Escort (A Standalone Romance Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (74 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Lightly
Baked with Just a Dash of Salt

Dane

It only took an hour for
Wilks to show his talent as the new executive chef of
l’Iris
.
By the time dinner service started to slow down, there was really nothing left
for me to do that couldn’t be done just as well by someone else, and I offered
to give Wilks the kitchen.

Apparently, his first
name is Jared.

I never really bothered
to learn that kind of thing, but it’s his kitchen now.

After the discussion with
Wrigley and obligatory coital session that followed, I started to feel a little
bit better. Still, it’s going to be a little weird going home tonight.

Maybe Leila’s out with
her new boyfriend. Before I’m even to the door of the apartment, though, I can
hear her inside singing along to some pop song.

I can’t just hide from
her forever, so I unlock and open the door. Once it’s closed, I decide that
maybe I
can
just hide from her
forever, and I make it to my room without alerting her to my presence.

My phone’s in my hand a
few seconds later.

“Hello?”

“Wrigley, I don’t know
what I’m doing here. This whole thing is so uncomfortable. I don’t think I can
go through with it.”

“You’ve got to talk to
her, Dane,” my new girlfriend says. “I’m not opening up the candy store until
you’ve figured out what this is between the two of you.”

That was the agreement
before I left for work this morning, but it’s making less and less sense with
every passing moment.

“She’s with someone,” I
say.

“Right now? The guy’s
there?”

“No,” I answer. “I don’t
know. I didn’t see him when I came in.”

“Wait, you’re not hiding
in your room like a little bitch, are you?”

“She’s out there doing
jazzercise and singing along with shit off the radio.”

It’s a while before
Wrigley’s done laughing.

“She’s in a good mood,”
she says finally. “Now is as good a time as any.”

“Why am I doing this
again?”

“Because,” she answers,
“I don’t want to start an exclusive relationship with someone whose heart isn’t
into it. This is strange enough for me, I’m not about to jump in further if
there’s nothing but undertow.”

“But—”

“I know it’s probably
nothing,” she says, “but on the off chance that it’s something, you need to talk
to her and see where you stand.”

“Can we be in a
relationship, but you go back to being callous and sex-crazed?” I ask.

It’s too much to hope.
She just laughs and hangs up.

Wrigley was right about
one thing, though. Sneaking into my bedroom, closing the door and calling
wasn’t really the strongest move I could have made.

There’s nothing left for
me to do but go out there and see what I feel when I do.

I open the door and about
startle the shit out of Leila.

She turns off the radio,
shouting, “Jesus, Dane, when did you get home?”

“Just a few minutes ago,”
I start. “There’s something I need to talk to you about—”

“You’re not going to
believe this,” she starts, a look of excitement on her face.

“What?” I ask.

“I got the job!” she
exclaims, turning the radio back on.

“That’s great!” I say
with a smile. “What job?”

“That’s right, I didn’t
tell you,” she says. “I’ve been putting out my
resumé
for a while now, but I hadn’t heard anything back. Today, I got the call, well
one of my bosses got the call, but that doesn’t matter. I got hired on full
time at Claypool and Lee! I start in a couple of weeks!”

“Claypool and Lee?” I
ask.

She flips the radio off
again.

“Oh, right,” she says. “I
probably should have run this by you.”

“What?”

“The job’s in Jersey,”
she says. “I’ve got to start looking for places.”

“New Jersey,” I say.
“Wow. So, what happens—
”

“I’m not just going to
kick you out,” she says. “I’ll talk to Traven and see if we can get you put on
the lease as the primary. I know the place is kind of pricey, but I’m sure you
could find a roommate.”

That’s not what’s making
me feel like I’ve been hit in the stomach with a baseball bat.

Wrigley was right.
There’s no doubt about it.

I’ve got a thing for my
roommate and it’s a big one. I’m not even making a penis joke there, that’s how
serious this is.

