by Lisa Levine
“Just be careful, okay?” Bridget said.
“Careful of what?”
“Of him.”
“Bridget, I’ve known Easton forever, and I trust him. Even with that last incident, I trust him. We talked about everything, and things are great now. I love him, and he loves me, too.”
“Did he tell you that he loves you?” Bridget asked her.
“Yes.”
“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. We both know that if something happens and this doesn’t work out that you are going to be gloriously ruined by it. You’ve put your whole heart and soul into this guy, and I’m just worried for you.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Ivy said. “I’m happy now.”
I casually walked my way back over to where they were standing before Bridget had another chance to get inside of her head.
As Ivy went to look down at the books I had grabbed, Bridget silently mouthed out the words to me that said, “You said you love her?” as if I had committed a cardinal sin. I was trying to figure out a way to signal to her that I had no intention of breaking Ivy’s heart, but Ivy looked up before I could, and Bridget went back to looking as if she were casually stocking books.
“So, do you have to stay and work the rest of your shift today?” I asked Ivy.
“No, Ben said that I could take the rest of the day off.”
“Great!” I said excitedly. “I want to take you out for a day in the city then.”
“The day is already halfway over,” Bridget mumbled. She could be such a ray of sunshine sometimes.
“Okay, well, I want to take you for an evening out in the city then. Sound good?”
“Sounds wonderful!” Ivy smiled.
“You two have fun!” Bridget said as Ivy and I turned to leave.
I could feel her eyes boring into the back of my head. I was going to show Ivy one of the best times of her life, and then I was going to take her back home to make love to her all night again.
24
Chapter Fifteen (Ivy)
This was the best day ever. Easton took me all around the city, and although I’ve never been the kind of girl to be impressed by money, it was nice just to be able to do anything and everything without a care in the world.
He took me to the Art Institute of Chicago first, and we took selfies with the pair of bronze lions at the museum’s entryway. Then we roamed the halls, getting lost in art and talking about the various pieces and what we saw inside the installations. We stopped to have a glass of wine and then continued onto Millennium Park and Cloud Gate to see the mirrored bean-shaped sculpture. For as long as I had lived in Chicago, I’d never had this much fun. We wandered around, poking in and out of shops, cafés, galleries, and bars, looking at and experiencing everything as both friends and lovers. It was truly wonderful and more fun than I can remember ever having.
We held hands the entire time, and at one point, we had to stop in the middle of the street and kiss. It turned into more than a kiss as our hands pulled against each other, and eventually, someone told us to move out of the way. I was so happy and so in love with Easton that I was consumed by the thought of never being without him again. The only problem with that was that it also made a lingering feeling creep up on me that it wouldn’t last. I tried to ignore the nagging sensation, which was easy to do the more I got completely swept away. But it seemed to continue to resurface despite my efforts to try to dismiss it. After a lavish and adventurous time in the city, we settled at a quiet bar to sit and get a drink and a bite to eat.
“Did you enjoy today?” Easton asked me as he held my hand in his lap.
“Completely. It was wonderful,” I said as I smiled. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he said as he picked up a French fry and popped it into his mouth.
“Okay, please don’t read into this at all. I just want to know your thoughts on it,” I said as a disclaimer.
“Does that mean I should act more like your best friend now and less like your lover?” he asked teasingly.
“Oh no, please always act like my lover,” I said in return. “But a bit of best friend wisdom might be good with this one, too.”
“Okay, shoot,” he said. He squeezed my hand to let me know that he was right here, and nothing I could say was going to make him go anywhere else.
“Do you ever worry that this won’t last?” I asked. I felt guilty for even bringing it up, but he immediately started easing my fears.
“No, not anymore,” he said. “I think that’s a natural reaction, especially for people who have been through some shit. I think we automatically go to a mode of this is all going to fall out from beneath me as sort of a preparatory coping mechanism, if that makes sense?”
I nodded as I took a sip of my drink. It made perfect sense.
“But I don’t feel that way with us anymore,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I came to realize something that made more sense than everything else, something that resonated deeper than anything I had ever known to be true.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“Do you ever think about when we were in high school?” he asked me. It seemed random, but I was guessing there was a method to his question.
“Sometimes,” I answered. “But not too often.”
“I think about it from time to time,” he said. “And you know the one thing that I think about the most? It’s you.”
I laughed. “That’s not that unusual,” I said. “We were best friends. If I were to think back on my teenage memories, you were in almost all of them.” Of course, I didn’t tell him about all the fantasies that I used to have about him back then, too, or all the times that he would be dating other girls and I would be so jealous that I would start to cry in the middle of dinner and have to excuse myself to my room.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But what if it was something more than that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe the reason that you were a virgin for all this time,” he said.
I squirmed in my seat, and he moved his hand over to my thigh.
“Sidenote,” he said. “You don’t need to keep getting uncomfortable when we talk about your recently ended virginity.”
