Once Friends

by Z. L. Arkadie

  “About this…”

  Through her peripheral vision, Sonja saw him holding up the paper, so she lifted her head. “What about it?”

  Jay dropped the sheet into the storage compartment next to his armrest. “There.” He smirked.

  Sonja wanted to grin like crazy, but she didn’t want to expose her deepest desires, the ones she wasn’t quite ready to accept herself. “It’s okay. You’re a single guy.”

  “But I’m on this trip with you, and like I said, I’ve changed my ways. And look, I’ve made our reservations, bought our groceries, and”—he winked like the charming pro he was—“I’m making dinner.”

  Finally Sonja could let her smile shine through, and she stretched it wide, from ear to ear. “I’ve never heard of an A-lister making their own reservations and buying their own groceries, let alone making their own dinner.”

  He chuckled as he scratched the back of his head. “That’s because I spend more time being between assistants than actually having one.”

  Sonja raised a hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t ask why.”

  Once again, Jay laughed his head off, and yet again, she loved watching him.

  The landing was bumpy, but finally they were back on the ground. It was early evening but still hot outside. However, the private terminal they used to exit the airstrip was overly air conditioned. Since they passed literally no one in the terminal, the appearance of Jay West didn’t cause a ruckus until they arrived at the car rental counter. Finally, after six selfies and handshakes, they loaded their bags into the small trunk of a very impractical sports car and sped off the airport grounds.

  Sonja felt like a fool for picturing Midland, Texas, as the same small town her grandmother had lived in. With the proliferation of the internet, smart phones, strip malls, superstores, and designer coffee, of course Midland would change. She quashed her plan to ask people who were near her grandmother’s age if they have ever heard of Lorraine Hester or Harlan Duke. Now, looking at the rows of tan stucco track homes and passing their fifth Starbucks, Sonja felt as if learning anything about her grandmother would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  She ripped her eyes off a McDonald’s, with its gym-sized play land, to tell Jay they’d have to think of another plan of attack when his cell phone rang and Bluetooth picked up the call.

  “Hello,” Jay said, keeping his eyes on the road.

  “Where the fuck are you?” a voice blared through the speakers.

  “Jim. What do you want?” Jay asked.

  “Fuck it, I don’t want to know where you are. Listen, Nora’s going to be your assistant. I’m sending you her number. Run every damn thing you’re doing through her so she can keep your calendar.”

  Jim didn’t wait for Jay to respond as he kept going on about what he preferred as far as his project with A&Rt. He was still encouraging Jay to postpone Pact of Lies so that he could consider hotter projects that would “take his career to the next level.”

  “How many levels are there?” Jay muttered, but it seemed Jim didn’t hear him because he kept talking.

  Sonja watched how Jay leaned to the left, pressing his body against the crevice between the car door and his seat. He used to do that years ago. Whenever his caretaker ran down the list of auditions he was scheduled for while handing him scripts for each, he would lean away from the source of the information. Back then, Sonja didn’t have enough life experience to know why he would do that, but now she did.

  “Got it?” Jim barked.

  Jay stared straight ahead.

  “Jay, are you there?”

  Jay cleared his throat and shifted abruptly in his seat. “Jim I don’t want to talk about this right now. I’ll call you back when I can.”

  Jim’s voice exploded over the speakers right before Jay ended the call and promptly powered down his device.

  Sonja sat very still, waiting for the tension that the previous moments had caused to dissolve. “Are you okay?” she finally asked.

  Heavy silence lingered for a few beats, then he put on a smile that was an inch too high to be real. “Yep!” he optimistically declared.

  Sonja watched him with her lips parted. “So your agent doesn’t want you to do this project?”

  “I don’t give a damn what he wants, the little shit. He should be glad he hasn’t been fired, which is something I should’ve done a long time ago.”

  She felt as though she should rub his shoulder to comfort him, but she didn’t want to cross a line that she so badly wanted to breach. So she stared ahead vacantly as the navigator announced that they had arrived at their destination.

