LUCAS
By the end of the week I was pretty much dating my conditioner. And also my hand cream and the box of Kleenex on the nightstand by my bed.
If I’d had more free time, I might’ve spent more of it trying to convince Emerson what a colossal fuckup this whole thing had been. But that was the problem. Between all of Aster’s frantic calls to complain about my mother’s meddling, the appointments and the meetings my mother had scheduled, and all the last-minute fires I was trying to head-off during these last weeks before the gala, I’d hardly had a minute to myself.
But that didn’t mean Em wasn’t constantly on my mind. In fact, the more time we spent apart, the more I thought about her. In a perfect world, I was sure I would have done things differently. If there had been a real chance for the two of us, I would’ve found time so we could talk. Tried explaining the way things really were between Aster and me.
Instead, I let myself be overscheduled, in an effort to push Emerson—and the fact that she’d be leaving soon—out of my mind. To obliterate her from my life before she could do it for me.
And at the end of each day, rather than calling Em, the way I would have before, I collapsed onto my bed. I let myself get lost in memories of her . . . dark, explicit fantasies . . . and wished it were her clenched around me instead of my own lotion-covered fist.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Literally.
I found myself bumping into her at the strangest times, which was partly why I couldn’t stop thinking about her. If I left my house, Em was leaving hers. When I stopped by The Dunes to catch up with my roommate Zane before calling it a night, she was there. And every goddamned time I ran into the Quick-E-Mart to grab a six-pack, there was my good pal Emerson McLean.
And Em had never been ashamed of that banging body of hers, so there was no shortage of short skirts, revealing tops, or teeny bikinis. There was no place I could look at her that our skin hadn’t touched. No part of her I hadn’t tasted. In other words, just seeing her made my dick hard.
The thing was, though, I was starting to suspect this wasn’t coincidence, all this bumping into each other. Maybe Em wasn’t as cool as she’d pretended to be about the two of us being just friends. Maybe she was thinking about me as much as I was thinking about her, and this was her way of sticking it to me. Her way of making me suffer—by giving me a peek at the forbidden fruit, so to speak.
Making it impossible for me to have a single night’s sleep that wasn’t interrupted by wet dreams of her.
When I’d first met Emerson, it hadn’t taken me long to realize she was used to people underestimating her, judging her book by the cover. It was easy to guess why. A blonde vixen with legs for miles—men treated her like she was an airhead, and women acted like she was a slut. Everyone seemed to sell her short.
But there was so much to Emerson beneath that glitter-encrusted surface. She was smart and driven, which was why she’d be leaving so soon—to start her marketing internship at the PR firm. She was stubborn too, refusing to let people see her vulnerable side. But just because she didn’t let anyone see it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there. She just didn’t want to admit to it.
She was funny too. Sometimes, when it was just the two of us and her defenses were down, she made me laugh so hard it hurt not to be around her.
Maybe I was the one who’d underestimated her. If she really was devious enough to torture me this way, she wasn’t just smart, she was a fucking genius. She’d figured out how to drive me wild.
Except that didn’t make sense. Maybe my blue balls had cut off the oxygen to my brain. Because what would be the point of this revenge scenario of hers? Em had made her intentions more than clear from the get-go: she had plans that didn’t involve me. Arizona was a long way from the beaches of SoCal—too far for any real relationship, at least. What would she gain from wasting the rest of her summer by messing with my head?
Especially when all she’d have to do is give me the word and I’d gladly pick up where we left off.
All I knew was, that if I’d learned anything during my time with Emerson, she had a mind of her own. She knew how to keep me guessing.
Besides, I’d seen the look on her face when Aster had busted in on the two of us. Maybe Em was too proud to say what she wanted. Too goddamned pigheaded for her own good.
There was only one way to find out for sure.
As if on cue, Emerson strode into the Laundromat just as I was transferring a load of whites from the washer to the dryer, and I wondered how in the hell she’d known I was here. I swear, if I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect her of tagging me with one of those wild animal GPS trackers.