“Check this out,” she
says. “I’m going to be working with some of the best financial minds in the
country and after five years, they’re going to give me my own team. They’re
putting me on track to be a partner someday, you know, if I don’t screw it up
in the meantime.”

“Oh, you won’t screw it
up,” I tell her. “You’re going to do great.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I
don’t mean to just bail on you, but this is really the opportunity of a
lifetime for me.”

“I’m happy for you,” I tell
her. “Really, I am.”

“Then why do you look
like you just got hit in the stomach with a tire iron?”

I almost correct her, as
the visual in my head was very clearly a baseball bat with a bunch of nails
driven through the end, but the amount of explanation involved there is just
too much.

“Well, I guess that just
about does it,” I tell her.

“No, seriously,” she
says. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” I say,
but even I’m not convinced.

“Oh,” she says. “I know
what it is. This is about last night.”

“Well…”

“May I ask why it
bothered you that I was kissing Mike?”

“Mike?” I ask. “Isn’t he
your friend from town?”

“Yeah,” Leila answers.
“He was just having one of his moments and badgered me into letting him know if
he was a good kisser or not. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“What do you mean?” I
ask.

“Oh, nothing,” she says.
“And you didn’t answer my question.”

“What was your question?”

“Why does it bother you
that I was kissing Mike?” she repeats.

“Why would it bother me?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

I sigh.

Am I really going to do
this? Wrigley is a perfectly wonderful woman: totally out of her mind, but
still, very much my type. Am I really willing to risk that for someone I hardly
know?

Of course, I hardly know
Wrigley, but that’s neither here nor there.

“I just didn’t know you
were home,” I answer. “When I came in, I realized that I was probably intruding
on something, but my phone rang before I could get out of here.”

“Oh,” she says. “So it
didn’t bother you that I was kissing someone else?”

“Why would it?” I ask.

This is painful.

“I don’t know,” she says.
“We almost, you and I, you know…”

She trails off; her
newfound discomfiture is hardly helping things.

“What?”

“Okay, I didn’t black out
that night,” she says. “After your friend came out of your room wearing—or not
wearing…whatever—I kind of wished that I had, but—is this too weird?”

She’s talking really
fast, and
it’s
a few seconds before I realize she’s
just asked me a question.

“Is what too weird?”

“Talking about this,” she
says. “I know you and that Wrigley chick have a thing and all that. I just
don’t want to make things uncomfortable between us for the next couple weeks.”

That’s actually a pretty
solid idea. She’ll move and I’m sure I’ll be over her in no time.

“I think I’m in love with
you,” I blurt out.

That was stupid.

The remote falls from her
hand and it looks like her jaw is trying to follow it.

“You’re what?” she asks.

“You know what? Never
mind. I shouldn’t have said anything. You got some big news today, and I think
that’s
what we should be talking about.”

“You’re in love with me?”
she asks.

“Well, I…”

I stammer a bit, but I
have no words to follow the string of unintelligible noises.

“When did this happen?”
she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.
“Look, can we just forget that I said anything?”

“I just got a new job,
and I’m going to be moving,” she says, putting her hands to her temples.

“Yeah, let’s just forget
I said anything. I’m thrilled to hear about your—”

“Are you sure it’s not
just a proximity thing?” she asks. “I know sometimes people—”

“Oh, let’s just drop it.”

She peers at me and I
can’t bring myself to return the gaze.

“You
are
—seriously, why didn’t you say something before? You know, maybe
while I was drunk and throwing myself at you?”

“Well, I—”

“Wait,” she says, “that’s
right. There was a naked woman in your room at the time.”

She starts laughing and I
want to kill myself.

“I’m sorry,” she says.
“This really isn’t funny.”

She’s still laughing.

“Okay, well, I’m going to
go now, but yeah: congratulations on the job.”

“Dane, I’m so sorry for laughing.
It’s a nervous thing. I’m really not trying to laugh at you.”

“Really,
it’s
fine,” I tell her and turn to go back to my room.