  Jay made a left into the driveway of a red brick house with white shutters, tall windows, and a large wooden door. There were lots of well-groomed trees and bushes in the yard. The place was nice, especially for the price per night.

  He shoved the gear into park, turned off the engine, and looked at her with the sexiest bedroom eyes she’d ever seen. “Hey?”

  She could barely breathe. “What?”

  “Don’t let anything Jim said make you think I’m not fully committed to you because I am.” His eyes seemed to penetrate her deeper when he said you.

  “Oh.” She felt warm in her light cotton dress even though the air conditioning had done its job of making the car nice and cool.

  Then his eyebrows lifted slightly and his eyes gleamed some more. Sonja felt as though he was hypnotizing her into betraying sound judgment. Sonja couldn’t be attracted to Jay in that way. It wasn’t feasible—at least that was what she felt, but she didn’t know why.

  So she swallowed and decided to guide them down the right path. “I wasn’t worried about that.” Her voiced cracked, so she cleared her throat. “The fact that we’ve, I’ve, probably taken on more than I can chew worries me.”

  He smirked. “Don’t worry about a thing. You and I have always made a formidable team, remember?”

  Oh goodness, her head was spinning as she recalled the plays they used to write and produce together and all the money they made from the neighborhood kids. “I remember.”

  She hadn’t realized how close his face was to hers until he leaned back. “So let’s get inside and figure this shit out.”

  With some distance between them, Sonja felt as though she could think more clearly. “But I’m not even sure what we’re looking for anymore?”

  Jay’s winning smile was back in full force. “Oh, that’s easy. We’re looking for any kind of inspiration.”

  Sonja chuckled. Jay always had a way of having no plan sound like the most exciting idea in the world.

  Jay punched in a code to extract a key from a locked box. Sonja was relieved when they stepped inside a cooled house. Even though he’d paid for the house, he insisted she make herself comfortable in the master bedroom. There was nothing Sonja could say or do to change his mind. So shortly after turning on the lights, they parted ways to wash off the flight. The plan was to meet in the kitchen to make the steaks, baked potatoes, and salad for dinner, and then spend a good chunk of the night figuring out a strategy to learn more about Lorraine Hester’s past.

  Sonja had stripped out of her clothes and gotten in the shower. As she let the warm water run down her body, she tried to wrap her mind around the unbelievable day she’d had. First she had been summoned to her grandmother’s office, where Lorraine had threatened to drop the hatchet on her budding career as a screenwriter. It was at that moment Sonja realized how badly she wanted to change her life, so she brought the issue to Jay and Dexter. And then she and Jay ended up on a private flight to Texas.

  Being alone with him had done unexpected things to her body and mind. At the moment, she was fighting the desire to fantasize about Jay stepping into the shower behind her. Without saying a word, he would spin her around, kiss her so deeply that her head felt as though it was spinning off her neck, and titillate all her sexual hotspots, making orgasms rush through her with the velocity of Niagara Falls. Sonja gasped as though she had just taken her f
irst breath. Being around Jay had awakened desires that had been dormant within her for years, and she had no idea what to do next other than focus. So after lathering her hair with shampoo, she forced herself to think of ways they could proceed with their research.

  Sonja’s thoughts raced back to when she’d become overly interested in her grandmother’s past. It all started after she’d decided to give up on her ambitions of becoming a screenwriter, because too many assholes were blocking the path to success, and asked her grandmother for a job.

  “I didn’t know you were interested in real estate,” Gran said.

  “Well, I’m not,” Sonja replied. “I just want somewhere to land until I figure out what to do with myself.”

  Her grandmother didn’t lecture her about getting back in the ring and trying until she landed a knockout punch—that was the sermon Elaine had given her. Instead her grandmother had said, “As long as you continue moving toward something.”

