Jenna
By the time I get to the Ramada, I’m a bundle of nerves and conflicting emotions, and no amount of telling myself “It’s not a big deal. I want this guy and he wants me and it’s okay to go get some” has made it any better.
I do want Felix. Everything in me wants him, and no matter what I tell myself, sleeping with him feels like a very big deal.
It’s not like I haven’t had plenty of sex before, and with guys I’d known for far less time than Felix. And as much as I feel sick at the thought of going back to that life, I doubt one random afternoon in a Ramada would push me into that pit any more than that one night with that Finnish guy last summer about a month after Alec and I broke up—the one and only one-night stand I’ve had since I was nineteen.
The sex had been okay, the guy nice enough, but the morning after, I’d just felt empty. Lost. A reminder of the way things used to be, and painful enough that I hadn’t even considered another one.
Until Felix, that is. But talking with him today felt like talking with someone I’ve known all my life, someone I could tell anything to, but laced with the giddy thrill of discovering this new, fascinating person I want to learn everything about.
Not exactly a prelude to getting this out of my system.
I grab the bobby pins I keep in the glove compartment, and flip down the mirror above the driver’s seat. Then I undo my braid and start pinning the red streaks up, where they can be hidden under a hat. Fortunately, I’m not so famous that people instantly know who I am everywhere I go, especially when I’m not with Alec.
With my hair pinned up, I grab a straw sun hat from the backseat, left there from a beach trip with Ty the day before we met Felix. Three days ago, only. It’s kind of hard to believe.
The hat looks like it would go way better with a flowy bohemian sundress than with the shiny metallic skirt and black shirt I’ve got on now, but whatever. I don’t need fashion approval from the hotel receptionist. Just enough distance from my public persona that even if they think they know me from somewhere, they aren’t likely to connect the dots.
Meeting at the Ramada will help with that. Celebrities having clandestine hotel meetings isn’t exactly uncommon, but from what I’ve heard—and I’ve heard a lot—most still do so at the fancy luxury hotels, like they just can’t imagine a rendezvous that isn’t followed by room service prepared by a Michelin-starred chef. Supposedly the staff is more discreet at places like that, but you can always find someone willing to talk to the paparazzi for the right amount.
Not that I trust the discretion of the staff here any more than anywhere else, but the truth is, no one expects to see a celebrity walking into a budget-friendly hotel chain for a nooner.
Or so my theory goes. I don’t exactly do this often. Or ever.
I already had a fake name, complete with credit card, for times when Alec and I didn’t want to be recognized, so it was easy to call ahead and pre-book the room, and when I check in at the front desk, they have the key card ready for me.
“The other room key has already been picked up,” the receptionist says, giving me a pleasant smile. And no trace of recognition.
My heart speeds up. Felix is here, in the room, waiting for me. And even though we’ve only been separated for an hour, I just want to be with him again. I’m like a moth diving straight for the flame.
God, is that what I’m doing? It took me six months to say yes to dating Alec, after he saw me singing karaoke one night and asked me to join his band. I’d been so afraid of slipping back into my old life, so I hadn’t made a single decision impulsively, or out of passion. I’d waited until I was sure that being with Alec made sense.
Was that the smarter way to handle it, or was it the reason Alec and I turned out to be such a bad idea?
I take the elevator up to the fourth floor. Then I head down the hallway and find room 415. I take off my sunhat and pull the bobby pins out so my red streaks join the rest of my hair, which after being in a braid hopefully has a nice wavy quality to it now. I put the pins in my purse and stare at the door.
Then I stand there for a moment, toying with the key card.
Are we really going to do this?
I want to; god, I do. But I can’t help feeling unsettled in a way I didn’t when we were at the sushi restaurant, the connection between us so strong, so tangible, like I could see it if I squint hard enough. I felt comfortable talking about things in my life I rarely talk about with anyone—and never, never so quickly. I’d been friends with Alec, and part of his band, for weeks before I told him about the frat parties and my part in what happened to Rachel. And even then, I think I mainly told him because while Ann Arbor is a big city, it’s not that big. I knew he’d hear rumors eventually. Besides which, I had to give him some sort of reason why I kept turning him down for dates, even though I’d as much as admitted I liked him. Leo, Roxie, Mason—none of them know as much about me as Felix already does.
I slip the card into the door and open it. And there’s Felix, lying on his back on the bed with his hands behind his head. He’s still in his dark-wash jeans and a fitted t-shirt, and his blond hair has that perfect slightly mussed quality to it. He smiles, but there’s something nervous about it.