“I wish you had told me,”
she says.

I stop.

“I have feelings for you,
too, you know?”

“Yeah?” I ask.

I’m no good at this whole
vulnerable thing.

“Yeah,” she says. “After
that night, I realized that I’ve been really attracted to you for a while. I’m
pretty sure that’s why I hated you for so long.”

“So you hated me because
you like me?”

“I’m a girl,” she says.
“That’s kind of how we roll. You guys do it, too, you know. That whole pushing
girls down in the sandbox cliché; that’s the same thing.”

“Yeah, well, good talk.”

“I really wish you said
something.”

She’s still talking.

Why are we dragging this
out?

“I wish
I
said something, but I’ve got this new
job and I don’t see any way this is going to work, Dane. I wish we just—”

“It’s okay,” I tell her.
“You don’t owe me anything. I should have said something sooner and I didn’t.
That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

I turn the knob on my
door.

“Are you going to be all
right?”

That has just become my
least favorite question ever.

“Yeah,” I answer. “I’ll
be fine. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I’m half-expecting her to
say something else, but she’s silent. So I push my door open and can’t get it
closed behind me fast enough.

Well, at least I have
something to tell Wrigley, although I can’t imagine this is going to be the
best first day of a relationship she’s ever had.

Chapter Fifteen

Coming
Down

Leila

Mrs. Weinstock didn’t
fire me after everything that happened yesterday, so I guess I’m here until I
give them some kind of notice. That’s not really what’s on my mind, though.

Work is a blurry mass of
emotion, none of which stays in one place long enough to really sink in. I
wanted to tell Dane that I felt the same way about him, and I guess I kind of
did, but that doesn’t change anything.

On the bright side, I’m
so distracted that I barely notice it when Kidman asks me if I’d like to grease
up his paper tray, and before I know it, I’m done for the day.

I don’t want to go home,
but I can’t stay here. Knowing Dane, little, though I do, I can only imagine
that if he is home, he’s probably got company.

I’m just going to have to
get over that, though.

I would call Mike, but I
can see that only making things even less comfortable with Dane.

Why would he wait until
the last possible minute to tell me that he has feelings for me?

By the time I get home,
I’m too emotionally drained to worry about whether Dane’s in there or not.

I get into the apartment
and, if he’s home, he’s in his room.

That’s fine by me.

Drained, though I am,
there’s no doubt that seeing him right now would be enough to send me off some
kind of edge.

I can’t think about that
right now, though. I only have a couple of weeks before I start at my new job,
and I need to find somewhere to live.

If worse comes to worse,
I can commute for a while, but that’s going to be a long drive. Like most
people in Manhattan, I don’t have my own car, so I’d have to rent one; it’ll be
so much easier if I can find somewhere before then.

I pull out my phone. If
there’s one thing Mike knows, it’s how to annoy the crap out of me. If there
are two things he knows, they’re how to annoy the crap out of me and how to
find a killer deal on an apartment.

“Hello?”

“I got the job.”

I go on to tell him the
finer details and before I can even ask, he’s already installed himself as head
of the apartment-finding committee.

Now Mike: Mike has a car.
It’s a beat down hunk of junk, but it runs. Tomorrow is Saturday, so the
planning section of the conversation goes by quickly enough.

It’s when he asks what
I’m going to do about Dane that things start to unravel, or rather, that I
start to unravel.

I make a quick excuse and
hang up, but just hearing the name has me in a tailspin. I don’t know why I’m
crying so hard.

*
                   
*
                   
*

It’s six in the morning
when my phone rings.

I let it go to voicemail
and have a brief, magnificent fantasy of falling back to sleep and not waking
up again until I’m no longer tired, but that dream is cut short as the phone
rings again.

“What?” I answer.

“Rise and shine,” Mike
says. “It’s time to find you an apartment. I’m downstairs and ready to go.”

“It’s too early,” I tell
him, but I know it’s not going to make any difference.

