“I’m pretty sure I’m going to get drafted in June. Coach has been hearing things.” Soren’s hand hadn’t stopped moving up and down my back as we lay in bed after . . .
After lots of things—sweaty, noisy, great things.
“With the way you play?” I replied, glancing up from where my head was resting on his chest. “Any team in the country would be stupid not to want you to play for them.”
He smiled, staring at the ceiling. “It’s really happening.”
It really was. I wanted this so badly for him—I just wished time would slow down or our circumstances were different. I wished it wouldn’t mean the end. “You’ll probably get signed to some team in California or somewhere far away.”
His hand stopped moving. “I’m not your dad. You know that, right?” He tipped my chin up just enough I was able to look at him. “If I get drafted—”
“When,” I said.
“When I do, it’s a conversation we’ll have. We’ll make that decision together.”
My eyes left his, my leg tangled tighter around us. I needed to be preparing myself to let go, instead of holding on tighter. I needed to focus on falling out of love with him instead of falling more in love. My life was here and in Paris. His life was going to be somewhere out there, and if luck had anything to do with where he was drafted, it would be in the city farthest from New York. That was my personal history with luck and the men in my life.
“This is your dream, Soren. It’s not something you discuss with a girl you’ve been dating a couple of months.”
His body tensed below me. “Yeah, this is my dream.” His words were just as tense. “That’s exactly why I will discuss it with the woman I love when it comes to that.”
My teeth worked my lip, trying to keep the tears away. “We’ll see,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said, not a whisper at all, “we will.”
After that, we were quiet. Neither of us might have wanted to talk to each other right then, but we stayed close. His arm didn’t loosen around me, his chin tucked back over my head, and I worked my body a bit tighter around him.
Our time together was too rare and too valuable to spend it apart when we were both in the same zip code. Our time felt that much more valuable when I counted the weeks until June. There weren’t many.
I didn’t know how soon Soren would have to move to the city of the team that picked him—I didn’t know much about any of it—but instead of asking, I stayed ignorant. It felt better not to know than to be overwhelmed with looming dates and details.
Twilight was straining through the windows, which meant hours had passed since we’d burst through the apartment door, tugging at each other and tearing off clothes. We’d blown way past dinnertime, but I couldn’t think of anything important enough to leave this bed, to leave him.
Food. Water. The call of nature?
None of it appealed to me the way he and that bed did.
A couple of months ago, Soren had taken down the partitions and dragged our twin beds together to create whatever size that was. It was a little strange having a big seam going down the center of our bed, but Soren always took that spot, letting me have one side or the other. In the corner he’d shoved them, the partitions had started to collect dust. The walls had been taken down, but they weren’t gone. They were still there. Waiting for us to put them back up.
Or, I supposed, waiting for me to put them back up.
“You never talk about him—your dad.” Soren’s voice pushed into the silence, his words hesitant. “But I feel like he’s somehow always in the room with us.”
“Because that’s not creepy.” I pinched his side, attempting to keep this topic light. I couldn’t do heavy—not when it came to the man who’d brought me into a world he wanted no part of.
“You know what I mean.”
So much for the attempt at light and easy. Time to address it from another angle—the dismissive one. “I let go of him the same way he let go of us. That’s behind me.”
Soren’s throat moved against my head. “How does anyone ever put that behind them though?”
I wasn’t expecting tears. That’s what gave them their chance. “He left us.”
I was able to swipe the first tear away before he noticed, but the rest came too quickly to intercept. They fell down my face onto his chest, down the hollows his ribs formed. He held me as I cried, his clutch feeling impossibly strong, yet it wasn’t the least bit confining. He shared his strength instead of exerting it over me.
“No warning. No note,” I continued. “He just left for work one day and never came back. One wife, three daughters, he left it all behind to go live a different life.”
Soren didn’t say anything right away. I’d counted five times his chest had fallen, five times it had risen before he replied. “How do you know something didn’t happen to him?”
It would have made all our lives easier if something had happened to him like that. I’d often wondered if it would have even made his own easier.
“Every year on our birthdays, he’d send us an envelope with a five-dollar bill in it. No card. No note. Just a crumpled bill that smelled like cigarettes.”
My stomach turned when I remembered that smell. So strong, it seemed toxic. Each one of those five-dollar bills I received had been ripped into dozens of uneven pieces and burned in whatever fire I could find. Five dollars was a lot of money for us back then, especially for a girl who never had the luxury of extra spending money, but I’d never been tempted to keep one of those bills. Not once.
“My mom doesn’t have a degree or anything—they got married right out of high school when she got pregnant with me, and after that, she was too busy having us and raising us and working.” A few more tears spilled when I admitted to Soren that I was the reason my parents had married.
