Never Just Friends (Spotlight New Adult Book 2)

by Esguerra, Mina V.

  He had his back to her when he dropped his pants, then his boxers, so she got a view of that hard butt of his. She rose up on her knees, moved to the middle of the bed, and waited for him to turn around.

  When he did, she inadvertently bit her lip. Everything about him was radiating desire, for her, for what he wanted, and was going to get, right then. Was this always present between them? It couldn’t have been, but now it was as obvious as an erection. She felt stupid all of a sudden, to have gone without this for so long.

  Naked as she was, he crawled up the bed, mimicking her position until their knees touched. There was a condom packet in his right hand; he’d be all clear in August. She was on the pill and had made a habit of taking the test twice a year, like him, because they were essentially getting their results together.

  “Did you change your mind?” he asked.

  Usually his dark hair and tendency to give a good glower made him seem more intense than he was. Right then he was all gentle, no sharp edges. Like she could actually hurt him.

  “No,” she said.

  “Because you might see a man spontaneously combust, if you change your mind,” Jake said, as he tore the foil open.

  “I said I know what pleases me.” It was hot, so hot, how he took his cock in his hand and rolled the condom over it. “I thought we should start with that.”

  He had no complaint. Her small hand on his chest led him to sit, back against the pillows and the heavy wooden headboard.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Jake groaned. “This is perfect. This is how you like it?”

  “Sometimes,” Lindsay said, holding on to his shoulders as she lifted a knee and straddled him. Feeling him against her. Almost inside her.

  “You like being fucked deep, don’t you? I can give you that. Let me.”

  She felt him there already, on her, but she held on for a second thinking that there was still a way to back out of this. Maybe there would be a way to get this done, to scratch this itch, and go back to where they were. Comfortably friendly. Expecting nothing. But no, she realized, they had passed that point a long time ago. For her it might have been this morning, when he surprised her with his kiss, but for him to have thought about this, and set everything in motion—he was in. So in. So much that if she said no, things wouldn’t be the same, even if she fooled herself into thinking that it would be.

  Might as well enjoy it.

  She took him inside and sank down, all the way, faster than he expected. It ached in the best way. She thought of what he said, combusting, but it would be her, she’d catch on fire if she wasn’t careful, and she hadn’t even moved yet.

  “That’s deep,” she gasped, feeling every inch of him inside.

  “It’ll get even better.”

  “Just wait a second.”

  Their lips met, briefly, enough for her to remember the other parts of her body that were being ignored by her fixation on his massiveness inside her. You wanted this. God, get it together. She took a deep breath and moved. Tentatively thrust her hips. Took him in even deeper, until she found her rhythm, and each descent had her gasping. Until he thrust his pelvis up against her rhythm, his timing more urgent, jagged, chasing something. It reminded her of how he ran, and why she’d let him go ahead and he’d wind up waiting for her. He sprinted. He was sprinting now. His hands went around her hips and she stopped doing the work now, because he was thrusting up and hitting all the right spots, plural because she was feeling it everywhere.

  Lindsay was moaning. She could hear herself and she wished she didn’t, wished she didn’t sound like she was almost there when they had started like a second ago.

  “Wait,” she said, pushing his chest down.

  He didn’t slow down. “Are you close, Lindsay? It’s okay. We have all night, babe. Don’t hold back, take it now.”

  Looking down and seeing him slide into her was making it worse, making it faster. What had she even done for him? Nothing yet. Nothing extra.

  “Lindsay,” and his voice was rougher now. “Take it. Come. What do you need me to do? You want it faster?”

  And he thrust faster. Oh God. She was going to break. In many, sharp pieces, like a porcelain figurine dropped from high up. “But—”

  “Lindsay.” His pounding made his breath and words short, terse. “This is all I’ve been dreaming of. I want to see what you look like when you come. You know you want to. What do you need? Tell me.”

  She didn’t need anything else. Another few thrusts and she’d be screaming. She didn’t know why she said it anyway. “Pull my hair.”

  “Holy fuck.” Jake wrapped a handful around his fist and did just that. “I knew it. I fucking knew it.”

  Knew what? But there was no time to ask the question, just enough to see the smug satisfaction on his face. Lindsay’s head tipped back and everything inside her set off. Fireworks. Geysers. Her eyes were shut tight throughout this complete loss of control, only vaguely registering him stiffen all over, inside her, around her, then become gentle again, his mouth recovering on her breast.

  It felt like she floated down to earth. She let him slide out of her, and then rolled over on her back.

  Still sitting up, catching his breath, Jake pulled the condom off. She was looking at it, registering that it was slick with come, but unable to say anything. Her mouth was numb. Her whole body was numb.

  He held the condom up so it wouldn’t drip. “I can last longer than that, don’t worry,” he said. “But damn it you were just—I needed to be there with you.”

  ***

  She was still quiet later, and maybe it got him concerned.

  “Lindsay.”

  Lindsay wasn’t asleep. But she was lying there with a hand monitoring her pulse. Waiting for it to slow down.