  Sonja had assured her grandmother that the job would be short-term because she was definitely planning on enrolling in a graduate program somewhere. However, she was still lost when it came to picking a subject of study. All Sonja knew was that she was both restless and lost inside, which made for the worst kind of inner turmoil.

  But it so happened that Leslie Smith, the then-manager of the complex in which Sonja lived, had just received her broker’s license and was moving into a full-time job at LH Real Estate Group. So Sonja filled her position as the manager of the complex.

  It was funny, because when Sonja started the job, she would see Ms. Jenkins out and about every now and then, and the woman always greeted her with a smile. And she was no bother until Sonja saw that all of Ms. Jenkins’s utilities—cable, internet and even her telephone account—were all in the name of LH Reality. Then Sonja discovered that her gran’s assistants were also paying Ms. Jenkins’s cell phone account, grocery service, and scheduling her house cleanings and car service for the rare times that she left the complex to do things like acquire another cat or take one of them to the vet or something. She found the fact that her grandmother was basically taking care of Ms. Jenkins’s every need very odd. So she decided to bring it up with Ms. Jenkins, as well as pull an Elaine on the woman by simply trying to sell her on the principle of empowering herself by taking care of her own bills. Ms. Jenkins basically told her to stop being nosy and mind her own business.

  Sonja had kicked herself for trying that strategy. Hell, it never worked on her, so why did she think it would work on someone else? And when Sonja asked her grandmother why she was taking care of the woman, her grandmother, in not so many words, told her the same thing.

  The next time Sonja saw Ms. Jenkins, she asked her when and where the woman had met her grandmother. Ms. Jenkins’s eyes expanded like balloons as she smashed her lips together and stormed off. Sonja marked the weird reaction and tried to ask her grandmother the same question.

  “She’s merely a tenant who needs help,” her grandmother said in a tone sharp enough to slice through steel.

  Sonja didn’t believe her one bit.

  Then one day, she had received a call from Ms. Jenkins to unplug her kitchen sink. The whole ordeal was a crazy disaster. Ms. Jenkins had more cats than she could remember, and Sonja didn’t know she was so allergic until then. Cats were everywhere, skittering and scattering across on the counters, around her feet, and of course Ms. Jenkins was wearing a gray cat around her neck. Sonja was thankful that she actually knew how to take the pipes apart and unclog a sink. She’d learned how to do it in college while living in the dorms. Whenever something went wrong in the bathroom, they could’ve waited forever for maintenance to come and repair the problem or she could just do it herself. Her grandmother had taught her to not sit around and wait for someone to fix something she could handle herself.

  Sonja took a break from her memory as shampoo rolled into her right eye.

  “Ouch,” she cried, rubbing it. “Shit.”

  She decided to concentrate on the matter at hand. Plus, she had already extracted what she needed from her memory and couldn’t wait to sit down and discuss with Jay what she thought should be their first plan of attack.

  Jay stared at Sonja, blinking, when she appeared in the kitchen. She would never admit it, but he had given her the reaction she was seeking. Her curly locks were damp and fluffy, her running shorts hugged her ass and crotch in the right places, and her T-shirt was loose enough to not be overtly sexy but just enough to make him want to snatch it off her and suck on her tits.

  He closed his mouth to clear his throat. “Um, the steaks will be done in about twenty minutes.”

  “Good,” she said then strolled past him to hoist herself up on top of the island made of gray granite. “Listen, I think I’ve come up with a starting point.”

  He frowned as though he had no idea what she could’ve been talking about.

  “Ms. Jenkins,” she said leadingly.

  He blinked hard a few times. “Oh, the tenant.”

  He was clearly distracted by her, and for a moment, she wished she had been less overt with the sex appeal. “Yeah. I can’t shake the feeling that she’s been blackmailing my grandmother into paying all of her bills for years. There’s a secret. We have to find out what it is.”

  Jay kept his stern expression. “A secret about what?”

  She folded her arms. “That’s the million-dollar question. But I think it has something to do with Gran’s first husband.”

  He walked over and sat on the island beside her. “Whatever you want.”

