “You’re blaming me for this? You guys are uncontrollable! You should come with a warning label!”
“Watch how you talk to them.” The rough, threatening growl came from across the table, from the man my friends and I had been glaring daggers at for the past half hour.
“You don’t talk,” I snapped at Dominic. “This is all your fault, so you don’t get to talk.”
“Sophia,” he started, pulling the ice pack off his bruised and swollen eye. “I did what I did for a reason.”
The sight of his quickly forming black eye made me smile a bit on the inside. My hand hurt like a mother, but it had totally been worth it. Dad would’ve been proud. I was going to have to tell him about the punch heard round the world next time we talked. “Glad to know you betrayed my trust for a reason,” I sniped.
“Christ, it’s like a bad Lifetime movie in here,” Sam grunted.
“Careful, Sam,” Daphne chided with a roll of her eyes. “That vein in your forehead looks like it’s about to burst.”
Just then the door to the conference room swung open and Grayson walked in shaking his head. Stephanie from HR and Nolan followed closely behind.
They took their seats, Grayson clenching his hands together on the tabletop, seeming to be praying for strength. “I just… I don’t… I can’t,” he stammered before finally settling on, “I have no words. Seriously. What the hell am I going to do with you crazy women? Christ! Jerry’s already threatening to quit. He said you three are putting too much strain on his heart. He can’t take it.”
I lifted a finger in the air. “Uh, just to point out, a bad diet and high cholesterol are what’s putting a strain on Jerry’s heart. I’m not taking responsibility for his bad lifestyle habits.”
Daphne leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Not helping.”
I shrugged and looked at the trio tasked with the outcome of this meeting. Grayson released a put-out sigh. “The plus side is that your listeners seem to have come to expect this kind of behavior for the show. And if the five hundred thousand views are anything to go by, they find it entertaining.”
Daphne and I sat up straighter while Lola choked out, “Five hundred thousand?”
“The video has gone viral,” Stephanie said. “And most of the comments are fairly positive since your tirade made people assume the man known as BigSpoon somehow deceived Sophia.” She shot a side-eyed glare at Dominic, who had the good grace to look apologetic. “But the fact that your behavior was less than professional means action is still going to have to be taken.”
My heart sank into my stomach. Once again, I’d let my emotions rule me and reacted without thinking.
“All three of you will incur a one-week suspension without pay,” Nolan stated, looking as if he hated having to lay down the law. He was a good man. If I hadn’t already known that thanks to Lola, I could tell by the pained look on his face. He was going to make a fantastic father figure for Lola since her own was vile. “And as you’ve probably already figured out, you’ll be fined for the language and—” He appeared to be struggling to swallow back laughter as he glanced at Dom
inic. “—physical assault. As long as Mr. Abbatelli doesn’t press criminal charges—”
“No fucking way,” Dom growled. “I’m not pressing anything. They shouldn’t be getting in trouble at all. It was my fault. I’m the one who pretended to be someone else to get close to Sophia.”
Hearing him admit his deceit sliced through my heart and made me angry all over again.
“All the same,” Nolan continued, “the altercation was witnessed by thousands. It can’t just be swept under the rug.” He turned his gaze to Lola and shot her a stern, disappointed father glare, making her slink down farther in her chair. Yep, awesome father figure. “As much as I’d like to spare my future daughter-in-law and her friends, the station’s and Bandwidth’s hands are tied.”
Well, at least we weren’t being fired. Any punishment that ended with us still getting to keep our jobs was fine by me. And in spite of not being paid, I kind of liked the idea of not having to come into work for a week. If I spun it right, I could convince myself that it was nothing more than a mandatory vacation.
The only drawback was the fact that it gave me five days of alone time where I had nothing to do but wallow in my own self-pity. But there was wine for that.
The meeting—lecture—finally concluded, and everyone stood to take their leave. I had every intention of walking right past Dominic without saying a word but, as if anticipating my plan, he held back, waiting for everyone else to pass before he grabbed hold of my arm, closing the door before I could get out. Trapped alone with him in the room made the huge space feel small and downright claustrophobic.
I snatched my arm from his grasp and snarled, “Get out of my way.” I took a step to the side to move past him but he cut me off.
“You aren’t leaving until we talk.”
“Nothing to talk about. You’re a liar and an asshole and a….” It was an inconvenient time to run out of witty, insulting nouns, but Dom Effect was in full force, scrambling my brain. “A stupid jerk face!” I finished pathetically.
The bastard actually had the nerve to smile before successfully biting it back. I’d have blackened his right eye to match his left if I didn’t think it would get me in more trouble. I tried moving around him once more but he grabbed my arm again, only that time he forced me to sit in the chair at the head of the table and stood over me, making it impossible for me to escape.
“I never lied to you.” I opened my mouth to argue, but he wasn’t finished. “Not directly, anyway. When I filled out that questionnaire, you and I weren’t in a good place. You were still hardly talking to me. I thought it was the only way to get closer to you. I wanted to show you that there was still something between us, that we were the same two people who fell in love with each other in the first place.”
“And you thought deceiving me was the way to do that? You betrayed me, Dominic!” I snapped. “I trusted BigSpoon. I talked to him about things in confidence, things I felt I couldn’t talk to anyone else about. You took everything I thought I was saying to someone else and used it against me!”
“That wasn’t my intention! I didn’t think I had a chance with you, but when we actually started building something, it was too late. I’m sorry if you feel I was manipulating you, but I swear that isn’t what I wanted. Every single thing you felt for that guy you e-mailed was real. It was me. We talked in a way we hadn’t since the first time we were together. Can’t you see that? Why do you think it was so easy to open up and share the stuff you shared? I used to be the one you confided everything in. We can still have that.”
