We finished cleaning the dining room and moved toward the locker room to get our stuff. My body felt achier tonight than normal—my nerves felt raw and exposed. “Can I ask you something?” I asked Krista as we grabbed our junk from our lockers.
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you just tell him how you feel? He could be feeling the same thing, but afraid to make the move for the same reasons.”
She sighed. “With anyone else, I would, but with him—he’s different. Jeremey is not like other people, and telling him what I want would be hard in a normal situation. Here—a rejection from him would be humiliating. I could never be around him again.”
“And you’re so sure that he would reject you?”
She bit her lip and nodded. The shy, vulnerable side of my friend Krista wasn’t something I was used to seeing. “He’s dated models, Zoey. Tall, leggy, stunning models. I’m a short, curvy blip on his radar that annoys him when our families get together.”
“Well, maybe we can find you a model this weekend.” I winked at her, bringing up the signing we were going to and the crazy notion she had proposed to me the day before. She laughed.
“Only in our wildest dreams.”
“Fantasies are always a fun distraction from reality. Reality sucks.”
“Amen to that,” she said with a laugh and bumped my hip with hers. In the back lot, we went to our cars, which we always parked next to each other. “See you tomorrow.”
“Text me when you get home.”
“Always.” Krista and I stuck together. In a world where I felt so alone all the time, she was the one constant and I depended on our friendship.
As I drove home, the music played softly on the radio, cycling through my favorite songs. Any other time I would have been singing along to the music, but I just let my mind wander back to the man in the suit and the fifty-dollar tip I got just for getting his drinks. It was by far the best tip I had gotten the entire night, and the group of assholes I’d switched Krista for shafted me by only leaving a measly three dollars between the six of them.
I took a deep breath and tried to force myself to relax before I got back to the house. A quick look in the rearview mirror just showed normal traffic, but it was weird. I still had that feeling, the one I hadn’t been able to shake all day, like someone was watching me—waiting for something.
Chapter 9
Killian
“Ineed you to do mea favor.”
“Sure.” Rowan immediately agreed to what I needed without even hearing what it was as I entered her office and made my way to the chair across from her desk. “I take it this has something to do with the girl Donovan had me looking into?”
“Yes,” I confirmed quickly.
