“Can you do better?”
She accepted his challenge and slung the strap over her shoulder, still braced on the doorframe. She leaned her head over the fretboard in concentration, a few blond curls slipping over her eyes as she organized her fingers over the strings. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back dramatically, bringing her other arm down in an aggressive strum of the ugliest, most dissonant chord Ethan had ever heard.
Ethan threw back his head and laughed.
“Guess not.” Grey shrugged, handing it back to him. “I did have a couple lessons a few years ago, I had to fake it for the show I was on. Seems like they didn’t stick.”
Ethan let the guitar lie flat on his lap, resting his hands on the strings. He considered her.
For the first time, he tried to put himself in her shoes. She was in an unfamiliar place, in a bizarre situation. He had all the power. And yet she’d sought him out, even though he had tried to shut her away and ignore her. He toyed with the idea of actually getting to know her, letting her get to know him. Just because their relationship wasn’t real didn’t mean they had to stay strangers. She seemed, so far, to be down-to-earth and easygoing—that is, when she didn’t want to bite his head off. Maybe she wouldn’t try to claw her way inside his heart, demand things of him that he could never provide.
And, yes, seeing her standing there in her leggings and bare feet and a cloud of wavy blond hair with a smile still lingering at the corners of her lips stirred something inside him that he hadn’t felt in years. Like he had a glimpse of something that could be his, something so painfully perfect that his chest ached, something he had done nothing to deserve. All he had to do was reach out and take it. It would be so easy to put the guitar down and pull her into his lap right then, burying his face in her hair.
The fact that he wanted to terrified him.
Grey had been staring at him with an unreadable expression, waiting for him to respond. He needed to say something. He couldn’t.
Ethan finally cleared his throat. “Um. I think I’m gonna head to bed. You all right? Got everything you need?”
Disappointment briefly flickered across her face, but she camouflaged it like the professional she was. She smiled tightly.
“Yeah. I’m good. Night.”
She disappeared from the doorway. He listened to her steps padding down the hallway, the bedroom door shutting behind her.
—
GREY WOKE UPthe next morning sweating and frustrated. Though the high-tech thermostat in her room read a cool sixty-eight degrees, she’d been tormented by a night of sexually charged anxiety dreams where she, unbearably aroused, had thrown herself repeatedly at a faceless man who was always just out of reach. She stretched out in the absurdly large California king bed and buried her face in the soft pillows, groaning, unsatisfied.
She rolled over and looked at her phone, which was so full of notifications that she had to scroll and scroll just to reach the end. Grey swiped open an Instagram DM from Kamilah, sent at 4a.m.thanks to the time difference, which accosted her with caps and an army of exclamation points:
UM!!!!!!! EXPLAIN!!!!! NOW!!!!!
Kamilah had attached a post from a celebrity gossip account. Grey’s own face stared back at her, leaning out of her car window in front of Ethan’s gate.
SPOTTED:Poison Paradise’s Grey Brooks entering the elusive Ethan Atkins’s Pacific Palisades residence.
Grey sent back a shocked blushing face emoji, resisting the urge to click through and read the comments. Nothing good ever came from reading the comments.
Her phone buzzed immediately with Kamilah’s response.
omg don’t even. i leave for 5 minutes and you’re running around getting that a-list d.
without telling me!!!!
i’m sending you to friend jail.
Grey wrote back:
lmao
it’s not like that! we’re taking it slow.
i don’t want to jinx it. i’ll tell you everything soon. i promise!!!
She topped it off with an angel emoji and then threw her phone facedown on the bed. She didn’t feel right outright lying to Kamilah. Everything she said was technically true, but typing it out still gave her a curdled feeling in her stomach. Suddenly, she felt very, very alone.
She stilled and listened for signs that Ethan was up and about. No noise. She had been so focused on the night itself she hadn’t really thought about what would happen in the morning. Based on how unenthused he had seemed to spend time with her last night, she wasn’t holding out hope for sharing the crossword puzzle over eggs and mimosas. He probably wouldn’t care if she slipped out without saying goodbye.