If she hadn’t gotten pregnant with me, if they hadn’t felt obligated to “do the right thing,” both of their lives could have been different. My mom had dreams. She must have. What eighteen-year-old didn’t? He’d probably had some too. Both had given them up because of me.
I didn’t want to have that kind of guilt on me again. Especially not from someone I loved the way I loved Soren. I wasn’t holding anyone else back from living the life they had planned pre-me entering the picture.
“Is that why you’ve never had any serious relationships?” Soren asked, his hand busy twisting through my mess of hair. “Because of your dad?”
“Would you be eager to get tied up in one after experiencing that?”
My head moved when lifted his shoulders. “I guess not.”
“I wasn’t the only one who waited forever to get involved with someone. What was your reason?” I asked, beyond eager to shine the conversation light on him after that surprise interrogation.
“I was too busy with school, sports, and a part-time job to squeeze in time for girls.” His fingers broke through the last couple of plaits left of my braid. “And I was waiting.”
“For what?”
“We’ve been over this.” He sighed in a way that made me picture his eyes rolling. “For you.”
As a smile formed, I wiped the last remnants of tears from my face. “You say the most romantic things to me when we’re tangled up naked in bed together.”
His arm hooked around me harder, dragging more of my body over his. “Best time to say them.”
“More like the most opportune time to say them,” I replied, wiggling against him to hint at what I meant.
“So very opportune.” He grinned at me, rubbing himself against me a few times.
“Last time you imbued yourself upon me, you claimed it was because the third time was a charm.” My hips straddled him as I sat up, taking control as I rubbed myself against him. “What’s your excuse this time?”
“Fourth time’s just for fun.” His hands curled into my hips as he stared down at me sliding against him. His smile folded into a smirk when he saw his steel wet and shiny from my body’s arousal. “Just for fucking fun.”
“Are you using that as the verb or the adjective?” When his brows came together, I explained, “Are we supposed to have fun fucking, or have a fucking fun time? There’s a difference, so how do you mean it?”
He tipped my hips, positioning himself. “I’ll show you how I mean it. If you have any questions after, feel free to voice them then.” When he pushed into me, my cry filled the apartment. “If you have any voice left when I’m done with you.”
Just as I was almost seated over his lap, a hard knock sounded at the door.
Our faces went blank as we must have both arrived at the same conclusion as to who it might have been.
Soren relaxed a second after. “My mom’s out of town for the weekend with some girlfriends. It’s not her.”
“Thank god,” I breathed, sliding off him. The look he gave me as I did reminded me again how much power I had over him. Especially when it was my body doing the talking. “Two-minute intermission.”
He sat up and reached for his sweats. As he tugged them on, he looked like a child who’d just been told they wouldn’t get dessert for a month.
“Why am I answering the door again?” he asked when he glanced at me trying to untangle the covers to throw over myself.
I answered with a shrug.
His groan echoed into the room as whatever he must have seen through the peephole warranted a door opening. I reached for his shirt to throw on in an emergency. He greeted someone at the door, and the person who responded didn’t sound familiar. There was some shuffling, something about needing a signature, and two good-byes.
“Delivery.” Soren’s voice was guarded which, naturally, put me on guard. “For you.” When he rounded into the room, he was holding a giant bouquet of flowers and a rectangular silver box.
My forehead pinched together. The bouquet was so large, it blocked his face and most of his upper half. “Are they from you?”
After he’d set them on the table, his gaze automatically drifted to the bouquet of daisies he’d picked up for me on the last visit. They were still going strong, the water looking freshly changed in the clear vase. Soren’s gaze moved between the two bouquets, reading too far into it if I was interpreting the look in his eyes correctly.
“No. They’re not,” he finally answered.
Rising from the bed, I padded toward the table and took the silver box from him when he held it out. “Who would send me flowers?”
“Pick a male name out of any phone book and you have an answer.” Soren’s arms crossed as he watched me open the box.
Inside was a stack of this upcoming month’s edition of French Vogue. There was a sticky note on the cover of the top one that had “Page 42” scribbled down.
Soren pulled the notecard from the bouquet, his expression darkening as he read it. Flipping it around, he recited it. “‘On to bigger and better things.’ Since it’s signed with a giant E, I can take a guess who these are from. I don’t know a lot of tools who think they’re such a hotshot, they can send a girl flowers and sign their name with one letter and call it good.”
Even I felt a little annoyed he’d done this, but I couldn’t let Soren know that. It would only make him more pissed. “He sent them as a congratulations. For my first official spread in an international magazine.” I lifted the copy on top for him to see.