“I know,” I said. “But it makes me feel as though I lacked something, something that everyone else had.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Do you have any idea how that felt for me? Let’s, for a second, take everything else out of it. The first time we made love was the single most incredible moment of my life. You keep talking about it as if it were a bad thing that you were still a virgin when we had sex for the first time, and I need you to know that it was quite the opposite. I’m honored to have been the first—and hopefully, only—man entrusted with your body. That was a gift, not a hindrance.”
I smiled at him and felt all the heat rush to places in my body that made me wish we were home again and in bed.
“Okay, so back to what I was first saying,” he continued.
I saw him rub his pants for a second as if to get himself to calm down. I thought he was feeling the same heat that I was.
“What if the reason that you had stayed a virgin this entire time, and the reason that I hadn’t ever been able to settle on a single woman this whole time, was because somewhere deep down, we always knew that we were supposed to be with each other?”
“That seems like that would be a pretty disparate double standard,” I teased. “You go around and stick your cock in every woman, and I wait as some sort of symbol of virginal celibacy for you?”
“No, that’s not at all what I meant,” he said as he looked completely embarrassed by how it had come across.
“Relax,” I said. “I was just joking. I know what you meant.
“As far as that looming feeling that it won’t last, that’s rubbish,” Easton said. “This is everything that will last. Most people never find what we have, and now that we’ve found it, it will outlast anything.”
He leaned forward and kissed me, and it immediately dispelled all of my worries. He was right; there was no reason at all to think that we hadn’t found our everlasting utopia. It was a rocky start, but here we were, and neither of us wanted anything other than what we held in our hands at this very moment.
After our evening was over, Easton wanted me to come back to his apartment with him, and I wanted so badly to do it. But even though Ben had been cool about today, he wasn’t going to be cool about it if I showed up another four hours late to my shift tomorrow. Plus, I knew that Easton was falling behind on his work, too, even if he didn’t want to admit it and he was his own boss.
“Please come home with me,” he pleaded as we sat in the driveway to my apartment.
“You know I want to,” I said as I tried to stop myself from just giving in, saying the hell with it, and quitting my job to just stay in bed and make love to him all day. “But if what you said earlier is true, then we have lots of time and lots of nights like last night ahead of us.”
“Ugh, yes, that is true. But I want to make love to you right now,” he said.
“Right now?” I said as I grinned at him mischievously.
He looked at me curiously, but when I reached my hand over to rub his swollen cock, he knew exactly what I meant.
“We’ve crossed the first-time line,” I said. “So now we can have sex with each other anywhere and at any time, right?”
He didn’t need to answer me. Instead, he grabbed me and pulled me over onto his lap while I undid his pants beneath me. I wasn’t well-practiced at this, but it came much more naturally than I had expected it to. I lifted my hips, and Easton pushed me gently down onto him. We both moaned as he slid inside of me, and I felt my thighs shake.
“You’re on top of me now,” he said as he tried to keep his voice steady. “I’ll help you, and you do the moving.
He guided my hips as he rocked me gently back and forth, and after just a few motions, I held his hands still and took control of it myself. It was an intoxicating feeling as I rolled my pelvis against him and felt him inside me, pressing and pushing on a sensitive place I didn’t even know existed in response to my movement. I pushed against him so deeply that I felt like he was pressing into the caverns of my body, and I was even more pleased when I could see how much it made him feel.
“Don’t stop,” he said as I watched his mouth drop open, and his eyes roll. He held my hips, but then I took his hands and clutched them up against the seat of the car next to his shoulders as he moaned, and his body trembled beneath me.
The closer he got to reaching his limit, the more I felt him harden and swell inside of me, and the more it shoved me toward the edge. The sound he made when he couldn’t take anymore coupled with my own, and we both collapsed against each other in a quivering mass of overly sensitized bodies.
He reached his hands to the side of my head and kissed me as I stayed right there without moving on his lap.
“That was incredible,” he said, still trying to catch his breath as his chest heaved against mine. “Come home with me.”
I smiled at him and kissed him more. I wanted to.
“I can’t tonight,” I said. “I’ll get fired if I’m late again, even with Ben. And then I won’t be able to pay my share of the rent. Will you come to the bookstore tomorrow after work?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be there. And I’ll be desperately ready to pull you out of that store and back into my arms.”
Getting clothes pulled back up and dragging myself out of the car was not the fun part; neither was having to leave and walk into my apartment. But Easton messaged me even before I had made it to the door, and that made me smile.
“I already miss you,” he texted.
“Me too,” I replied.
“Maybe someday not too far away, we can fix this problem?” his text said.
“What problem?”
I waited as I watched the three moving dots in the chat window. I was hoping that nothing was wrong. I hated it when something was wrong, and we weren’t together to talk about it.
“The problem of us not living together,” he answered.