  “I’m alive,” she joked.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Truth was, her brain was a bit blank. She was feeling things – the pleasant hum from earlier that still hadn’t completely left. The soft sheets bunched up around her. The air, getting a little colder, as it moved over her skin.

  “We never did this before why?” she said.

  As soon as she said it she began to remember. Because he did this a lot. Back then, even after the talk about casual sex, the story about a possible STD, if that hadn’t scared her off and she managed to sleep with him anyway, she’d simply have been his Friday night. Or his Ms. November. Maybe keeping her distance in this particular thing was what made them closer in other ways. Would they have stayed friends this long? Would he have continued to wander into her life, her home, her family’s routine?

  “I used to think that if you had just asked, then we would have, easy,” Jake said, his body stretched out beside her. “But maybe we didn’t because I wasn’t ready.”

  She didn’t know what he meant by ready, but that explained what she felt. Maybe back then, she wasn’t ready to have him drop out of her life once he was “done.” The strange thing was, this didn’t feel like that at all. This felt like the opposite, and it was…different. It might take some getting used to.

  “How dramatic,” she said, chasing that feeling away with humor, with a roll toward the body next to her, with a kiss.

  Chapter 11

  Lindsay learned early on, because they were friends who told each other things, that Jake didn’t have family nearby. His parents were never married, and when his father died, he had been shipped off to relatives with a small fund meant to help defray the costs of raising him. The fund lasted for the most part until the first few years of college, but he had never felt welcome in his aunt’s family. He was essentially a guy who lived with them, whose rent had been prepaid until he was eighteen. The house in Fremont was one of his father’s properties, and despite it requiring a longer drive to the university, he preferred to live in it rather than a dorm. He didn’t want to continue living with virtual strangers.

  Lindsay was living at her sister’s house in the same neighborhood because she had to. Cordelia was ten years
older, and at the time Lindsay started college, was married for three years and had two kids within that time. Their parents had passed away in a car accident when Lindsay was ten; Cordelia and her husband Rusty had been like her parents too, in a way.

  It was the right thing for Lindsay to do, stay with Cordelia to help with the kids. She worked out her class schedule so she’d be able to watch Zane and Brian and give Cordelia enough time to stay sane. By the time she had graduated, both were in preschool and supplementary daycare, and she was free to move across the country to finally be on her own.

  But Christmas was always spent at home, in California. Jake was there that first year because he had no plans, and she’d tossed him an invitation for the heck of it. He came back the following year, despite already living in Canada, or LA when he wasn’t doing the show. Zane and Brian adored him, treated him like a fun uncle. Rusty was just happy to have another friend, and they kicked back on the porch with beers every time he came over. Lindsay liked that he liked being around them.

  That second Christmas, Lindsay remembered, was when she was bitter about Jessica. His show was set to premiere in January, two weeks later, and the thing she refused to acknowledge as hurt was still fresh enough for her to stubbornly avoid watching the premiere. Which yes, was childish and insecure of her, but she couldn’t suddenly take that back. Catching up on twenty episodes of television now would take some time.

  But she knew that she should, finally take the time to see this thing that made Jake a success to so many people.

  They were in the Caine Foundation office, the day after he arrived in New York. They woke up early to swing by her place uptown so she could shower and change, while he sat in her tiny living room and ate a donut with his coffee. He had a car service thanks to the hotel and it took them back to midtown before nine a.m. She made the rounds and gave him a tour, introducing him to a gleeful Marnie, and now they were parked at the meeting room, his office for the next few days.

  She was watching him read a chapter of the Caine Foundation Annual Report, something she wouldn’t even do unless she wrote it (and she did write that chapter), and wondered again what was happening here.

  Knowing that he was absorbed in something else, she picked up her phone and texted Marnie: Can you get me the number of Jake’s manager?

  The meeting room had only three walls and they were clear plastic paneling. Lindsay saw Marnie receive it, read it, and toss her a look. She’d been a professional assistant for over a decade now though, and knew to be discreet. I’ll send you her contact details. Did I leave something out of the contract?

  No, she didn’t. Marnie was thorough.

  “You really sure about this?” she asked Jake again.

  Jake’s eye didn’t even leave the printed page. “Ask that one more time and I’ll start to think you consider me too stupid for this.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Then you have your answer.”

  Lindsay remembered senior year, and what Jake had been doing before acting threw him into a totally different path. He was being courted to take further studies by the agriculture department; an extra pair of hands was always needed at their ongoing rainforest outreach program. Was it something he really wanted to do? Did Lindsay ever remember him do more than talk about it, or work on it from the library or his laptop? Did he go to nearby national parks, plan trips to the Amazon?

  “Done reading,” Jake said, putting the report down. “Do you want to quiz me now?”

  Fine. Lindsay wanted to help, and not only because her boss essentially told her that Jake could not screw this up.

  “You see what that chapter is getting at?” It was the one on the lessons learned for certain grant projects that were coming to an end.

  “Small achievements, replicable results. Touching personal stories.”