The door clicks closed behind me, and I set my hat and purse down on a table by the door. The hotel room is predictably nice, in a generic hotel sort of way, with an impressionistic forest painting on one wall and a sizeable TV on the other. On the nightstand, staring right at me, is a brochure with some All-American Family—forgettably attractive parents and two kids, a boy and a girl—splashing around in the Ramada’s Luxury Pool and enjoying the hotel’s “low rates and family-friendly accommodations.”
Not exactly a place that screams secret afternoon sex romp. But probably a hell of a lot more hygienic than the type of place that would, so there’s that.
Felix smiles, like he knows what I’m thinking. “I can turn the brochure around if you want. So that family isn’t silently judging us.”
I laugh, but it sounds nervous, and Felix wipes his hands on his jeans.
“Hey,” I say, still fiddling with the key card.
“Hey,” he says back. “Are you having second thoughts?”
I guess it’s obvious. Probably because I’m still standing by the door. “I’m having all the thoughts,” I admit. “You?”
He groans and covers his eyes. “Yeah.”
I’m not sure if his thoughts are the same as mine, but there’s something comforting to not being the only one conflicted about this. The aching parts of my body aren’t nearly as comforted, though. Because if he’s also conflicted, then it’s probably best, and most responsible, if this doesn’t happen.
I sigh and sit down at the edge of the bed, though I wish I could be much, much closer to him. I’m not sure if that’s what’s best for him, for me, for us.
How can I be thinking of an us already?
We smile weakly at each other. “Have you seen Jerry Maguire?” he asks.
That pretty much leads the list of conversation topics I wasn’t expecting. “Um, once. A long time ago.”
Felix sighs. “There’s something Cuba Gooding Junior’s character says to Jerry, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Now I’m really confused. “Show me the money?”
He laughs, and my heart thrills a bit, because god, he’s got a great laugh. He holds out an arm to me. “No. Not that. Hey, no one can see us in here. You want to come closer?”
Do I ever. I want to climb on top of him and muss his hair up even more. I want to feel his hands running up the back of my short skirt. I want him to kiss me and kiss me until I can’t remember my own name.
I settle for scooting in next to him so I’m lying up against his side, my head on his shoulder. I close my eyes, letting myself soak in the warmth of his body against mine. And more than the sexual desires—though there’s definitely that—I feel . . . content. Blissfully so.
“So the girl Jerry’s dating is a single mother, you know?” he says. “And the Cuba Gooding Junior character, I can’t remember his name, but his mom was a single mother, too.”
The contented feeling becomes a hard pit in my stomach so fast I’m not sure how I manage to take a breath.
So that’s what he’s conflicted about. Of course.
“Oh,” I say. “You don’t want to get mixed up with someone with a kid.”
He looks a little stunned. “No, that’s not—that’s not what I’m getting at. That’s not what he says.”
I pause. Maybe I jumped to that assumption too quickly. “Okay. What does he say?”
“He says you don’t shoplift the pooty from a single mother.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Shoplift the what? How do I not remember this?”
“The pooty,” he says, with that gorgeous grin of his. “And I do not know.”
I may not know what the hell a pooty is, but I can—kind of—see where he’s going with this now, and I’m relieved Felix isn’t averse to being with me because of Ty, who is, of course, a non-negotiable part of my life and always will be.
That relief is great enough that I giggle, putting my head back on his shoulder. “So is that what we’re doing? Shoplifting?”
He groans. “That’s how it feels. Tell me that’s stupid.”
“Mmm. I’m not sure that it is.” But stupid or not, I’ve never wanted to shoplift so badly in my life.
“I told you I’m not proud of my past, right?” he says.
I nod. He did, in vague terms, though I sure know what it’s like not to want to think about the details of past indiscretions.
“One of the things I’ve been working on,” he says, “is paying attention when my gut tells me something doesn’t feel right. Making sure I’m doing what I need to stay out of trouble, even if it interferes with what I want.”
“And this doesn’t feel right,” I say. I both agree and disagree with that, and apparently so does he, because he shakes his head.
“It does,” he says. “Too right to happen only once.”
What he’s saying is true, and I know it. I close my eyes.
“I think I knew that before you showed up,” he says. “I was lying here checking my phone waiting for the text that would say you’d changed your mind. Sometimes when I’m stressed, I have this habit of sitting still and not moving, because if I don’t move, I can’t make a mistake. But I think in this case, I could have picked a better location.”
Something about that stings, the way he’s describing me as a mistake he has the potential of making. And even though he just said this feels right—too right—I can’t help but wonder. “Do you want me to leave?”
He shakes his head. “I really don’t.”
I relax against him, under the warmth of his arm, even though I’m not sure what it is we’re doing here.
