Never Say Never, page 11
She lowers her head, looking away, and I see her quickly run the back of her hand across her cheek.
“Shit, Skylar.” I sit up, grabbing her hand. “I didn’t mean to make you upset.”
She shakes her head, forcing a smile I can see clear through. Her eyes trace across the walls until they return to my stare. I want to offer her a hug. I want to kiss away her tears. But I don’t want to cross the line and send her shooting out of here thinking I’m some kind of opportunistic jackass.
“I wish I could tell you the rest.” Her voice breaks and her hand clutches at her chest. “I can’t.”
“Maybe someday?” I run my palm across her arm, dragging it down until it finds her hand. Her fingers interlace with mine, and it’s all her doing. “Whenever you’re ready.”
The silence between us is thick and heavy, and her mouth dances open as if she’s trying to fight words desperate to escape her beautiful mouth.
“I want you to kiss me again.” There’s a quiet hesitation in her voice and a longing in her eyes. “But…”
My heart hammers in my chest. “What are you afraid of?”
“You.”
I lean closer to her, breathing in her perfume, our bodies separated by a thin sheet of air. “I’m going to kiss you again, Skylar, and you’re going to fucking love it. I’m going to prove you wrong about me. I promise.”
She swallows, parting her lips a sliver, and I fully accept it as an invitation to take what I know is mine, but this time, it’s for good. My lips crush against hers, hot and determined. Her tongue is cinnamon, and I feel her body shaking as I press mine against hers. Skylar melds back into the blankets, and I press myself over her.
My hand traces her side as my lips graze hers. I take her bottom lip between my teeth and let go before diving in again. I want to taste her. I want to devour every square inch of Skylar Presley, and by the time I’m done, I want her screaming my name as she floats down from an orgasmic high.
And then I want her to spill all her deep, dark secrets because I am the guy I said I was. There’s nothing she could tell me that might change my mind about her.
I press my hardness against the fabric of her jeans, and she releases a moan into my mouth. Her lips welcome my kisses, and her fingers find their way to my hair, pulling, tugging, and scratching as she wriggles beneath me.
But the second I slip my hand beneath her top, everything changes.
“Stop.” She scrambles out from beneath me, pushing me off. “I don’t want to keep going.” She pulls the fabric of her shirt down over her belly and slicks her hand over the creases. Her arms cross and she’s replaced her sex kitten persona with that of an insecure stranger.
“I’m confused.”
“I don’t want to do this. Not like this.”
I’ve been throttled.
With a pained smile courtesy of the blue balls she is gifting me, I raise my hands in the air and slide toward my side of the bed. She’s trembling.
And now I feel like an asshole.
“Can we just…talk?” she asks.
“Of course.”
There’s an invisible wall going up all around her, and I’m the only one who can see it. I swallow my pride with a side of patience and settle in for some non-invasive pillow talk as my hard on concedes.
“Tell about your childhood,” she says.
I laugh, eliciting a smile from her sweet face, and just like that, we’re back on track.
“I’m serious though,” she says. “Tell me you had a normal childhood. I have to know you didn’t grow up on yachts and that you weren’t raised by a team of nannies working around the clock to ensure your parents never had to wake up in the middle of the night.”
My hand rakes across my chin as I cock my head. “First of all, there’s no such thing as normal. No one ever had a normal childhood, and if they told you they did, they’re fucking liars.”
“Agreed.”
“Second of all, I didn’t grow up in a yacht. I grew up in motels, trailers, and cockroach-infested apartments. I don’t think I ever finished a single school year at the same school until junior high, and that was only because this family took me in when my parents lost custody.”
“Your mentor.”
“Yes.” I rub my temples. The last thing I want to do is ruin this beautiful moment with her by talking about the past. My sympathy for her comes alive, and I feel bad for prying into her locked up past like I had any business snooping around in there. She’ll tell me everything when she’s good and ready.
“Go on,” she says.
“And that’s it.” I wrap it up, tying it with a shiny bow. “Spent high school knowing what it was like to come from a halfway decent family who ate dinners together every night and weren’t constantly high or passed out on drugs. Graduated from high school, then college. Started my own company. And now I’m sitting here with you.”
She gives me a scrutinizing side look. “Condensed, but I’ll take it. Movie?”
I click the remote and settle back against a stack of pillows. My gaze is fixed on the flickering TV screen, but my mind is stuck in the past.
The recent past.
Replaying those sweet few minutes when Skylar was mine.
I pull in a slow breath and lick my bottom lip, tasting cinnamon remnants.
I’m not giving up that easily.
There’s a faint light coming from the bathroom, and the dark air is damp with the scent of hotel soap. The shower’s running.
What time is it?
I scan the room until my eyes settle on the glaring red numbers on the nightstand. It’s seven.
Shit.
I’m due to be at work in a couple hours.
The shower water stops just as I’m searching the room for my shoes. I was hoping to avoid the messy hair, runny mascara, morning-breath scented awkward goodbyes in favor of slipping out unnoticed, but my plan is thwarted the second Theo emerges from the bathroom.
