She takes a deep breath and holds it, squinting her eyes tightly and smiling with a lot of teeth. I look at her and a smirk overtakes me.
She’s being half-flirty, half-coy, half-flibberty-gibbet, and half-little-lost-lamb-oh-won’t-you-show-me-things-big-strong-man. Which I realize I just made up and also that four halves equal two things, but I’m starting to think that she’s maybe five or six things all rolled into one.
I tilt my head and say, “Are you asking me out on a date?”
“… Am I?”
“Are you?”
“I dunno.”
“Think you might be.”
“What? Asking you out on a date?
“Sounds like you are.”
“Oh. Well then, yeah, I guess I am.”
A beat. Then we both start laughing.
To hell with it.
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure. I’d like… Yes. I will go out on a date to an art gallery thing with you. It’s Colorado, so it’ll probably just be a bunch of Ansel Adams wannabes, but why not?”
She closes her eyes and then looks up at me through her lenses.
“Andrew?”
“Yeah.”
“I would never steal anything from anybody.”
“… Yeah, I believe that. It’s OK. Sorry I got in your face about it. Let’s get out of here.”
She leans up, gives me a kiss on my lip where she bit me, then turns and walks out of the studio. At the edge of the wall, she trips and almost goes careening down the side, but she catches herself and looks back at me and grins, nervously.
“Do you think you can get down on your own?” I ask.
She looks down, looks back at me, looks down again, back at me. “I dunno. I mean, probably. I think so.”
“Do you want my help?”
She gets a momentarily pained expression and then, after a second, she nods quickly.
I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be helping her. I shouldn’t be going on a date with her. I shouldn’t be engaging with her. I’m going to burn her. Not because I want to. It’s the last thing I want to do. But when it does turn out to be her, I have to tell Pierce the truth. I have to. I just… I have to.
Don’t I?
“Yes, please,” she says in a tiny voice.
I smile because she makes me smile and I say, “You got it,” before placing myself in position on the side of the wall so she can brace herself against me, knowing that if she does happen to lose her grip on the way down, I’ll be there to catch her.
Sexpert Advice
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE – EDEN
“Ticket?”
I’m at the dry cleaners picking up my best black silk dress for my date with Andrew tonight. “Hi!” I say to the woman behind the counter. Svetlana is her name. I introduced myself when I dropped the dress off the other day. And even though she’s not wearing a lick of makeup and her face is shiny with sweat since it’s hot as hell in here, she’s beautiful.
I think every girl called Svetlana is probably beautiful. I wish I was called Svetlana. It’s definitely a Sexpert name. Maybe in the next video I’ll tell everyone my name is Svetlana?
Would Andrew buy that? Would it throw him off the trail? I mean, I think I did a pretty good job of convincing him I’m definitely not the Sexpert. I think he bought it.
He did. He has to. Because if he didn’t, then this date might be a setup and I don’t want it to be a setup. I kinda like him. And if he could just make Pierce let this stupid obsession with the Sexpert go, maybe we’d have a chance?
“Lady,” Svetlana says. “Give me ticket.” She drawls that out in her most do-not-fuck-with-me-I’m-Russian Russian accent.
“Eden,” I say. Because she doesn’t recognize me. “Remember? I introduced myself the other day?”
Svetlana glares at me.
I hand the ticket over.
“Wait here,” she growls, as if I have a choice, then scoots off to go find my dress.
I glance around to see if I know anyone behind me. That’s the cool thing about living in the TDH. Your neighbors are everywhere. But nope. I don’t. And everyone is too busy checking their phones to make eye contact with me, so I can’t even make a new friend while I wait.
“Here,” Svetlana says, hanging my dress on the little rack to my right. “Forty-one fifteen.”
“Wow,” I say. “OK. Forty-one dollars to dry clean a dress.” I go fishing for my credit card.
“You want pretty dress for sexy date so you can hook rich TDH billionaire, sexy girl? You pay for it.”
Right. I shove my credit card into the chip reader. That’s one bad thing about living in a super-trendy neighborhood that isn’t close to anything else. You pay a premium for services. I mean this is the only dry cleaners in the whole neighborhood. It’s like the Russian mob has paid someone off so they can inflate prices. So if I want to clean a silk dress on the cheap, I gotta take it somewhere else. And that involves getting in my car and driving places. And if I add up the cost of gas and effort, it’s really not worth it.