I love when she says yes.
I love when she says my name.
The way she moans my name…
I shake my head and close the door behind me before taking in a sharp breath and wiping my hand down my face. What have I gotten myself into? Better question: what did Noah get me into? I should never have gone out with him that night. Never even entertained the idea of it.
And yet…
I’m not lying when I say I don’t regret it. I don’t regret her. How could I? Not only was her presence a distraction from the constant face I have to put on in my everyday life, it was a relief from it. The mask came off, at least partially. I have dinners with women all the time. Beautiful, classy, wealthy women. But something about Amanda, the way I could tell she doesn’t usually wear dresses like that, yet she owned it in every sense of the word. The way she nervously chewed on her lip one minute and seductively ran her tongue across it the next. The way she really laughed, and really enjoyed her food, and really knew how to have a conversation not just about life but about music.
Goddamn.
I’ve never met anyone like her.
I clear my throat and straighten up. I can’t let my head go there. Even if we are married, even if she says yes and we play this thing out, we are nottogether.Not in the sense of what the word means. I hardly know her. That, and women leave. Women leave their sons, women leave their husbands and women don’t look back. This industry steals souls. I’m not about to let it take my heart.
“Yo!” Noah comes barging through the door and I jerk my head in his direction hard enough to give myself whiplash.
“Don’t you know how to knock?!”
He closes the door and ignores me, a grin on his always amused face as he makes his way over to my desk.
“Can you believe this? Any of it?”
I don’t say anything. The guy plops down in the chair in front of me.
“She’s the girl from Vegas. I knew it the second I saw her! But don’t worry, I didn’t say anything. I wanted you two to make that connection.”
“How generous of you. What do you want?”
“I want to know what really went down that night! Clearly you two didn’t just fuck. There’s too much irony involved.”
I debate keeping it from him. But I decide against it. One, he’s a sneaky bastard and he’s bound to figure it out somehow and it would be better if it wasn’t some Joey Tribiani ah-ha moment. I don’t have the energy to drag him out of a room, eyes wide with a gag in his mouth.
“Did you know?” he asks.
“No. I had no idea she was the new hire.”
“Damn. You really don’t look at the profiles, do you?”
“The profiles? No. I look at the credentials and their music sense. That’s all that matters anyways.”
Noah chuckles, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. “This is wild.”
“That’s not all though.”
He looks up. “Oh? There’s more?”
As usual, I want to pop him in the teeth. But I don’t. I tell him about the marriage. About how we thought it was fake and it’s not. His mouth pops open. Then, I tell him about the morning meeting and with that, his jaw hits the floor.
“How…is any of this possible? Damn, bro. I mean, on one hand, you are one unlucky son of a bitch. And on the other? You are a very lucky son of a bitch. So now what?”
“I offered her a deal,” I explain.
“Jesus, Callum. You…and don’t take this the wrong way…are insane. Do you know what the odds are of this actually working?”
“Trust me, I’ve done nothing but run odds through my head for the last twenty-four hours.”