“Leaving?” He stands in the doorway of the bathroom, a thick white towel wrapped around his hips and beads of water trickling down his beautifully sculpted torso.
“I have to work today.” I take a step back, hoping if I linger in the dark he won’t see how terrible I look. I never meant to stay the night. We watched a movie, ordered room service, and fell asleep on the bed after hours of discussing absolutely nothing of importance.
Theo steps toward me, his soapy scent filling my lungs as I breathed in humid, post-shower air. “I ordered you some breakfast. Why don’t you stay and eat before you go?”
“Thanks so much, but I can’t be late for work. Addison is a real stickler about being on time…”
“If this is about last night, about-”
Oh God.
He’s bringing up last night.
Everything was going well, and for a brief moment I forgot all about how wrong we were for each other.
Until his hands traveled below my shirt, grazing the soft, stretch-mark scarred skin of my belly.
And then I remembered.
***
“God, baby, you’re so fucking sexy.” Nick Giordano’s dark Italian eyes drank me in as his lips curled into a devious smile. We’d been dating for almost a year. He was my first love, I was sure of it. I’d have walked across fires and climbed mountains and done anything else he told me to do.
I was drunk in love and hopelessly addicted to the way he made me feel.
Special. Pretty. Loved.
I did everything he ever asked me to do.
Except sex.
I wasn’t ready.
He was my first.
“I wanna make love to you so bad,” he whispered into my ear the eve of our first anniversary. “It’s all I think about, Skylar. I’d give anything just to feel you from the inside, to feel you on my cock. God, baby, you make me so fucking hard.”
His hands traced the outside of my clothes. Almost a year of heaving petting, and I knew I couldn’t prolong it anymore. He’d been so sweet to me, and he had the patience of a saint. It wasn’t every day that a millionaire playboy would sweep a girl off her feet and wait a year before getting into her pants.
“I know I make you wet, baby,” he groaned into my ear. “Let me feel it. I want to feel you come all over my cock.”
His words send a rush of chills up my back and a stupidly sexy smile across my naïve mouth. He’d been trying for months, but his pleas were becoming more intense every time. Nick Giordano had sweet-talked his way into my heart and had every ill intention of dirty talking his way into my pants.
“I love you, you know that, right? I love everything about you.” His fingers trailed down my collar, stopping at my breasts and grazing over the top as they heaved with each breath. “I would never hurt you. You’re mine. But I don’t have all of you, not yet. I want all of you, Skylar. Give yourself to me.”
A thousand worries plagued my mind, but they were all overridden with the burning urge between my slick thighs. I wanted Nick to make love to me. I loved Nick. It was time.
“Okay,” I said, releasing a pent up breath. “We can make love.”
Nick’s lips widened bigger than I’d ever seen before as he leaned over into his nightstand to retrieve a condom.
“Wait,” I called out. “Turn off the lights.”
“But I want to see you baby,” he said, leaning down to kiss me. “God, you’re beautiful. Own it, Skylar. You’re fucking gorgeous, and I want to see all of you.”
“But-”
Nick’s hands were already working the button of my jeans before I could protest again. His eyes flashed dark and determined. I searched for love in them as I lay on my back, my body exposed under the harsh light of the nearby lamp.
Every stretch mark.
Every sag.
All the evidence that I was once double my size was clearly on display for Nick, the successful, attractive millionaire who fought off legions of supermodels because he was with me.
Skylar a.k.a. Whitney the Whale from Nowhere, Iowa.
I felt like a fraud, as if I’d falsely advertised myself of being worthy of someone like him.
Sex wasn’t the way I thought it would be. It wasn’t like the movies. There were no loving looks exchanged, and every time I craved his mouth on mine, he was usually sucking on my nipple like I was some kind of human cow.
A handful of slow, painful minutes dripped by before he thrusted hard, three times, and then grunted into my ear like a dying animal. He then lingered inside me until I felt him shrivel up, and then he rolled off me and hit the shower.
Nick fucked me. He didn’t make love to me like he promised.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
The next morning as I cooked him breakfast like the dutiful girlfriend I was, I overheard him outside on the phone with his best friend, Joey. The kitchen window was open, and he clearly had no idea the way sound traveled in his own home.
“Fuck yeah, finally hit it last night…yeah, for real…she’s fucking covered in stretch marks, dude. Like a fucking zebra or some shit. And her tits are real. They were flopping all over the fucking place. She just lay there while I sucked her tits. Total virgin.”
I dropped the spatula, my hands trembling, and leaned in to hear more. It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t be real. Nick loved me.
He wrote me letters. Send me flowers. Held my hand.
It wasn’t fair.
I’d never had so much as an indication that he wasn’t anything but Mr. Wonderful.
“Nah, I’ll probably move on to that redhead, Felicity. The one I met in Miami a couple months ago? That shit is tight. She’s moving to town too, so…”
Tears burned my eyes.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t swallow.
My knees threatened to give out if I didn’t get the hell out of there.
I left the eggs to burn on the stove, gathered my shoes and bag, and ran out of there, never looking back.
Nick never called, and I learned two of life’s greatest lessons.
You can’t believe everything people promise you, and people are assholes.
