I was bone-tired after equestrian practice and a long day otherwise. A long week, actually, if I thought about it. Between the stuff with Dave and then my brother’s disappearance and reappearance here, not to mention school and daily training at the stables, I was desperate for some decompression time and almost couldn’t wait to get into bed for a long night of good sleep.
Which I was almost ready for as I stood in the bathroom combing out my wet hair after my shower, already in my pajamas: a pair of flannel shorts and a tank. When my cell rang, I glanced down and saw Jared’s face on the screen. Smiling, I picked it up and answered.
“Hi there,” he said, his voice deep and smooth, making my insides churn. It was great seeing him in person, but something about that voice on its own...
“What’s up?” I said, holding the phone with one hand and combing my hair with the other watching myself smile in the mirror.
“Did your brother show up?”
Oops. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, I should have texted you. He’s here, actually.” Getting a bit tired of telling the story, I gave him the abridged version.
“So that’ll be nice, having family close,” he said when I was done. “It sounds like you get along with him.”
I shrugged, putting down my comb and grabbing the bottle of moisturizer off the counter. “He’s my brother. Of course I love him.”
“Being siblings doesn’t guarantee a good relationship,” Jared said and I detected a definite edge to his voice.
I froze with the moisturizer bottle poised over my right arm, the phone wedged between my face and shoulder. “What does that mean?” fell out of my mouth, but he’d put it out there; it’s not like I wasn’t going to ask.
“Sorry,” he said on a long exhale. “Family can be complicated. Mine especially. Remind me to warn you against growing up in a Hollywood family.”
I squeezed a line of lotion down my arm. “Not much fear of that, but thanks for the warning.” I suspected I’d learn more about what he was talking about in his manuscript, so I didn’t push for him to tell me more.
“You’re welcome. So I...Sorry, Brooklyn, hold on...”
I heard another voice in the background asking questions I couldn’t quite make out. Jared responded, “What? Yeah. He’s fine. He showed up at Rosewood and is going to be working there now. Yeah...Uh huh...Yeah. Okay, man, but did you want to talk to her or can I maybe have a conversation with my girlfriend and give you the debrief later?”
I smiled, partially at Jared’s response (and that he’d just called me his girlfriend), but also because Dave had asked about my brother, obviously concerned about me. It was sweet and maybe more than that, but I didn’t dare think too much about why he cared. Or that it mattered to me so much.
“Yeah. Okay. Get out of here, will you?” Jared continued and then came back to the phone, his voice clearer. “Sorry about that. Dave. He wouldn’t leave me alone until I gave him the update.”
“It’s okay.” I sat down on the closed toilet to moisturize my legs.
“How was equestrian practice?”
“Hard,” I said as I squirted moisturizer on my thighs and started to rub it in as I spoke. “We went through a bunch of drills and it probably didn’t look like much, but it’s so much work to get in sync with the horse and do the moves over and over. Charlie was having a bit of an off day, so we really struggled. It’s been a long week for both of us.”
“I’d love to see you ride one day,” Jared said.
I smiled at that. I didn’t think he was that interested in horses or riding, but that he wanted to see me ride—well, that was the kind of thing that made him perfect boyfriend material. “Maybe in the Olympics,” I said. “The school Olympics, I mean, not the real ones,” I added quickly. “I’m really not very good. There’s a derby—a competition between schools—that the dean wants me to compete in, but I’m sure I’m not good enough.”
“I bet that’s not true. You practice every day, don’t you?”
I thought about the early mornings and the extra practices with Coach Fleming. “Almost. I only get Saturdays off.”
“So I’m sure you’re getting better. You couldn’t not get better, right?”
“Nice double-negative there, Mr. Writer.”
He chuckled. “Busted. But tell me...” his voice got low and trailed off.
“Yeah?”
“Do you wear those beige pants with the knee patches and the high boots?”
A laugh erupted from me. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to appreciate equestrian attire. “Why would you ask such a question?”
“I’m just trying to picture the whole experience.”
“Right. The whole experience. You didn’t ask about the color of my horse.”
“I don’t want to make out with your horse,” he said without hesitation.
“Pervert.”
“Guilty,” he said, obviously unashamed. “So, do you? Please tell me you do.”
I laughed again. “Yes. I do.”
If it was possible, his voice got even lower and smoother. “Are you wearing them now?”
I looked down at my pajama shorts and bare feet. “Of course,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I left them on after practice knowing you’d be calling. They’re really tight, though. I can’t wait to get out of them.”
“And what about the whip. Do you have one of those?”
“Of course,” I said in a low voice, kind of loving how powerful I suddenly felt.
He groaned into the phone. “You’re killing me.”
Suddenly there was a knock at the door. “Brooklyn? Can I get in there?”
I pressed the phone to my shoulder so as to not deafen Jared and yelled, “Out in a sec,” to Emmie. I rubbed the last of the lotion into the skin of my right calf and stood up. “Sorry,” I said to Jared, trying not to ruin the moment. “So...what do you have on?”
“A lamp.”
I snorted. “You’re funny.”
“What? That’s not sexy?”
“Very,” I said as I opened the bathroom door and nodded at Emmie as we traded rooms. “Are you wearing the shade on your head or...er...other places.”
“I’m not wearing the lamp. Unless you’re into that.”
“No, I can’t say I’ve had too many lampshade fantasies.”
“But you do have fantasies?” he asked in a suddenly very serious voice, making me feel like maybe I was in over my head with this conversation. We were dating, but this felt just a bit too intimate, too soon.
“Umm,” I said, freezing on my way to climbing into bed.
There was a long silence. “Sorry, Brooklyn. I shouldn’t have gone there.”
I tucked my feet under the covers. “It’s okay. It’s just...”
“Too soon?”
“Too soon,” I said, thankful he seemed to understand.
“Sorry,” he said again. “I just really like you and I guess...”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, my heart fluttering at the ‘I just really like you’ comment. “I’m not very experienced at this stuff.”
“What stuff? Lampshade fetishes?”
See? This is one of the things I really liked about him. I laughed. “Thanks for understanding.”
“Of course,” he said without hesitation. “Anyway, I’m not exactly a Romeo, you know,” he added.
I found that hard to believe when he looked like he did and had grown up in Hollywood. He’d probably lost his virginity at a scandalously young age, but I wasn’t about to bring that up—we weren’t quite there yet. Though I was curious. I blushed as I wondered if it was in his manuscript. Good thing he couldn’t see me.
Pulling the covers up to my chin and angling the phone against my ear, I yawned as I tried to think of something else for us to talk about and realized halfway through that I’d done it right into the phone. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “That was rude.”
“What’s rude is keeping you up. I’ll let you go. I just wanted to hear your voice to hold me over until tomorrow.”
“Mmmm,” I said, starting to nod off.
“Don’t forget to hang up, sleepy girl.”
“Okay,” I muttered. “Goodnight, Jared.”
I think he said goodnight, but I was pretty much already asleep.