“How is it possible,” he says, rubbing his forehead, “that I’m lying here next to you, in a bed, in a secret hotel room in the middle of the afternoon, and I’m somehow suggesting we not have sex?”
I laugh. “I don’t know. You do seem torn up about it.”
“I really don’t know who I am right now.”
I put my arm around his chest, feeling the muscles through his t-shirt, and lean in close enough that my nose presses into his cheek. “You’re cute, whoever you are.”
I’m so intensely aware of how close his lips are to mine that I’m finding it hard to breathe. He pulls me in even closer, which doesn’t help my breathing any. It does, however, feel so good. My body fits perfectly tucked up against his like this.
I can only imagine how perfectly it fits with his in other ways.
His fingers trail along my bare arm, raising goosebumps along my skin. “This isn’t how I want it to go,” he says, and I know I’m not the only one imagining us fitting together with less clothes in the way.
“How do you want it to go?”
“In another situation, I would have asked you to dinner. And then maybe to coffee after. And then breakfast the next day. You wouldn’t have been able to get rid of me, I’d be so clingy.”
My heart flutters happily, thinking of Felix and me on long romantic dates, talking about anything and everything—like lunch at the sushi restaurant, only without the restraints of all the rules. “You do seem the high-maintenance type,” I say with a laugh. “But somehow, I think I wouldn’t mind.”
And I wouldn’t. Something about talking with him, being with him—I never want it to end. I think of how it was even talking with him on the phone to tell him about the audition, frantically trying to think of something to say to keep from hanging up. I wasn’t even aware before today of how much I needed someone to talk to, someone who cares about me for me, and not as part of a band, or as a member of their family who they depend on. Alec and I lost that—the easy way we used to talk—long before our relationship ended.
And even then, it was never like this.
“Maybe we’d sleep together,” he continues. “And maybe we wouldn’t yet. But I’d treat you with respect, and whenever that did happen, I’d sure as hell still be there in the morning.”
My throat goes dry and my heart pounds faster. He would be; I know that. He wouldn’t be like those other guys, the ones I let use me. The ones who only wanted me for sex, the ones who never saw me.
He would be there in the morning, and he would look at me like he’s looking at me now, like there’s no world outside of this room, outside of us.
And I know, sadly, what I need to do. Or not do, I suppose. “I have an answer to your question now. It would make things worse if we slept together.”
He covers his face with his hand. “This is the worst,” he groans.
I laugh, knowing all too well how he feels. “Tell me about it.” I move to sit up, but again his arm around me tightens.
“Do you need to go?” he asks.
I look back at him, surprised.
“You can if you want,” he says quickly. “But we’ve got a couple hours, right? You could stay and talk. Fair warning, though. I’ll probably kiss you.”
I at once feel flushed with desire and completely confused. “You want to kiss me, even if we’re not going to have sex.” I’m not sure what to do with this. It goes beyond my experience with guys—even the good ones, like Alec.
But Felix responds like the answer to this is obvious. “Yeah. What about you?”
I do. More than that, I just want to be with him longer, even if all we can do is hold each other and talk. I settle back in next to him, and it’s like my whole body relaxes—like it had tensed up in that brief moment we’d been apart, and I hadn’t even realized it until I was back in his arms.
He wants to kiss me, even if we aren’t going to have sex. The girl I was four years ago would have found this laughable, impossible even. Which may be why I feel the need to sort out what, exactly, we’re doing. “So you’ll kiss me today. And after this we’ll just be friends.”
It hurts to say that last part, but it’s what’s necessary. Isn’t it?
He shakes his head. “I can’t do that. I can’t pretend to be just your friend.”
My throat closes. “Are you going to leave the band?”
“No,” he says, and I let out a breath of relief. “But it’s something I’m working on—trying to be authentic. True to myself, I guess.” He pauses. “That probably sounds stupid.”
“No. You’re talking to a professional liar. I get it. It sucks to put on an act.” I didn’t think it would, or at least not so badly, when Alec and I agreed to keep doing this for the sake of our careers.
But even in the worst parts of my past, I was never much of a liar. Except, maybe, to myself.
Felix brushes the hair back from where it’s falling over my face, and I close my eyes against the touch of his fingers, soft and yet I can feel the callouses of years of cello playing, which is somehow crazy sexy. Or maybe just on him. “Exactly,” he says. “I can pretend for the world, but I can’t put on an act with you. I can keep the rules. We don’t have to date, and we don’t have to touch. But I also don’t want to pretend this is anything other than what it is.”
“And, what is that, exactly?”
