Nine
Nate
Becca pulls open the door between us and looks up at me nervously. She’s wearing a floral-print dress with a neckline that dips right between her breasts and oh god, Nate, get your eyes back to her face.
“Hey,” I say, though it comes out a little hoarse. “Can I get an interview with you before everyone meets downst—”
Becca grabs me by the arm and pulls me into the room. She closes the door and presses her back against it. “I need your help.”
Um.There are a lot of things I would like to help her with alone in her bedroom, but I’m positive that’s not what she means. “What can I do for you?”
Becca winces. “My zipper is stuck. Can you fix it?”
Oh, god. She wants me to—“Should I go grab one of the wardrobe people?”
“I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. Can you just fix it?” She looks at me like she’s desperate, and I sigh.
Yeah, okay, Becca is hot and amazing and I want to take this as a come-on, but she’s an incredible woman in a vulnerable position who is looking to me for help, and there is no way in hell I’m going to take advantage of that.
“Sure,” I say, and she spins around and puts her hands against the door. All my blood rushes downward. Her dress is mostly backless, so the zipper hugs the curve of her ass. It’s most of the way up, but stuck a few inches from the top, and I can see the elastic edge of her lavender underwear. But it’s the smooth skin of her back that leaves me breathless—she’s not wearing a bra, though the halter is fastened around her neck, and I want to run my fingers over her skin, to undo the halter and slip the dress off and kiss her neck beneath her ear and whisper all the things I’ve been thinking and feeling since we met.
Get a grip, I tell myself, and while I think I’m going to be getting a very firm grip on myself later, I don’t want to make her uncomfortable now.
Which I’m clearly doing by hesitating. Becca looks at me over her shoulder, and I nearly come undone.
I kneel down, inspecting the zipper and definitely not the soft skin at the small of her back. I’m definitely not thinking about how little effort it would take to rock forward and kiss her there, to cup her ass in my hands—
Oh my god. Zipper.
It is stuck, and I pull it gently up and down, but it doesn’t budge. In fact, it looks like there’s a tiny bit of something stuck in the slider, and I try to pick it out with my nail, but it isn’t long enough.
“Do you have any, um . . . tweezers?” I ask. “I think there’s something stuck in it.”
“Sure.” Her voice is a little wobbly.
Shit. I am being creepy. I’m making her uncomfortable.
“Or I could go get wardrobe,” I offer, because she obviously needs an out here, having miscalculated how awkward I could make this.
“No, I’ve got it!” she says quickly, then crosses the room to her vanity and bends over her makeup case. She’s right next to her bed, which, in show tradition, is covered in a frilly pink comforter and a breezy white canopy. It’s the bed every six-year-old girl probably dreams of, and while I certainly never have, I’m dreaming right now of stepping up behind Becca and pulling her against me and then bending her over that bed and—
“Here they are!” Becca says, pulling out tweezers and holding them up triumphantly.
I must be staring at her like an idiot, but Becca doesn’t seem to notice. She strides over, hands me the tweezers, and spins around, pulling her hair over her shoulder to give me a full view of her bare back again, even though her hair isn’t nearly long enough to reach the zipper.
Her underwear has slipped just slightly, so I can see the very ghost of the dip between her ass cheeks. My jeans are mostly containing my raging hard-on—I don’t dare wear anything but tight jeans around Becca, not with the effect she has on me.The effect she’s always had on me, though it’s getting stronger, and having her here so close, with no cameras and no mic packs yet, where I could pull her close and tell her everything and no one would hear—
This is too much temptation, and I need to get this over with as quickly as possible, before I do something to get myself fired and alienate Becca forever. If I want to have a shot in hell of her saying yes when I ask her out after the show, I need to not be that guy who skeeved on her when she asked for help.
I focus on the zipper, using the tweezers to tug out a bit of sheer fabric from the pull. It’s a yellow-green color, not even close to the color of Becca’s dress. I tuck it in the palm of my hand as I zip Becca’s dress the rest of the way up and breathe a sigh of relief.
No, not relief. Frustration. Deep, tangled frustration.
Oh my god, I want this woman so fucking much, but I want to do this right.
There are alotof things I want to do to her right.
“All done,” I say, hoping she doesn’t notice how breathless I am. I take a step back and she turns and smiles at me. I try to smile back. “Here’s the offender.” I hand her the bit of green fabric and back up toward the door.