Especially ones like Nick.
***
I’m rushing home to my apartment, ignoring the repulsed stares I got from strangers on the street who think I’m in the middle of a Monday morning walk of shame. The second I reach my apartment, I fling the door open and kick off my shoes. I have precisely thirty minutes to shower, dress, and hit the pavement in order to make it to work on time.
Shit. I might even need to spring for a cab.
“Morning, sunshine.” Nina’s voice greets me from the living room. A clear plastic container of sliced fresh fruits and a carafe of orange juice sits neatly on the kitchen island. She’s not alone. Charlie is sitting next to her.
And Cory.
“Where were you last night? You didn’t answer your phone.” Nina asks sweetly.
“I went out with a friend from work for drinks,” I lie. Sort of. “We saw a movie, so I stayed there for the night. Didn’t want to walk home late.”
“Cory brought breakfast,” Nina says.
Of course he did, because Cory is thoughtful and impeccable in every single way. He’s like a modern day version of a Weird Science experiment. In many ways, I feel as if I’ve breathed him into life, molded my ideal man out of thin air. He’s that spot on.
“That’s kind of you.” I offer him a smile as I head down the hall. “I’m so sorry, I’m running late for work.”
Nina and Charlie are dressed for work. She rakes her keys across the counter as Charlie grabs his briefcase.
They’re seriously going to leave Cory here. With me. Alone. I make a mental note to remind Nina that Cory and I are not dating and no amount of forced togetherness will change that.
“Bye, leaving for work…” Nina calls out. “Oh, don’t forget the final fitting is tonight!”
The door slams. It’s just us two.
This is awkward.
“I’m going to jump in the shower,” I turn and run back to my room, getting ready faster than I ever have in my entire life, and emerge to find Cory sitting comfortably in Charlie’s easy chair, flipping through morning talk shows.
Cory stands up the second he sees me, making his way toward me. He grabs a glass from the cupboard and pours me some juice as I step into my heels. “I hope you don’t mind, Nina invited me to the after-fitting tonight.”
“After fitting?”
Cory laughs. “It’s something she made up. I guess we’re all trying on our dresses and tuxes for the wedding, and then we’re going to drive around in a limo for a couple hours drinking cheap champagne.”
I have to hand it to Nina. She can make anything an occasion.
“Why would I mind?”
“You just seem a little…cold? Distant? Disinterested?”
“I’m busy, Cory. I have a lot on my plate. It’s nothing personal.”
He steps closer, owning the space between us the way he did the last time I saw him. “I know the wedding is a couple weeks away, but I was going to ask if you wanted to be my date.”
“I’m in the wedding. I don’t need a date.” Despite the deep loneliness that gnaws at me from the inside out, I’m still capable of attending a wedding sans date.
“Yeah, but you’re going to need someone to dance with. To carry your shoes when your feet hurt. To make sure you get home safely.” He runs his finger along my cheek and pulls away, his face falling. “Unless you have someone else.”
I hesitate.
I don’t have anyone else.
I want someone else.
But I need someone like Cory.
“I know you’re not mine yet, and I’m not yours. But I’m hoping that will change. I like you, Skylar. A lot. A lot more than I thought I would. And I’m asking you, if there’s anyone else, let him go. Because you and me, we’re perfect together and you know it. You can’t tell me you don’t see your future when you look at me.”
Cory backs off, but his gaze holds me hostage.
“I know what I see when I look at you.” His gray eyes crinkle in the corners.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve said too much.” He covers his lips with his hand as if to quiet them. “Maybe we can finish this conversation tonight?”
Cory’s stare lands on my mouth. I know he wants to kiss me, but now, anything other than Theo’s kiss would feel intrusive.
Meaningless even.
“Okay, I guess I’ll see you tonight?” I reach for the door handle and turn to offer him a quick wave, only I don’t see Cory standing there.
I see Theo.
I shake my head.
This is bad. Very bad.
***
I run-walk to work, darting and weaving through pedestrians like a crazy person all in the name of getting to work on time. Even though Addison sets her own schedule, she’s always the first one in the office, and that’s why I want to be the second one in. I want to make her proud.
“Morning,” I call into her doorway as I hurry toward my office. I slip into my workspace and fire up my laptop, pulling up my emails before my purse strap is barely off my shoulder.
“Hey.” I glance up. Addison’s leaning into the frame of my door. A tea bag tag hangs from her steaming mug. She’s pale.
“You feeling okay?” I ask.
She comes in and shuts the door, and I think I’m going to faint for a second. I fully expect her to ask me why I’ve been so absent from the office lately. She knows I haven’t made a single sale yet, and we log all of our showings into the system.
“I have to talk to you about something,” she says. Her nose points down as she pulls in a careful sip. Addison lowers herself into a chair and crosses her long legs. Her hand runs along her navy pencil skirt as if there could possibly be a stray piece of lint on her impeccable outfit.
“Of course.” My back straightens and my muscles tense.
Oh God. Does she know about Theo and me?
“I’m going to come out and say it.” She swallows and pauses, holding her gaze to the floor for a minute. “Please keep this between us.”