He gapes a little, like it didn’t occur to him to define it. “I don’t know. If you have a clue, you’re welcome to fill me in.”
I press in tighter against him. “Whatever it is, I like it.”
There’s this moment where we’re silent, just breathing each other in. I can feel his heartbeat under the palm of my hand. I find myself wishing this was my life. Only this, and no rules about what we can and can’t do.
But this is just a perfect, stolen afternoon, and I need to know what follows. Partly because as amazing as it feels to be more to him than just a sexy encounter and a friendship after, I can’t put my finger on what more we could be. “So if we’re not together and we won’t touch, what’s the difference between that and being friends?”
His lips twist as he considers. “You have close guy friends, yeah?”
“Yeah. I was close to Mason.” A stab of hurt follows those words. I’d thought I was close to him. “And there’s Leo.”
“And you talk to Leo like this?”
I laugh. “Ha. No.”
“Well. There you go.”
I roll off him enough to prop myself up on my elbows. I should let it go, should just be satisfied that there’s this thing between us, and we both feel it, even if we can’t put a name to it. But part of me needs some kind of label, as if that makes it more likely to be real and still exist the moment I leave this hotel room. “I’m still not entirely sure what it is we’re doing here.”
Felix’s blue eyes study mine. “I can’t pretend to be your friend because I’m past there. It’s like, there’s friendship, and there’s sex, and then there’s like this third thing . . .” He cringes. “I can’t believe I’m about to say these words. I can assure you I have never uttered them in my entire life.”
My heartbeat picks up. Friendship. Sex. A third thing. “Go on.”
He bites his lip. “I guess it’s like, emotional . . . intimacy?” Then he closes his eyes. “Oh god, what is wrong with me?”
I laugh, because Felix said those words like they’re a foreign language, and also because it’s less scary than the word I was thinking.
I lie back down on his chest, my arms around his neck. His heart is racing, and mine’s keeping pace. “Emotional intimacy,” I say. “I like it. I could get behind that.”
He sighs. “So does that put us on the four year plan?”
Ugh, four years. But that he would even consider it . . . “I’m still not sure you actually remember I have a kid. And a past. And a hell of a lot of baggage.”
“I have baggage, too. I’m not ready to tell you all of it yet, but I will.”
This stings a bit more than is reasonable. I mean, I was open with him at the restaurant—far more so than I’ve ever been with someone I’ve known for so little time—but it’s not like I went into all the details of my past over sushi.
I wonder, though, if someday I could tell him everything.
I wonder if he would still feel the same about me, after knowing all the things I’ve done.
“It’s okay,” I say, because I believe him when he says he will tell me. Maybe I’m being stupid and naive, but I find I trust him. I trust he’s not playing with me or using me. I trust that this thing between us—this emotional intimacy—is as real for him as it is for me.
And then something occurs to me. “You know I’m still going to have to pretend to be with Alec, right?”
“I know. I get it.”
I’m not sure he does, not really. “That means we have to go out. Like scheduled appearances. Phil makes us appointments, gives us places to go. Like . . . on dates.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I get that you have to keep up appearances.”
But I’m realizing how unfair it is, if he has feelings for me, to have to see me with Alec. Being a couple with Alec, which isn’t the same thing as watching us at band practice. “And sometimes we have to like, kiss and stuff. Only in public, and it’s not like we full-on make out or anything.”
His arms wrap around me. “Jenna, I get it. I know.”
And even though everything in me is begging me not to say this, I do anyway. “So you should date other people.”
His hand runs through my hair, his fingers gently separating the strands. “We’re not in a committed relationship. We can’t be. So I’m absolutely allowed to date other people.”
I told him he should, but my heart feels like it’s splintering apart.
“And you’re going to want to,” I say quickly, as if saying it out loud will help. “Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you?”
His fingers graze the curve of my ear, then cup my chin. I meet his eyes.
“I don’t exactly want to spend my time leading girls on,” he say. “Unless you plan to hire me a fake girlfriend to throw off suspicion.”
But four years is a long time. And if my world can have changed so quickly, so thoroughly, in two days . . .
“You might find someone,” I say, the words barely more than a whisper.
His thumb caresses my cheek, and his lips quirking up into a smile. “Because in my experience, something like this is so easy to come by.”
His words from before echo in my head: I haven’t felt like this.
Neither have I, I want to say. But words fail me, because I can see the look in his eyes as he cradles my face in his hands, and my breath catches and my blood rushes and then his lips are on mine.
And in the heat that consumes me, it’s like everything shifts—my life, the world, everything.
Or maybe I finally realize how much it already shifted, before I even knew it. Back when I first met eyes with a gorgeous guy playing his cello and sitting in the bright sun on Hollywood Boulevard.