“I brought coffee and
donuts,” he says. “If you’re really nice to me, I might even let you have some,
now get your ass
outta
bed and let’s get going.”

I go on to make a very
compelling argument about how nobody’s going to show us apartments this early
in the morning, but he’s already hung up.

Grumbling, I get out of
bed.

Mike didn’t leave me time
to take a shower, so I put on some deodorant and hope I don’t feel too
disgusting by the time the day’s out. I don’t really like my chances.

When Mike said he was
here, he meant parked in the garage down the block. It’s a bit early, but there
are already people on the sidewalks, nearly all of them talking on phones. I
can’t help but wonder how many of them are actually talking to someone and how
many are just talking into the air, trying to appear like they’re a lot more
important than they actually are.

I might be a little
cranky.

I’m not even to the
parking garage when I hear Mike’s voice echoing through the structure. He’s
arguing with someone about whether parking on the line is “in” or not, and from
the sound of it, it doesn’t seem like he’s winning.

I follow the ruckus and
eventually find Mike standing at the back of his car, up in the face of the
parking attendant, and the problem is easy enough to spot.

Mike didn’t pull into a
space and take a little more than his share of the spot; he’s parked behind two
cars, blocking them in. He’s trying to advance the argument that because one of
his tires is on one of the yellow lines, he’s technically not parked illegally.

“Lei, you’re here,” he
calls over the attendant’s shoulder. “Let’s get the fuck out!”

I hurry to the car and
get in. The parking attendant is still shouting profanity at Mike through the
window, but as soon as Mike starts the car, the man backs off.

“Yeah, I didn’t know how
long I was going to hold him there with that bullshit,” Mike laughs. “Your
coffee’s in the cup holder on the right. You drink it black, don’t you?”

“I don’t even care right
now,” I tell him and pull the lid off the cup.

I pour about half the cup
of coffee down my throat. It’s a good thing the coffee is cold.

“So, I stayed up until
four in the morning looking at places, and we’ve got some options. There are a
few in town and a few out of town. Which would you like to check first?”

“You didn’t make any
appointments?”

“Who’s going to take an
appointment in the middle of the night?” Mike asks. “It’s Jersey. People there
don’t have plans. They’ll be so thrilled that a New Yorker is in town they’ll
roll out the red carpet.”

Mike’s one of
those
New Yorkers. He’s of a special
breed that thinks no one outside of the five boroughs has anything important to
do. That, mixed with the already sizeable god-complex, and they just might kick
us out of the state.

We’re on the road for a long
time, longer than I would have thought.

I made sure to look at
the clock as we were leaving, and it’s already been almost three hours. There’s
no way I can make this kind of commute.

“What kind of brokerage
houses do they even have in Jersey?”

“They have brokerage
houses everywhere,” I tell him. “The only difference is that in New York, if
someone on the floor pisses you off, you can hunt them down before they’ve had
a chance to leave the state.”

“So, what’s the deal with
you and Dane? I kind of got a vibe from you last night.”

Mike and his stupid
vibes.

“Nothing,” I tell him.
“Just drive. You know where we’re going, right?”

“You know the guy’s in
love with you, right?”

I look over at him, my
eyes wide.

“What?” he asks. “It’s
not like it wasn’t obvious the way he was carrying on the other night when he
walked in on us kissing.”

“You didn’t seem to have
any useful theories on it then.”

“Yeah, I had a little
time to think about it and the more I did, the more I realized that he had the
same look on his face when I found my date for senior prom under the bleachers
getting felt up by Bill Rodman.”

“I’m moving,” I tell
Mike. “That kind of trumps everything else.”

“You’re not into him,
then?” he asks.

I don’t answer, but
that’s an answer in itself.

“You like him, too,” he
says. “
J’accuse
!”

“
J’accuse
is back, huh?” I ask.

“Are you going to tell
him?” Mike asks.

“Nope,” I answer.
“There’s really nothing to tell. I have a new job in a new city—a new state,
even. It doesn’t really matter whether I like him or not.”