  She nodded. “That’s what it said, but when your donor is giving you money, they don’t want to hear about the one person whose life became marginally better or that small dot of land that you’ve kept green.”

  He nodded. “They want big-picture impact.”

  Lindsay nodded. “Far reaching. Policy level. But that kind of thing costs an obscene amount of money, more than anyone is willing to give. Do you realize what that chapter is trying to do?”

  Jake glanced at it again. “Convince them that their small amount of money is going to matter, when it all adds up. But it’s not true, is it?”

  “It’s not untrue,” Lindsay said, “We can’t prove it. Sometimes a lot of money with ambitious intentions will be the biggest flop. Manageable intentions, manageable expenses. We can tell them that this served as an inspiration for something bigger. That this was the catalyst for another thing. That this small thing contributed greatly to the grand design.”

  “It’s a dream,” Jake said. “You’re selling the dream that they can make a difference.”

  “But they’re not wide-eyed innocents. They’re old hands at this. They can see through the BS and know that it’s just money moving around the world. Which small thing that probably won’t matter do we put our money into now?”

  “And this is what you need me for then?” It was beginning to sink in now. “To sit in meetings and help argue the case that this insignificant thing is better than that insignificant thing?”

  “Kind of. You thought you were saving the planet?”

  “I know I still am,” Jake said, like a trooper, “but apparently from bureaucracy.”

  “You remember that signal we came up with for when we’re in mortal danger but can’t say anything?” Lindsay said. “If you get asked something crazy, do that. I’ll be there for you in a heartbeat.”

  Chapter 12

  The signal Lindsay was talking about was a closed fist but with a thumb tucked inside, because on one of those times when they drank beer and talked about the details of their life during the zombie apocalypse, Jake said she should never tuck her thumb in when she threw a punch.

  “You’ll break your own finger, which is stupid,” he had said. “We’ll need all our thumbs.”

  “Then if you see me making a dumb fist like that, you’ll know I’m in trouble. Or I’m just trying to annoy you,” she had said.

  As the day wore on, and he read more, he felt confident that no trouble signals would be needed.

  Jake was also beginning to see why this work would need defending. As he spent more time in the meeting room, shifting from one report to another following a project’s progress from proposal to evaluation, the idea of this being a gig that had him hug trees and be photographed started to fade. But he knew it could be like this. He didn’t pull that string to be photographed hugging trees.

  If this were a typical year, Jake would be in the middle of filming Rage Eternal right now. Maybe they’d be at episode four, pre-production for the fifth. Though available to him, he didn’t take the option of traveling back to California during his three-day gap per episode. There was, to be honest, no one else to visit in California, and he took the flights only to take meetings with his manager, have lunches with people.

  Then he didn’t need to use the travel at all because he started seeing Jessica, and she was originally from Vancouver.

  He waited for his heart to painfully contract, the way it used to, when he thought about Jessica. Thinking about her at some point became like knocking the first domino and watching in horror as the rest began to fall, and there was no way to stop them. It would start with her face, that first time he saw her at the script reading, no makeup and hair pulled back. He was new to all of this; she flirtatiously offered to “teach him” things. They were friends immediately; she was good at making friends. She wasn’t in that many episodes that first season but she was in town, and before he knew it he was going to her apartment every chance he got. It was good for a few months. Jake winced every time the story went further, because when it got ugly, he got the short end of it. Pre-actor, the Jake that Lindsay met, would never have gotten into that situatio
n. He was out of his depth, clung to Jessica for support, and she shook her leg to dislodge him.

  Even though filming the show took a relatively short time (they only had ten episodes, shorter than most network television series), there was publicity work before the show aired, and then pre-production work for the following season soon after. That part fucked with his head the most; she was cold, distant, cruel by default, but for occasional bursts of being interested again. But he couldn’t tell which was genuine, because he didn’t know her that much at all.

  That meant during his second year in Vancouver, filming season two, he was a mess. But his show runners, Cora, everyone really, made it work. His character Charles was tapping into a darker side, and he poured himself into it. Not that he felt any satisfaction in nailing “broody.” But there was no going back now. Even if he quit and went back to California to continue school, write off the acting as a period of insanity, what would be the point? His inheritance had run out, and how much was he going to make researching trees?

  Also, Lindsay had graduated, and was already in New York.

  The good thing about watching those dominoes fall, all the way to the last one, was the peace that came with the silence. Lindsay was always the last domino. He began to ask himself though why that even mattered.

  In any case, the ratings were stellar, especially for the episodes nearing the end of the second season, which aired only a few months ago. He was getting more attention than ever, and when he began to put himself back together, he realized that he could go with a happy middle here. Get the best of different worlds. As long as he had enough guts to take it, and ask for it.

  He knew he would be sitting in on meetings about electric transport, water pollution, and smog, but his attention kept gravitating toward that reforestation project. It meant to revive a portion of Indonesian forest almost completely lost to logging. Surely they hadn’t completely brought it back. Why were they getting cut off from the money?