by Amelia Wilde
“Are you serious?”
I gave her my best smile then. I had no fucking idea what would happen as a result of that decision. How could I have? “Absolutely. Like I could ever leave you.”
I shake my head and shut off the shower in the locker room. I did leave her, though. She agreed with me, but I still left her.
And that kiss at O’Malley’s…
I should have messaged her by now, since her phone number might as well be tattooed onto my brain. I just don’t know what the hell to say. I don’t know if she’s looking for a hookup just to get me out of her system for good, or if she wants to talk to me about this. I don’t want to fucking talk about it—it’s not the kind of shit I want to keep rehashing over and over again—but if we did talk it out, and if she did want—
I don’t know what the fuck she wants.
I don’t know what I want. I want her, but I shouldn’t go anywhere near her. I don’t want to fuck up again and have to live with that for the rest of my life. Sam is the third rail, and everybody will tell you that you don’t mess with that shit more than once and expect to survive.
I didn’t give her my number.
It’s not the same as it was back in college. I changed everything and got a new phone plan. So it’s not like she’s been debating over whether to text me.
Although there are at least twenty guys here right now who would give a gorgeous woman like her anything she asked for, so maybe she does have it. I don’t fucking know. This is going to drive me insane before anything happens.
All of that comes to a crashing halt when I see who’s leaning up against the driver’s side door of my car, dressed in another professional get-up, this time a skirt that hits just above her knees and makes me want to push it up around her waist.
I don’t even break stride. I’m a little bit pissed, still, that she left me like that at O’Malley’s.
Sam straightens up when she sees me coming, but there’s nothing apologetic in her expression.
“Listen—” I start in before I’m even level with her, and she cuts me off.
“No, you listen.” A smile plays over her lips, but then she presses them together into a firm line. “You didn’t…call me, or text me, and I don’t care. Well—” She shrugs her shoulders a little. “I do care. But the thing is, you’ve been on my mind since that kiss. And I want to have dinner. I want to…talk things out.” My stomach turns over. “Maybe it’s a bad idea, but I want to. And the other thing is—”
“You’re killing me, Sam.”
“I’m going to be here for three weeks instead of one. My job here just got bigger.” Sam smiles up at me now, a genuine smile, a confident one. “So, you’ll be seeing a lot more of me around.”
Chapter Thirteen
Samantha
I have to ask one of the guys at Cerberus which car belongs to Beck, because I’m striding confidently out to the parking lot when I realize he’s probably not driving the same Subaru Legacy he had in high school. If he was, he’d have to be suicidal, because that thing was rusting out and breaking down back then and there’s no way it would have lasted another ten years.
I spent the entire weekend updating renderings for Cerberus and fretting about what happened at O’Malley’s. I spent every night hot under the sheets, thinking of Beck, his lips on mine, the spark between our bodies, the hard line of him pressed against me.
I wanted to text him.
I don’t have his number.
And what if he doesn’t remember mine?
Every time my phone vibrated with an incoming message, my heart started beating erratically. But it was never him, and in the middle of the night on Saturday, while I lay there with my heart beating in my throat and a wet heat throbbing between my legs that wouldn’t subside, it hit me.
I’m a professional woman with five years of experience under my belt, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Beck might not have—or know—my old phone number anymore. He sure as hell hasn’t kept his, and enough time has passed that those digits might have slipped his mind.
It all came together on Sunday afternoon when I was on a conference call with Michelle and one of our other principals, who’s putting some final touches on the first round of adjustments. There’s only so much my three-year-old laptop can handle, and Edison Calley is giving it a run for its money.
“Listen, Sam,” Michelle had said at the end of the call, a comment from the principal cutting in and then abruptly ending. “This isn’t a one-week job, and I have a feeling Mr. Calley is going to want more significant revisions. We can’t break ground on this until everything is finalized.”
“Okay.” Michelle wasn’t done speaking, and I could tell, but I couldn’t just sit there in silence as my stomach dropped to my toes and my heart billowed with hope at the same time. She was leading up to something, and if I was right—
“We’re going to need you there for another two weeks, at least. I know it’s not the most convenient—” Michelle, as far as I know, has never cared deeply about convenience, but she wants Ryder & Bloom to be a premier place to work, so she walks the line. “—but I’m going to spot you five vacation days at the end, okay? You don’t have to dip in to your accrued time.”
“That sounds great.” I didn’t want to sound too overenthusiastic, like avoiding being in the office is the greatest perk of all. “Did you want to review anything further on the plans today, or should I check in after my next meeting? It’s scheduled for two o’clock tomorrow.”
If I stay in Lockton, that’s almost three more weeks in Beck’s gravitational field.
I hung up the call and leaned back in the hotel room’s office chair.
The thought echoed in my mind the rest of the evening, the rest of the night, and into the morning. I want to see him again. I want to see him again, more than anything. I wouldn’t have said anything about my number if, deep down, I wanted to avoid him completely.