It’s more than wanting him; it’s needing him. We’re kissing, and his hands are running over my back, my waist, down my thighs, and mine are doing the same to him, and we may be clothed now, but I can feel in a very definite way how much he also wants more than this, and I know it’s only a matter of time before we abandon our good sense.
I break off from the kiss and bury my face in his neck. I feel the fever-heat of his skin against my cheek and hear the hammering of his heart against my chest.
“Four years,” I say, my body aching. My heart pounding. “Are we really talking about that?”
He presses his forehead against mine. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say we probably won’t make it four years before we start breaking rules. But I do think we can make it more than four days. How about you?”
I can’t help but laugh. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this. This isn’t normal.”
“Not normal at all,” he says, his breathing still a little ragged. “I think that was the point I was making before.” But he’s smiling, and I’m smiling back, because while I’m scared, I’m also giddy and a dozen kinds of wound up right now.
“Ahhhh. What are we doing?”
He kisses my forehead, and it takes everything in me not to start making out with him again.
“Taking Alec up on his one-night offer,” he says, grinning against my skin. “At least somewhat.”
I groan. Alec would be disappointed in me that I’m not doing more than making out. But if kissing Felix feels like this, I can’t imagine how hard it would be to go back if we did more. “I think it’s having the opposite effect,” I say. “It’s more like free sample day at the grocery store.”
He smiles. “Ha. So we’re trying this out with the intention to buy.”
The intention to buy. For good. His smile slips after he says this, and I think I know why.
Because it sounds insane, but it feels exactly the opposite.
“You’re right,” I say, slowly. “It doesn’t have to be four years. If things stay this way, I might be ready to get out sooner.”
Oh, god. I should not be considering that. After everything Alec has done for me, after this freak success he and I have had—I have a kid, for god’s sake. I can’t throw all that away, just because I’m terrified Felix is going to rightly decide I’m not worth all of this.
Felix must sense what I’m thinking, because he shakes his head. “It’s okay if you’re not ready to destroy your career trajectory for a guy you just met. Let’s just see how it goes, okay?”
I let out a breath, closing my eyes. I’m not going to be able to be with him, not like this. Not after today. We’ll be able to talk, to be emotionally intimate, as he said, but to not even be able to touch him? To not feel his arms around me like this?
“Okay,” I say, reluctantly. “But I already know it’s going to suck.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs, holding me close. “It will.” He pauses. “I need to ask you something.”
There’s enough hesitation in his tone that I pull back a bit. “What?”
“I signed that piece of paper, saying I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Yeah. And it’s really important you don’t.” Alec would kill me if he said anything.
Felix’s brow furrows. “If things keep going like this, I’m going to need someone to talk to about it.”
He sounds apologetic, so I think he gets the magnitude of what he’s asking for. But he did just tell me he’s trying to be more authentic, and I’m the one who saddled him with an enormous lie he wasn’t prepared to deal with.
“If I just told my sister Gabby,” he continues. “She wouldn’t tell a soul. I swear. When she understands how important it is, she’d never do anything that could hurt me like that. It would really help to have someone to talk to about what’s going on.”
I pause, thinking it through. I want to give him this, when he’s being so patient with me, but I also don’t want the secret to get out. Alec and I have worked so hard. He doesn’t deserve to lose everything just because I’m having the world’s worst-timed emotional intimacy with our cellist. “She won’t tell anyone. Not a soul.”
“No one,” he says. “If I impress upon her how much depends on that, she wouldn’t.”
“Don’t tell Alec. Or anyone else in the band.”
“Not a word. No one will know but her.”
I know Alec would be so pissed at me for agreeing to this, but I have to. Felix deserves this, and so much more. “Okay. With everything you’re putting up with for me, I can’t deny you that.” I pause, thinking of him telling his sister all about me. Imagining how a sister might react to all of this. “Tell me how she takes it, though? Otherwise I’ll worry.”
He grins. “Talking isn’t against the rules, right? So I intend to tell you everything.”
Everything.
Warmth fills me, all the way to my toes, and I’m grinning back at him. It won’t be physical intimacy, but maybe the emotional will be enough. Until we decide it isn’t anymore, and we make our plans—and my exit strategy—accordingly.
His lips are so close to mine, and I can’t resist leaning in close and kissing him, slow and soft, and then deeper, until all my thoughts are scattered at his touch. I don’t know when I’ll be able to kiss him like this again—maybe not for years—and I’m not wasting a single, perfect moment. We kiss and kiss and kiss, just lost in each other.
And I don’t ever want to be found.