Soren gave the bouquet one more suspicious look before taking the magazine and flipping through it. “Your first international spread?”
The dark notes had left his face, his eyes shining when they met mine. He was excited for me—proud of me. I was so wrapped up in that, I forgot which spread I’d shot. I really could have used those few seconds to prepare him for what he was about to see.
I knew the moment he found the right page. The look that broke across his face was the exact one I guessed any boyfriend would have when he saw his girlfriend pictured as I was in an international magazine.
“You’re . . .” He blinked at the photo, moving it around like it might change in a different light.
“I was shot nude,” I said in the best even, straight-forward tone I could. “The client wanted the focus on their accessories. They felt clothing would distract from that objective.”
“They wanted the focus on their accessories?” Soren rolled his neck, cracking it a couple of times. “And they thought putting them on a naked woman was the way to achieve that?”
I had to chew the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning because he kind of had a point. “Three things,” I said, giving a preemptive wince as he flipped to the next page. His eyes went dinner-plate round. “One, it’s tasteful nude. Nothing that you’re worried about showing is showing in any of those shots. Believe me, I checked.”
“Believe me, I’m checking too.”
Again, I had to chew the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing over the irony that he was getting upset over some tastefully posed nude shots of me in a magazine when I was standing two feet in front of him, just as naked with everything showing.
“Two, the accessories actually do stand out if you are able to step out of those subjective, concrete boots and try on a pair of objective loafers.”
He made a face that suggested he doubted that.
“And three, Europeans are different about nudity than we are. It’s natural and respected over there, instead of taboo and dirty the way we make it over here.”
“This is supposed to make me feel better about my girlfriend being naked on . . .”—he counted off the pages of the spread, one by one, a new crease forming in his forehead with each one—“ten pages?”
“Would it make you feel better if you knew that French Vogue’s target audience is ninety-five percent women, and that other five percent are men who—this one’s for you, baseball player—bat for the other team?”
He was still gaping at the pages like he’d just found out I was the centerfold in one of the trashiest porn magazines on the market. “Does it look like any of that makes me feel better?”
My feet padded toward him. “No.” Slipping my hands behind his back, I tried to press myself against him and distract him from the magazine. It wasn’t working. “Does this kind of stuff make you uncomfortable? Is this something I should have talked with you about or warned you about?”
I swallowed because part of me already knew I should have talked the shoot over with Soren. Not because I felt like I needed his approval or because he was the type who felt like he needed to give it, but out of respect for him.
He stared at the last two pages of the spread for another minute before setting the magazine on the table. He didn’t put it face down though; he left it open. His eyes moved between the flowers and the magazine, emotions warring on his face.
“Congratulations.” He found a smile as he hooked an arm around me and pulled me to him. “A ten-page, and believe me, I counted three times, spread in French Vogue.”
“You say that like you know all about French Vogue.”
“I might not be a member of that five percent male demographic, but I’ve learned enough from you to know a major model moment when I see one.” His lips pressed into my forehead, but they felt a little stiff. Forced. “I’m proud of you.”
I breathed in the scent of him. The heady aroma of sweat, man, and sex. “You looked like you were about to rush to every magazine stand in the world and pull all the French Vogue from the shelves.” I inhaled him again, my hands gripping him tighter. “You don’t have to pretend to like everything I do. You don’t have to ever pretend with me.”
He shifted against me. “I’m not going to tell you not to pose naked again—that’s not the guy I am, and you’re not the woman who’d let herself be told by a guy what to do either—but I don’t have to like that anyone on the planet can turn to page forty-three and see my girl without her clothes on.”
We both seemed to relax after he voiced what he had. His arms hung more naturally around me. Mine felt more secure around him.
“It’s not like I’m full-frontal and spread eagle.” I prodded him.
The last lines bled from his face before he stepped back so he could motion at me standing in front of him. “This should be, like, proprietary or something.”
If he hadn’t been fighting a smile, that would have earned him a glare or a box of magazines sailing his direction.
“Proprietary?” I repeated, trying to keep a stern face.
His eyes wandered over my naked body as he nodded the entire time. “Seemed better than saying mine.” His eyes flashed when they met mine. “Less uncivilized.”
“Uncivilized? You?” I didn’t temper the sarcasm in my voice. “Never.”
“I’ll show you uncivilized,” he said, palming his erection straining through his sweats. Just as I took the first step toward him, eager to pick up where we’d left off at “fourth time’s just for fun,” he cleared his throat. “Right after you try to explain to me why your agent sent you flowers, red roses, the very same day you made it home to your boyfriend at the very address you live at with him.”
