Reckless

by Stella Rhys

  Adam’s eyebrows lifted as he cracked a smile. “AJ, you definitely don’t have to do that.”

  “I know, but I want to. Consider it a thank you for helping me exorcise Caspar yesterday.”

  Adam smirked. “I’m pretty sure you already thanked me. In fact, I haven’t finished thanking you.”

  Something fluttered inside me, and I bit back a smile as he tugged me gently over to him by the pocket of my jeans.

  “Adam,” I said softly. I was definitely happy to see that he was okay enough to still be thinking about this, but mustering every ounce of good behavior in me, I removed his hand from my pocket and set it back in his lap. “That won’t be happening right now,” I said.

  I’d actually meant to say “that won’t be happening,” as in at all, but the last two words just slipped in, and I tried to tell myself it didn’t make an actual difference.

  Adam’s blue eyes glinted as he read my inner turmoil with ease. “You don’t want me to?”

  “No,” I replied fast, absently organizing his mail again. And though I wasn’t looking at him, I could hear the smile he broke into, which made me want to smile too.

  “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want me to make you come again.”

  I wet my lips, which reluctantly curved at the edges. And though I didn’t look up at him, I did answer.

  “I do want it,” I said quietly, as if there were other people in the room. “But I can’t afford to know how good that feels.”

  “Why not?” Adam asked.

  Because.

  Because I just got chewed out by my sister for sleeping with you this morning.

  Because I’m afraid of feeling more than whatever I’m feeling now, which I’m pretty sure is already too much.

  “Because you’re my boss,” I finally replied, looking up at him. It seemed like a pretty solid reason. “But anyway.” He looked amused as I changed the subject. “I’m going to cook for you now.”

  “As long as you stay and eat with me.”

  “I can do that,” I said before going over to his fridge and having a look at the groceries. “Okay. Where’s your cast iron?”

  “What’s that?”

  I turned around and laughed at the earnest cluelessness on his face. “It’s a pan, Adam.”

  “Sorry. I’ve been kitchen illiterate my whole life.”

  “Really?” I laughed as I started opening all the drawers and cabinets to look for everything I needed.

  “Yes. I feel like that shouldn’t surprise you.”

  “Well, on TV you’d always see jock boys like you constantly raiding the fridge and eating everything in sight.”

  “Yeah, well, I generally avoided the kitchen and downstairs as much as possible. Unless Iain was over. And even then we did our best to be upstairs or outside.”

  The mental image I had in my head sharpened as he talked about nights he’d crashed in the pool house with Iain. I hadn’t known that particular detail. What I knew was that in college and law school, Adam couldn’t be motivated to visit for holidays unless he was allowed to bring a friend. I’d always figured it was a boredom thing, but I should’ve known bringing Iain was also for mere survival’s sake.

  Well, at least that eventually worked out for Holland, I thought to myself, freshly charmed by the thought that many years later, she managed to land her dream crush from her childhood.

  “I take it all this was to avoid your mom?” I asked as I located the cutting boards.

  “Yeah.”

  I couldn’t help shaking my head a little. I knew that Adam’s relationship with Jeannie was rocky, but I could never really wrap my mind around just how awful it was.

  Or more importantly, why.

  “Were you really that bad of a kid?” I asked cautiously, half-expecting that Adam would say “dungeon” and move on. But instead he laughed.

  “Between you and Emily, you were considered the bad kid right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what was the worst thing you ever did?”

  “Ummm.” I had to think about it. “My parents wouldn’t let me go to this party one night, so I snuck out my window to go. And then I got too drunk at the party and passed out with my friend somewhere in the house. And my parents thought I was missing till probably noon the next day, which is when I finally woke up and texted that I was alive.”

  Adam nodded through my story, a smile glinting in his eyes as he no doubt imagined the scene. But the look faded away as he spoke again.

  “When I was in high school, my dad got my mom a new car for Christmas and I took it on a joy ride a week later and totaled it,” he said, making my eyes widen. “Probably on purpose,” he added.

  “What does that mean? That you kind of knew what you were doing when you crashed it?”

  “Yeah. I knew what generally happened when I drove that fast.”

  I nodded, trying not to look too fazed. I actually wasn’t. I knew about the “speed demon” side of Adam from Holland. He and Iain had both been like that. Adrenaline junkies with a taste for recklessness. I knew Adam had stayed that way all through law school, but forcibly toned it down once he was promoted to agent at Engelman when he was twenty-five.

  “That’s not too bad,” I said as I washed the vegetables. “But I know you used to fight a lot before you started having clients too,” I added. He’d actually met Iain mid-bar brawl. “And I’m sure those stories would horrify me more since you’d actually, you know, hurt people.”

  “Yeah.”

  I peered up at him in the middle of scrubbing, but he was spacing out as he played with the jump drive. I had kind of hoped he would detail the stories of the fights he got into, because I was starting to realize that all these events in his life weren’t just due to him being “wild” or “a party animal” as he was often described at the office, mostly for the way he could rage till dawn with clients after events.