  They were staring into each other’s eyes yet again. And Sonja realized the desire she had worked so hard to manage was charging back to the surface. She noticed how his eyes rolled down to her chest and beyond before rising back to her face.

  “I ordered a bottle of wine. You want a glass?” he asked.

  Sonja shook her head. She wasn’t a big wine drinker, especially since it only took one glass to dismantle all of her inhibition. “Nah, but you can have a glass.”

  His lopsided grin was perhaps the most seductive expression she had ever seen—at least it felt like it at the moment. “I’ll pass.”

  Sonja’s heart was thumping as she looked down at her burning thighs.

  “Sonja,” Jay whispered.

  When she raised her head to face him, Jay’s lips were right there. After one breath, their mouths bridged the distance between them. In the next breath, their lips were connected. Sonja’s heart fluttered and her soul ignited into flames of passion. Finally she had given her body what it so desperately desired.

  With every swirl and brush of their tongues, she wanted more of him. His hand was squeezing her breast as though it had finally been granted permission to indulge. The way he sucked, bit, and kissed the skin of her neck, then lifted her shirt to sink her nipples into his warm mouth sent sensations to her pussy that she’d forgotten existed. A whimper escaped Sonja as Jay swept her off the countertop as though she were as light as a feather. Through the warmth of their tongues and lips and their breaths clashing, she heard her grandmother’s voice telling her to always be responsible in such moments. That was when she regained reason and took a deep breath.

  “Jay,” she said, dropping her face to block access to her lips. “What are we doing?”

  Chapter 12

  Jay West

  They had made it to the start of the hallway. He had planned to carry her to the master bedroom. But what Sonja had just asked was valid—what in the hell was he doing? His dick was throbbing, and his body was shivering. If he didn’t enter her soon, then he would burst. And she felt so soft in his arms. Her ass in those shorts, and her fluffy damp hair, and he’d been wanting to suck on her breasts all day. Damn, she had the perfect set. But then he smelled the meat in the oven. He didn’t want to turn back or put her down. But the decision wasn’t his.

  “I want you, Sonja,” he said with a little pleading in his tone.

  “I know but…” She was breathing
heavily.

  “We’re not kids anymore.”

  The way she searched his eyes always turned him the hell on. It was as though he couldn’t hide anything from her. Sonja was the only woman in the world who could discover his secrets, which meant that he didn’t have to hide anything from her.

  “I know we’re not kids anymore.”

  “So what does that mean?” he asked impatiently.

  She nodded stiffly.

  His eyes widened. “Yeah? We can do this?”

  “Do you have condoms?” she whispered.

  He paused because he didn’t want to answer that question. He didn’t want Sonja to think he was so presumptuous as to believe she would give him the privilege of making love to her. He also didn’t want her to believe that he was still as promiscuous as he used to be. But he didn’t want to make a U-turn and go in the opposite direction of where they were taking their night.

  “Yes, I have some.” He felt just as eager as he sounded.

  “Okay,” she whispered thickly.

  Cautiously, he went in for another kiss. Her lips were so soft. She tasted so sweet. He was so close to receiving the one thing in life that had always eluded him.

  “But,” she said between kisses.

  He didn’t want her talk, so he kissed her again.

  “Jay, the oven,” she managed to say.

  The food could burn for all he cared, but she was right. He cursed under his breath.

  He moved fast, practically running with her down the hallway. Once he made it to her room, he spread her out on the bed and lowered himself on top of her, grinding his erection against her pussy. He wanted her to feel his rock-hard thickness. It throbbed so badly for her.

  After one last deep caress of her tongue by his, Jay jumped to his feet, ran to the kitchen, and fumbled with the knobs of the oven until he’d finally turned it off. He nearly sprinted down the hallway, eager to taste her and be inside her. After he stormed into the bedroom, Jay stopped in his tracks. His jaw dropped. Sonja had stripped out of her shorts and top and was completely naked.