This conversation was not going to end well. No matter how I answered, it wouldn’t change the conclusion he’d arrived at.
“Because he’s my agent? Because he wanted to say congrats for my first big spread in the most iconic fashion magazine in the world?”
The veins in his forearms were showing through his skin. They did that whenever we got into an argument or Ellis was the topic of conversation. “Why the question mark in your answer?”
“For the same reason there was an exclamation mark in your accusation,” I fired right back. “Because this is an argument neither of us is going to win.”
Soren’s hands secured at his hips, his neck rolling. “He needs to back off. He needs to back the fuck off before I make him.”
My arms lifted at my sides. “He’s my agent. The one who’s done really big things for my career. How am I supposed to get him to ‘back off’?”
“There’s a difference between having a professional relationship and some man twice your age sending flowers to your apartment with some note that doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination of what ‘bigger and better things’ are.” My face must have looked blank because Soren blinked. “Him. He’s waiting for you to move on to bigger and better him. Waiting for you to leave small, insignificant me.”
“You’re being insane. These are congratulations flowers.”
“They’re foreplay flowers. So when you run to him like he’s planning, you’re going to run straight into his bed. Also what he has planned.”
“Disgusting. Stop it.”
“Why else does an old skuzzy dude with his reputation send a young, naïve girl flowers?”
My back tensed. “I’m not naïve.”
“You’re proving you are right this minute by pretending these flowers and everything he’s done to try to come between us isn’t because his endgame is winding up between your thighs.”
His words sent me staggering back like they’d shoved me. “You’re jealous.” My lip quivered. “Stop taking your insecurity out on me.”
Soren’s jaw moved beneath his skin. “This isn’t jealousy. This is concern. This is me wanting to protect you.”
My lip wobbled again as my eyes cast down. I knew that. God, I knew that, because he was good and selfless and didn’t deserve this.
“I’m not jealous of him,” he said, his finger stabbing toward the ground with each word. “If you were with him, then I’d be jealous of him. I don’t trust him. I wouldn’t trust him with a houseplant, let alone the woman I love. That’s how I feel about him.”
If I bit into my lip any harder, I was going to draw blood. My palms already felt like I’d broken the skin from the way my nails were digging into them. “You haven’t heard me tell you that one girl you’re always hanging around needs to back off, have you?”
Soren’s brows came together. “What girl are you talking about? The only girl I’m always hanging around is you.”
“We hardly see each other anymore.” My voice was louder than I’d intended.
“Exactly.” He motioned at me backing into the wall away from him. “You’re still the only girl I’m hanging around.”
My nails dug deeper into my palms as her name rose in my throat. “Alex. Your lab partner. The team’s water girl, doctor, physical therapist, star-player blow-job bestower.”
Soren backed up a step. “What did you just say?” The way he was looking at me was new. Like he didn’t recognize me.
The storm inside me wouldn’t quiet though. “Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean she isn’t ready to do it at the drop of your pants.”
Now his veins were showing through his neck too. He made himself take a couple more steps back. “And I’m supposed to be the jealous one?”
I bit back what poured onto my tongue. That would have been useful a handful of sentences ago. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m being petty and immature. I don’t know what I’m saying right now.” Moving around the apartment, I started to gather up my clothes. “I need some fresh air. Alone. To clear my head.”
As I started for the bathroom, Soren broke in front of me, blocking my path.
“Soren, let me go.”
“No.”
“Soren—”
“Not without a fight.”
“Isn’t that what we just got into?” My arm flailed behind me, trying to dodge around him only to be blocked again. “I need a break before getting into another.”
Soren’s head fell back, a frustrated roar rumbling in his chest. “For Christ’s sake, you’re nineteen. I’m twenty. This is both of our first serious relationship.” I rammed into his chest when he dodged in front of my next attempt to get around him. “Jealousy and immaturity are easy traps to fall into, so we’re going to have to fight it, Hayden. We’re going to have to fucking rise above all of that petty shit our peers get wrapped up in, because this, us”—he gestured between us—“deserves more than that. I’m not going to lose you over some stupid argument. I’m not going to let you lose me because I’m jealous of some guy who sends you flowers. We’re not going to do that shit.”
The fight to leave drained out of me. Instead of trying to push him away, my hands started pulling him closer.
“We just did all of that shit.” I sighed, letting my head drop to his shoulder, the anger melting off of me.
“But we’re not going to do it again.” His hand sealed behind my neck, holding me to him. When I nodded against him, he said, “Promise?”
My eyes closed. “Promise.”
“I promise too,” he vowed in my ear. “I love you too much to lose you over something so little.”