For once though, she hadn’t caught me off guard. I’d had a hunch I would be seeing her.
“Howdy there, neighbor.” I flashed her a toothy grin. “Fancy meeting you here.”
She glanced at me suspiciously, as if I were the one who’d been stalking her. “Yeah,” she said, eyeing our surroundings as she wrinkled her nose. “Fancy.”
I turned away from her to adjust the settings on the machine. I inhaled through my nose and told myself not to be hypnotized by her bralessness. She was doing this on purpose. Her nipples stood at attention beneath her sundress, which was too damned short for the Laundromat, giving everyone a glimpse of those incredible long legs of hers.
It took me a minute, and a lot of thinking about baseball . . . and then my grandmother . . . and then baseball again, before I was sure I finally had a grip on myself. When I pressed start on the dryer, I turned back to face her again, leaning casually against it as my clothes tumbled inside. “Been awhile since we’ve had a chance to catch up. How are things?”
She gave me a dubious look. “You okay? You’re acting . . .” She began sorting her clothes into two different washing machines. “Weird. Super weird.”
“Can’t a friend ask another friend how she’s doing?”
Had I only imagined it, or did her posture slump a little when I mentioned the whole friend thing?
“Sure. I suppose so.” She lifted a shoulder and went back to what she was doing. “Fine, I guess. Bored now that Lauren’s gone. Between the community center and Will, I hardly see her anymore.”
Shit. So there it was. I had a pretty impressive ego if I’d really believed this had all been about me. The truth was, her best friend had convinced her to move to California and then all but abandoned her. Em had more than enough reason to be moping around.
Still, that didn’t mean I was entirely wrong about her fucking with my head. I wasn’t quite ready to let her off the hook just because I felt bad for her, even if I felt like kind of a dick for coming up with this idea in the first place.
If the roles were reversed, I doubted Em would go easy on me. “So, I was wondering . . . ,” I started.
She perked up then, which made it almost impossible to look at her because her tits lifted and her nipples stood at attention. Awesome, but not awesome.
Don’t do it, the rational side of my brain warned. There were so many reasons this could blow up in my face. I should just leave things where they were, in the Friend Zone.
But I had to know if I was right—if Em really was as miserable as me.
And, so what if she was? She was still leaving at the end of the summer. And I still had other . . . what? Other obligations?
I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t.
“I have this project I’ve been working on, and since it sounds like you have some free time, I was thinking maybe you’d want to . . .” My eyebrows shot skyward. “Maybe you could help out?”
Em crossed her arms, glaring at me. “This project wouldn’t involve a dozen Trojans and a can of whipped cream, would it?”
“What? Shit . . . no,” I stammered, and then I caught myself. “But I like the way you think. Maybe your project is better than mine.”
She uncrossed her arms and stood upright. “Tell me about it. This ‘project’ of yours.”
“It’s a gala.”
She snorted. “A gala. As in . . . a ball?”
“As in a fundraiser, to be specific.”
Her pointed gaze took in my shorts and flip-flops. “You don’t exactly strike me as gala material.”
Laughing, I admitted, “I won’t take that as an insult.” Then I wiggled my eyebrows again. “But I guess that means you don’t know everything about me.”
Her mood darkened. “Yeah. Aston clued me in on that.”
This was not the time to correct her about Aster’s name. Not after my attempt to convince her I was more than just a pretty face had misfired.
“That’s not what I meant.” I needed to steer the conversation away from Aster completely. “About the gala . . . it’s kind of a big deal to me. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this, so I’m in a little over my head. I don’t suppose you know anything about fundraising.”
I waited for her to tell me I was a giant prick and to shove my fundraiser up my ass.
But as always, Emerson surprised me. Her face broke into an enigmatic smile as she dropped her quarters into both machines and set the cycles into motion. “There might just be a thing or two that you don’t know about me too.”