“So you
do
like him?”

“Haven’t we established
that?”

“I was talking out my
ass,” Mike says. “Could you reach in the glove compartment and grab me the map
that’s in there?”

I open the glove
compartment, but all I find is a small bag of pot and a half-empty bag of corn
chips.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s
seriously the second decade of the new millennium. People don’t use fucking
paper maps anymore. Could you pass me that bag? I think I’ve got half a joint
stuffed in there somewhere.”

“I’m not letting you
drive me high,” I tell him and close the glove box.

“Killjoy.”

We’re on the road for
another half hour, and Mike seems incapable of talking about anything other
than my situation with Dane. I’m really not in the mood.

When we finally take an
exit, Mike pulls the phone out of his pocket and hands it to me.

“Pull up the GPS,” he
tells me. “I’ve got everything programmed in there.”

I will say this about
Mike: he does come prepared. I really wish he hadn’t come prepared with the bag
of weed, though.

We follow the automated
voice into the first apartment complex and I have the strangest moment. I’ve
been in New York City so long that when I think of an apartment complex, I
think of one building with only a few parking spaces out front that are always
filled, crammed to the rafters with every brand of crazy person there is.

This place, though. It
kind of reminds me of home.

It’s not the nicest place
in the world, but the grounds are well-kept and I don’t see any crime scene
tape, so I’m already excited.

“And now we wait,” Mike
says as he pulls into an open parking spot.

“We wait?” I ask. “Why?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says,
“their office doesn’t open for another hour. So, when are you going to tell
Dane that you want him to split you like a tree trunk?”

“Split me like a—you have
a problem, Mike, seriously.”

“It’s not like you didn’t
already know,” he tells me. “I saw the look on your face when you realized he
was there.”

“I was startled,” I
rejoin. “You should have seen
your
face. Your mouth was open so wide I could see your wisdom teeth.”

“Whatever,” he says. “I’m
talking about after the initial shock. You looked like you were going to—”

“Can we please talk about
something else?” I ask. “Have you had a chance to try what I told you?”

“What? You mean
completely changing everything about the way I kiss?”

“That’s exactly what I
mean.”

“Eh, a little bit. I
don’t know if I just got magnificently better at it, or if I’m still as
terrible as ever, but we weren’t kissing very long.” He leans over, grinning
and nudges my arm, saying, “If you know what I mean.”

“Oh, god.”

We sit there for a while,
and I continue to dodge his questions about Dane. When the office finally
opens, we go in and talk to the manager. She takes us on a tour and it simply
doesn’t compute that I can get a two bedroom apartment with a decent floor plan
for under $1,000.

I really haven’t been
living in the city that long, but that kind of freaks me out.

I’m ready to sign the
papers right now, but Mike steps in before I can commit to anything and tells
the woman that we have a few more appointments today, but we’ll let her know.

By the time the day’s
done, I can hardly remember what that first apartment looked like.

“So,” Mike says as we’re
on our way back to New York and all the insanity those two words juxtaposed
entail, “you’re really not going to tell me what you’re going to do.”

“Nope.”

I don’t want to tell him
that, with every new apartment we looked at, I was making a mental note of
which room would be mine and which one would be Dane’s. I admit it, I like him
and I don’t want to leave him, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to share a
bedroom with him either.

Mike drops me off in
front of my building and we make plans to get together tomorrow and decide
which place is going to be the right fit.

I’m not looking forward
to walking into that apartment and having to try and think of a way to approach
Dane now that it’s all out in the open, but I don’t get the chance. As I come
up the stairs, Dane’s coming out of the apartment.

“Don’t lock it!” I call.

He jumps a little, but
nods and opens the door.

When I get up to him, my
every thought is of walking right by him, but I stop.

“Dane, I wanted to talk
to you about last night,” I tell him.

“Could we not do this?”
he asks. “I’ve already humiliated
myse
—”