I didn’t quite know what he meant by that. Was he saying that he wanted to live together? I was sure that it was too soon for that, and besides, I had a lease with Bridget.
“Do you have a solution in mind?” I asked.
I waited while the dots moved in the chat window and then stopped as if he had changed his mind, before starting to move again.
“Goodnight, Ivy. I love you.”
For a minute, I thought about asking him why he didn’t answer my question, but then I looked at his text again and realized that it was the first time he had ever told me that he loved me in a message. There was something about seeing it in print that made me forget about everything else.
“I love you, too,” I texted back.
I stood outside the apartment for a minute and held the phone to my chest as I looked up at the cloudy sky and breathed in the crisp, cool air. I couldn’t wait for it to be tomorrow so that I could see Easton again. I felt like my days were now measured by when the next time I could see my best friend would be.
When I finally walked inside the apartment, Bridget was already asleep, and Peacock greeted me at the door. I reached down to rub his head and then carried him back into Bridget’s room and dropped him onto her bed next to her so that they could snuggle. He did his typical dog thing where he walked around in a couple of circles before settling, and Bridget opened her eyes to ask me if everything was okay.
“Yeah,” I said. “Everything is even better than okay.”
“Are you being careful?” she asked groggily. “Like I said?”
“Define careful,” I said.
Bridget was able to scowl at me, even though she was half-asleep. “Careful as in protecting your heart from being broken again,” she said.
“Oh, then no. Definitely not.”
She rolled her eyes and then went back to sleep with Peacock as I walked out of her room and toward my own. I got ready for bed, set my alarm, and then lay down in bed with my phone on the nightstand. When it buzzed, I picked it up to look at it.
“I can’t sleep without you now,” Easton typed. “What have you done to me?”
“Same,” I texted. “Whatever it is, we seem to have done it to each other.”
I tried to stay awake and held the phone in my hand to see if he would text again, but my tiredness from the day caught up to me, and I drifted off to sleep.
In the morning, when I woke up, I was already excited to see Easton at the end of my shift.
25
Chapter Sixteen (Easton)
The end of the day would not come soon enough. I couldn’t wait to meet Ivy at the bookstore and ask her to move in with me. I had been up all night, thinking about it, thinking about how much I love her and how long we’ve been friends, and how much I just didn’t want to spend another night without her. There was just no reason for us not to live together. Sure, there were logistics, but I could very easily take care of those. I could pay off her portion of the rent with Bridget and whatever else she needed. I was so excited to ask her about it tonight and also a little bit anxious and really hopeful that she would say yes. I watched the clock tick down the hours and tried to get myself to focus on work to make the time go faster.
“Mr. Wilder,” Janet said as she knocked on my door. “There’s someone here to see you, and he—”
My door swung open before she had finished. The man from the nightclub that I had given a solid beating to, pushed past Janet and nearly toppled her onto the floor.
“Mr. Wilder, should I call security?” she asked.
“Not yet, Janet, thank you. I can handle this buffoon.”
Janet walked away from the door, visibly shaken.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him as I stood up at my desk. “Pretty bold move to come storming into my office after I handed your ass to you the
last time that we locked horns.”
He laughed and slammed paperwork down on my desk.
“What’s this?” I asked as I picked it up to look at.
“I don’t think you know who I am,” he sneered. “You might have thought twice about your stunt at the club if you had. I’m Roger Stills, Esquire.”
Great. Yeah, I knew that name: Roger Stills, one of Chicago’s high-powered attorneys with absolutely no moral compass. “What do you want, Roger? Besides, just to waste my time.”
“I also happen to be Layla’s older brother.”
Just perfect.
“You’ll see in that paperwork that I’m going after you with an assault charge, and I’m threatening to move against your investment firm,” he said with a wide-mouthed grin. His jaw was massive, and I thought that I noticed his nose a little crooked now, too. I was hoping that it was from my punch. It had been a solid one.
“You won’t get any of that, so why bother?” I asked, unaffected by his threats.
“Actually, I will. I have already gotten the security footage from the nightclub that clearly show you assaulted me without cause.”
“You’re lucky those tapes don’t have audio,” I snarled at him.
“And you’re not so lucky because it looks like a completely unprovoked attack. Trust me when I say that my law firm will own half this company by the time that we’re done with you.”
“And you wanted to come to deliver the message to me in person, why?”
“To offer you a chance to save yourself and your company a whole lot of hardship.”
I already knew whatever this guy wanted wasn’t something good. He was pissed-off enough at being humiliated that he was looking for revenge and most likely blackmail.
“I want you to apologize to me, and then I want you to get back together with my sister. Do those two things, and I’ll drop all the charges.”
“No,” I said immediately. “And that’s ridiculous. If you have such a solid case against me, then why in the world would you negotiate it away from an apology and a boyfriend for Layla?”