My heart is wary, that’s for sure. I still get crushing jolts of pain from thinking about what happened between us, and it’s on my mind now more than ever. But there’s also a strange fluttering hope. It’s like being back in high school and waiting to see his face in the hallway between classes. When we started dating and he’d walk me from class to class, holding my hand, I thought I’d die of happiness. Back then, my mom would shake her head with a weird little smile, like she wanted to warn me away from something but couldn’t.
She couldn’t have known what to warn me against, anyway.
So here I am, leaning up against his car, waiting for him to come out of the Cerberus plant, the September sun gentle on my hair, stifling the urge to duck behind the back bumper and crab-crawl out of here before he sees me.
But I’m not going to be that woman. I’m not going to be the kind of woman who runs away when things get tough. I’m not going to be the kind of woman who can’t handle seeing her old flame, even if she might still be in love with him a little bit even now.
I’ve been sticking to the rules, working for a living, this entire time, and I’ve missed him every single day. If there’s ever going to be another chance for us, this is it. This is it.
When he finally makes his way toward me through the parking lot, my heart goes crazy, thumping in my chest like a bass drum. I straighten my back and lift my chin. Maybe he’s pissed at me for what happened. Maybe he doesn’t want to see me anymore.
He starts to talk before he’s next to me.
“Listen—”
“No, you listen. You didn’t…call me, or text me, and I don’t care. Well—” I can’t keep the honesty sealed behind closed lips anymore. I can’t pretend I don’t miss him. Seeing him at Cerberus, seeing him at O’Malley’s, it’s shaken something deep in my core, shaken something loose. “I do care. But the thing is, you’ve been on my mind since that kiss. And I want to have dinner. I want to…talk things out.” My mouth goes dry. “Maybe it’s a bad idea, but I want to. And the other thing is—”
“You’re k
illing me, Sam.” There’s a light in his eyes that wasn’t there the other night, a spark that definitely wasn’t there when I turned my back on him in O’Malley’s.
“I’m going to be here for three weeks instead of one. My job here just got bigger.” I return that light with a big smile of my own, projecting all the confidence in the world to hide the fact that I’m nervous as hell and still not a hundred percent sure that this is a good idea. “So, you’ll be seeing me around.”
Beck’s green eyes blaze into mine, and he lifts his chin, a smile playing over his lips. I want my mouth to be on his. I want my back pressed up against the wall at O’Malley’s…or any wall, really, as long as it’s Beck’s hands on my waist, on my neck.
“Around. When will that start, do you think?”
I shrug, a habit I can’t get rid of, not when I’m blinded by him. “Right now.”
He shakes his head, and my heart sinks like two cement shoes. “Now’s not good for me.”
“I get it.” I can hardly keep my eyes on his face. “I get it.”
“Dinner would be better. Do you have plans?”
Chapter Fourteen
Beckett
“I know where we’re going.”
Sam says it with a little grin on her face that I catch out of the corner of my eye.
“No, you don’t.”
“I completely do.”
She cranes her neck to look out the window, like that’s going to tell her anything she doesn’t already know. We’ve driven this highway a million times, because it leads to the Lockton Brewing Company, which was a brewery before it was fucking trendy to be a brewery. Almost nobody frequents it anymore, since there are three new breweries right downtown, but if I was going to take a woman on a date, I’d take them out to Lockton Brewing.
Of course, I haven’t taken a woman on a real date since Sam. I tried a couple of times in college and it was a damn disaster. One of those women, Lindsay, tried her hardest to make things work between us. She planned so many dates and outings that it made my head ache just to see her name on my caller I.D. But every time she slipped her hand into mine, I wanted it to be Sam’s.
Now the best woman ever to walk into my life is sitting in the passenger seat of my car, but I don’t reach out to take her hand.
Ever since she sat down, the light scent of her shampoo filling my lungs, I’ve been looking for an excuse to touch her. She’s not exactly giving me any signs not to, what with her purse tucked down next to her feet and her phone put away, but there’s a charge running between us, thickening the air, and if I touch her—I fucking know it—we’re not going to make it to the brewing company. We’ll end up at my place, or at her hotel room, and that’s where things are going to fall apart.
I just know it.
There’s no way we can go any further into the heat between us without getting burned.
So I’m taking her out to dinner, and we’re going to eat, and then talk about stupid shit until she can’t stand it anymore, and then…
Then, I don’t know. I don’t know what the endgame is to rehashing all the difficult shit that happened the summer after sophomore year. All of that is the reason I avoided the hell out of her for the last two years of college. I wanted to drop out, or transfer, or do anything else, but the way my mom’s eyes shone whenever I’d visit home drove spikes of guilt through me like almost nothing else ever has.
“Don’t try to hide it.”
Sam’s voice breaks into my thoughts, and for a second it’s like she’s reading my mind. One glance tells me otherwise. She still has that funny little grin on her face. Right—the restaurant.
“For all you know, there’s another fancy strip mall out here that you’ve never seen, because you never visit.”
Sam puts a hand to her chest. "Offense.”
“You don’t.”