“Not if the way you go about proving that is by lying to me!” I returned on a shout, standing so we were toe-to-toe, nearly nose to nose. “Directly or indirectly, you weren’t being honest with me, Dom. You purposefully tricked me into confessing things to you that I had no intention of sharing until I was good and ready. How can you possibly think we could have what we once had when you do something like that?”
He lifted his hands, resting his palms on my cheeks and threading his fingers through my hair. “I wanted to tell you the truth,” he whispered, resting his forehead against mine. “I wanted to tell you so many times, but I didn’t know how.”
I wrapped my fingers around his wrists, not to pull them away but in order to keep myself grounded. No matter how much he hurt me, I felt grounded any time we touched. It was like a goddamn curse.
“We talked about trust, about communicating and being honest with each other,” I whispered, the pain making it difficult to talk. “You agreed to that, Dominic. You told me to my face that we’d be honest with each other, and look at the secrets you’ve been keeping from me. A relationship can’t be built on lies and manipulations.”
“Sophia—”
My nose stung as tears built in my eyes. “No. This isn’t going to work.”
His eyes rimmed red as his hands began to tremble. “I don’t accept that,” he decreed in a voice so quiet it was almost impossible to hear. “I can’t. Sophia, I love you.”
“I know. But it’s not enough.” I pulled away and moved for the door, but Dominic spoke again when I put my hand on the knob.
“You said we’d talk tonight.”
I looked over my shoulder. “That was before I found out you’d been lying to me from the beginning.”
I pulled the door open and stepped through as he said, “There are still things we need to talk about. This isn’t finished, Sophia. You promised we’d talk, and I’m going to hold you to that.”
He could do that. He could also hold his breath while he waited for me to listen.
Chapter Thirty
Dominic
I’d gone to her house like we’d discussed that evening, and wasn’t surprised that she didn’t open the door for me. Eventually I went back to my car and sat in her driveway, praying that she’d take pity and let me in. It didn’t happen.
So I tried again the next night.
And the next.
And the next.
Four days of no contact eventually passed. But I never gave up. Not once. That was why I was currently sitting in my car in her driveway, looking up at her house. The ache inside of me when she walked out of that conference room had grown with each passing day. It hurt to eat. It hurt to sleep. Christ, it even hurt to breathe. I felt like a drug addict detoxing, only there was no light at the end of the tunnel for me.
The shadow of her figure moved across the living room window, and I found myself holding my breath as the curtains fluttered. She knew I was there. She’d been watching me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she missed me the way I missed her.
My cell phone went off, the unexpected noise scaring the shit out of me. I released a sigh of annoyance at the sight of my sister’s name, then swiped my thumb across the screen to answer.
“Shorty, now’s not really a good time.”
“Really?” I knew the saccharin-sweet tone of her voice was fake when she carried on. “Seems like a good time to me seeing as you aren’t doing anything but lurking outside my best friend’s house like a creepy stalker.”
My head fell back against the headrest and I closed my eyes. “She called you to tattle on me?”
Her laughter came through the line. “She’s got it in her head that I can convince you to leave her alone. I tried explaining that you don’t listen to a damn thing I have to say, but she was adamant that I try.”
I smiled for the first time in forever. “Yeah well, you were right, she was wrong.”
“I figured as much. Okay then,” she chirped. “I’ll leave you to it. Love you, big brother.”
My back shot straight. “Wait,” I started skeptically. “You aren’t going to try harder?”
“Why would I do that?” I had no answer for that, even if I wasn’t thoroughly confused. “Look, you know what I want most of all is you and Sophia together. You fucked up. Big-time—”
“Thanks, shorty,” I responded drily.
“But everyone makes mistakes,” she finished. “She’s hur
ting right now, unbelievably so, and with damn good reason. But you make her happy. Happier than I’ve seen her since the last time you two were together. It’s like she’s only existing when she’s not with you, and I don’t want that for her. So no, I’m not going to try and talk you out of what you’re doing because I know in my heart that you’re the only one who can make her happy like that. So fix it, Dominic.”
My eyes slammed shut. I had to inhale and exhale slowly as what my sister just said burned through me. When I finally got my bearings back, I teased, “Since when did you become such a romantic?”
“Ugh,” she groaned dramatically. “It’s all Grayson’s fault, the caring, sincere asshat. I’m still not used to all these feels. They make me twitchy.”
I chuckled before finally disconnecting the call. Closing my eyes, I leaned back and settled in. It wasn’t ideal, and to be honest, five nights of sitting in my car had done some serious damage to my back, but it was worth it to be close to Sophia in any way that I could.
A knock on my driver-side window made me jump so high I bashed the top of my head on the roof of the car. “Shit! Son of a bitch!” I rubbed at the aching spot and looked to see Sophia bent down, staring in. She twirled her finger in front of her in the universal sign for “roll down the window.”
Turning the key in the ignition, I started the car up and put the window down. “Hey, what are you doing out here?”
“You’re really not going to go away, are you?” was her response.
“Nope,” I replied. “Not until you agree to talk to me. I’m settling in for the long haul.” I grabbed the bag in the floorboard and pulled out a paperback. “I’ve got a book to keep me entertained.” Next came a bottle of water. “Something to keep me hydrated, and to potentially use as a toilet if circumstances get dire.” She curled her top lip in disgust, but I kept going, removing a bag of beef jerky next. “And sustenance. It’s Saturday night and I have no plans. I can do this all night, Soph.”
Tempting Sophia Page 18