  It definitely wasn’t just that. There were definitely more demons in Adam’s past than he liked to let on, and though I’d sensed that before, I’d never quite felt the need to fully know and understand it till now.

  But as curious as I was, I didn’t bother asking.

  To start, I didn’t want to sink him deeper into this mood on a Sunday night before the start of a busy week. Plus, I knew I’d probably just get that shrug and the generic line that had always driven his sister crazy. “I was just a bad kid.” That was it. The explanation for why his mother was abusive. Why she raised Holland like a prisoner.

  I was back to quietly cursing her in my head when Adam asked about Caspar.

  “He still bothering you at all?”

  It said something when I was actually thankful to get Jeannie out of my head with the topic of my ex.

  “Nope. I think you officially scared him off, but if you didn’t, I wouldn’t know, because I blocked him today,” I said brightly, placing a wet paper towel under the cutting board before I started chopping.

  “Nice,” Adam said, but when I heard the tinge of strangeness in his voice, I looked up.

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “You said that weirdly.”

  “I said one word,” he argued, but he lost steam halfway through the sentence because he knew I knew better. “Fine. It’s just… I never told you something,” he said, grimacing as he rubbed the back of his neck. I stopped cutting.

  “What?”

  “The week you were getting ready to surprise Caspar, I was pretty sure I saw him on La Brea with some girl. I don’t know if it was the blue hair girl, because she was wearing a hoody. But the guy definitely looked like Caspar and I felt like I should’ve given you a heads up, but Holland said not to if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, especially because you were so excited for his birthday that week, and I just…” He held his hands out as he tried to figure out his words, but then he let them fall back into his lap. “I don’t know. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to hurt you. But you wound up getting hur
t anyway. And I probably could’ve warned you.”

  I blinked at him, nodding as I took in all the information. And by information I meant the fact that he looked this level of stressed out right now over this total non-issue, and the fact that he’d been so mixed up about it the other week that he had actually consulted with Holland.

  When I realized he’d cared this much before we’d ever even slept together, I almost wanted to make a face.

  Great. I might’ve actually been better off not knowing that, I thought, because it made my heart melt to imagine my arrogant prick of a boss actually having a quiet meltdown over my wellbeing, and I really didn’t need to be any further endeared to him right now.

  “You’re pissed,” Adam said to break the silence. I laughed.

  “Not even,” I said, suppressing the urge to just round the counter right now and plant a giant kiss on his forehead. “I really do appreciate the concern, Adam, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not sure it would’ve changed things at the time and at this point, I’m just done thinking about Caspar. Yesterday was pretty good closure,” I said, warmth in my cheeks as I remembered the words Adam had said yesterday. The speech he made that I told myself was all an act, despite the fact that I was pretty sure it wasn’t. “And even if there wasn’t that closure, I could never look at him the same after all those completely shitty things he said.”

  I’d barely finished my sentence before the thought of Schilling popped up.

  Ugh. I wrinkled my nose. And for the next thirty seconds, the topic of what Caspar said lingered palpably in the air, the whole house silent save for the sounds of basketball and my chopping.

  Peering up, I smirked. “Wow. I’m impressed,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You usually have zero impulse control but you’re refraining from asking me about the whole Schilling comment he made.”

  Adam laughed. “If I had zero impulse control, you would’ve been naked and fucked on multiple surfaces of the office already,” he said with such confidence that I felt a little shudder. “But yeah,” he relented after another second of silence. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about whatever happened with him.”

  Him. As in Simon Schilling.

  Everyone in the sports world knew his name. Back when I knew him, he was just a superstar agent. Now he was the VP of Roth Talent Agency.

  Also known as RTA, our direct competition.

  “I met him when I was a sophomore. He was my professor for sports law,” I said before explaining just how coveted that particular course was.

  Everyone in my major scrambled to get that class every year, because everyone knew that Schilling always awarded one lucky student an internship with RTA that included a front row seat to the MLB Winter Meetings—which was basically heaven for anyone interested in the business side of baseball.

  “We learned negotiation strategies, participated in mock negotiations.”

  “I’m assuming you crushed that shit.”

  “I was definitely top of the class,” I said, grinning when Adam held up his hand for a high five, which I swiftly returned before getting into the race for the internship. “We had to draft up the best mock contract, and everyone knew it was between me and this kid Corbin because we were the top two students. But between us, Schilling was always heaping more praise on me. Constantly spotlighting me and my work.”

  Adam nodded slower now, and I mentally commended him for feeling wary this early in the story, because he was right to. But at the time, even Emily hadn’t suspected anything was fishy.

  “I wound up landing the internship and after, Schilling invited me out to meet with him and some other agents from RTA. The first meeting went well. But the second time, it was just us two and Schilling started doing these… little things that I recognized as early trouble.”

  I wasn’t looking at Adam as I detailed everything, because I was sliding two baking trays into the oven. But I could actually feel his heated disdain, his rising anger as I talked about how Schilling started doing the things that all girls knew as warning signs, like touching my shoulder a lot. Putting his hand on my back when there was no reason to at all. He even asked if I had a boyfriend and mused about how much attention I probably got for being an attractive woman in a male-dominated field.