“I never visited you.”
“Ouch.”
Sam narrows her eyes, shoots a kidding glare across the car at me. “I didn’t come here often, okay? I didn’t want to run into you. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t visit. My parents still live here part of the year.”
“And the other part?”
“You want to talk about where my parents live when they’re not in Lockton?”
She’s right. I don’t give a damn where her parents live. But if we start to focus too much on the past, if we start to get any closer together, it’ll be two live wires, and God knows if the sparks could be contained. It could be both our lives up in smoke.
Most of me doesn’t care. Most of me wants to peel the stretchy fabric of her dress over her head and take her to the back seat. I’d pull over right now if—
“No. I don’t want to talk about that.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
I take in a breath, inhale more of her scent, and my cock jumps against my jeans. “Talk is fucking cheap.”
I don’t take my eyes off the road, but I can feel her studying me. “You’d rather do something else.” It’s not a question.
“I’d rather do quite a few other things.” The blood must be rushing right out of my head, because this is dangerous territory.
“Like what?” Sam’s voice has dropped to a low, soft tone that wraps itself right around my cock and squeezes. She breathes in and out, in and out, and the rhythm speeds up, changes.
“Nothing that can be done right now.”
“Nothing you can do without a bed?”
Damn, she’s really going to go there. She doesn’t seem like the unsteady version of herself that I met in the hall at Cerberus last week. Something has changed in her, and I bet I know exactly what it is. Sam’s made up her mind. At least, she’s made it up enough to say shit like that. Well, two can play that game.
“Whoever needed a bed?”
We sure as hell didn’t, not back in high school and the summer before college, when our parents were still trying to keep up the facade that we weren’t fucking like rabbits whenever we got the chance. There’s another hot pulse of blood to my cock as a memory blindsides me—Sam riding me in the backseat, my feet on the floor, her legs spread wide over me, hips rocking side to side, smooth skin lit up in the moonlight.
She must be remembering the same thing, because her hands tighten in her lap. “If you pulled over…”
I almost swerve right off the road. I almost screech to a stop right there on the shoulder of the highway. But another memory comes like a slap across the face. Blood, too much of it, and Sam’s face, white in the bathroom’s fluorescent light. Her voice, tight and afraid: “Beck, what do I do? What do I do?”
I can’t risk that again, so instead I smile. “If I pulled over, we’d be arrested inside fifteen minutes.”
“Whoever needed fifteen minutes?”
The turn for Lockton Brewing Company rises up over the crest of the next hill, and it’s just the out I’m looking for. “We’re here.”
Some of the tension dissipates, and Sam turns her head. “I knew it.”
“You did. You knew it all along.”
Chapter Fifteen
Samantha
Lockton Brewing Company hasn’t changed a bit, but the man sitting across from me at the table has. I have a strange kind of double vision—I can see so clearly who he used to be, lanky and tall, a basketball player with an athlete’s slim lines and clean-cut face, but it shimmers in and out of the man he’s become, with close-cropped hair, a few days of stubble, and eyes that reflect back what the world has done to him.
Or maybe it’s just what I’ve done to him. I don’t know.
They bring out a basket of chips, and he pops one in his mouth, considering me with those eyes. Things got pretty damn heated in the car. For a minute, I thought he might turn around and take me back to his place, and I wouldn’t have put up a fight. But something in his face shifted when we got too close. The air in the car seemed colder.
I wanted to take his hand, tell him that it’s still an open wound for me, too, but I
couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
“There isn’t much here.”
I raise one eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“There’s not much here to visit.”
I lift one shoulder and drop it back down. “There’s plenty to visit. But my job has been pretty demanding. I like it downstate.” But I don’t like being away from you.
“I could have sweetened the deal.”
I take one of the chips. “By doing what?”
“By not being such an asshole after—after what happened.”
Beck’s face does not reveal any kind of desire to talk about this. In fact, in all the years I’ve known him, he has never wanted to get into the deep, dark moments of life. But maybe he wants to get this out in the open. Get it over with.
“That wasn’t your fault.”
He shakes his head, lips curving down into a frown. “It was my fault. Don’t try to pretend otherwise.”
“So we’re doing this,” I say, quietly, not breaking his gaze. “You want to talk about this now?”
“Hell no,” he says, reaching for his water glass and curling his hand around it. “But you want to talk about it, so let’s do it. Let’s have it out.”
“I don’t want an argument.” My shoulders have gone tense, and there’s a burning in the back of my throat.
Beck leans in closer, his voice dropping another level. “I’m not fighting with you, Sam. All of this has been…it’s been a little crazy, you showing up here. It caught me off guard. I never thought I was going to see you again.”
His tone is surprisingly gentle, surprisingly soft, not at all like the gruff words in the hall at Cerberus. There are little hints of the Beck I used to know peeking out, and it makes me so damn nervous and hopeful, all at once.
“I didn’t think so, either.”
“I didn’t forget your phone number.”
The abrupt shift takes me off guard, but only for a second. “You didn’t?”