  “I told my guy friends, but they said it was no big deal and it wasn’t worth getting up in arms about. Basically, they told me not to blow the opportunity by being sensitive and just look past it.”

  “Did you?”

  I looked up at Adam, feeling a tinge of regret as I said, “Yes. Just out of sheer hope that I was overreacting, because I really wanted that internship. I just wanted to learn. It was RTA. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  Adam nodded, that handsome little frown knit in his brow. “Of course. I understand,” he said.

  And while I knew he did, I still took a little while to muster up the strength for the rest of the story, because it’d been awhile since I’d said it aloud. Probably college, actually.

  But after getting everything in the oven and grabbing the chicken from the fridge, I went into the start of my internship. How it had been amazing at first.

  “I learned so much so fast that it felt like a whole semester of college compressed into one week. It was exhilarating. I loved it so much. But at the same time, I knew my gut feeling about Schilling was right, because he kept it super professional at RTA and barely spoke to me at the office, but at school, he’d always flip a switch and ask me to hang back after class. He started letting his gaze wander more openly. And then he started make comments about how as a woman, I actually had an advantage because I could showcase my ‘assets.’ To catch the eye of future clients.”

  The string of expletives that Adam muttered under his breath was so full of disgust and fury that I opted not to say the rest of that part, which was that Schilling would always take that time to drop his eyes to my chest and let them linger.

  “At this point, I pretty much knew I was in a bad spot, but I also knew I had only my word against his, and more often than not, he was professional around me, so I essentially just prayed every day that he’d behave so I could keep studying what I loved and showing up to this job I adored without any trouble.”

  “But he tried to get you in bed?” Adam asked tightly. I looked up at him.

  “Yeah,” I said, which was the short version.

  The long version was that Schilling had lured me to stay one day after class by giving me a real, recently-negotiated Major League contract to look at.

  In the middle of reading it, of course, he placed his hand on my upper thigh.

  I still remembered so distinctly being immediately horrified, but finishing reading my sentence first. I couldn’t understand why. Maybe as a way to try and convince myself that I was okay. That this moment of shock and horror might go away. I had been completely paralyzed.

  But as soon as he started rubbing my thigh, I’d stood up and walked out.

  “Obviously, I rejected his advances,” I said. “And the next time I tried showing up to my internship at RTA, they told me I had been dismissed. And then the next time I showed up at class, everyone was congratulating Corbin for landing the internship, because Schilling chose him to replace me.”

  My throat briefly tightened when I remembered that day. How gutted I’d felt even before Schilling addressed the class about Corbin, speaking of “hypothetical” situations, and how in this industry, you always had to be ready to seize an opportunity, because you never knew what was going to happen. “The reality is there are often people who get the job, but aren’t actually suited for the position. Sometimes it’s nepotism or luck... or looks…”

  For all to see, his eyes landed on me as he said that word.

  “I’m going to kill that motherfucker,” Adam said seriously when I got to that part. I laughed.

  “Trust me, I had these thoughts. And so did Emily, actually. But you’re not going to kill him. He’s kind
of huge in this town. I don’t think you could get away with it.”

  “I’d find a way.”

  “Stop,” I snorted.

  “I hope you knew then that it was bullshit,” Adam said, changing the subject back fast. “You know you earned that internship.”

  The edges of my lips quivered as I adjusted to being serious again.

  “I know,” I said softly, my eyes back on the cutting board as I seasoned. “But it still fucks with you a little. It just… robs you of your triumphs, you know? All your achievements. Were they legit or were they just handed to you? I know I earned it, but does everyone else?” Shaking my head, I heaved a big sigh. “It shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks, right?” I asked with a rueful smile as I looked up at him. “But you know how it is in this town. This industry. It shouldn’t matter. But it does.”

  “I know,” Adam said solemnly, still frowning so hard that I just wanted to reach over and touch his face.

  God, why does he have to be such a cute listener?

  “Is this why you’re so patient about it?” he asked.

  “About what? Not getting promoted?” I arched an eyebrow. “Yeah. I mean at the start of every season, Engelman promotes someone, and I’ve seen five go by where it’s not me. Granted, I don’t think I really deserved it till the last few years, but it still sucks to hear the buzz right now being that Davis is going to get it, since he only started last year,” I said honestly. “But I just keep my head down and work, and just stay patient, because I need to know that when I’m rewarded, it’s because I earned it. That nothing was handed to me.”

  “Of course,” Adam said, his voice still serious, a murmur. I could feel his gaze on me right now, but I only peered up a little to give him a teasing smile.

  “You gonna go crash a car out of anger now?”

  He snorted. “Maybe. I’ve definitely never crashed a car into a house before. Where does Schilling live again?”

  “Shut up,” I laughed, but quickly, the humor was gone from his face.

  “Do I ever make you worry?” Adam asked.

  “What do you mean? Do you ever worry me the way Schilling did?” I said incredulously. “Adam, no. Schilling fired me when I wouldn’t sleep with him. He gaslit me and made me doubt my own skills. You’re literally the opposite.”