Hollywood Playboy (Hollywood Royalty 1)

She didn’t leave my side the whole time. I told her I had to use the washroom, hoping that she would let up, but nope. She smiled at me, and said, “Oh, me, too,” in her annoying nasal voice. I swallowed and knew that once I was in the bathroom, I was calling Cassie, and she would get me out of this fucking hellish night. But when we walked past the women’s bathroom door, I thought she would let go of me. Instead, she yanked me into the women’s bathroom and threw herself against the door.

“I know you want it,” she said to me, and all of a sudden, her fucking hands were everywhere. First, I felt them in my hair. I shook my head, and her hands fell off, but then she launched herself at me, her lips landing right on mine. My hands pushed her away from me. “Oh, you like it rough, don’t you, big boy?” she said, and I tried not to touch her or hurt her by physically removing her hands from my body. That was all I needed. I can see the headlines now: Tyler Beckett’s into hard-core sex. Her hands then went straight to my shirt or, better yet, the bottom of my shirt as she pulled it out from my pants and then was working on the belt. She was worse than an octopus and more like a centipede. I heard my zipper come down, and then the door behind her pushed forward a bit, but she pushed it back. “People fucking in here, go somewhere else,” she said. The woman pounded on the door, and I took the opportunity to step away from her.

“Enough,” I say, frustrated with this whole day and hoping like fuck it would end. “Get the fuck out of the way, or I’ll make you move.”

“Jesus,” she said, pushing herself off the door. Her dress had ridden up during her wrestling match, and it showed she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. “All I wanted to do was have a little fun,” she said, and I put out my hand. “Just one fuck.”

“Never going to happen,” I said, storming out and finally tucking in my shirt and fixing my tie. My heart was pounding, my head was throbbing, and when I looked up, my breath caught when I saw those eyes that had haunted me all day. Her cheeks pink from the champagne I caught her drinking, but then she looked over my shoulder and saw Ella coming out of the bathroom, still fixing herself. All I could do was whisper her name. I knew what it looked like; I knew what I would have thought it looked like if that was her walking out of the bathroom after a man had just exited. It couldn’t get any worse than this.

Oh, but it did. It got a fuck ton worse. I watch her swallow. “Your fly is open,” she says, and I look down. It’s fucking open, so I zip it up, and when I look up, I see that she is already halfway out of the room. I follow her toward the elevator and see she keeps her head down while she walks. She gets in the elevator, and I run to make sure I don’t miss it, putting my arm in right before it closes. Her head snaps up. I’m sure she was thinking she would be in the clear, but she isn’t—not by a long shot. Or maybe she was contemplating how she could break my arm that was forcing the doors open, or somehow keep pounding the door close button until my arm was crushed just to get away from me. “I don’t have time for this,” she says and presses the button to her floor. I wait for the elevator doors to close and move a couple of floors, and then I push the stop button, causing the elevator to stop between floors. “This isn’t funny.”

“No, it’s not funny,” I say from beside the panel right in front of her. “This whole shit is not funny.”

“It is what it is. You can screw whomever you want to. It’s none of my business.” She punctuates her next words. “Now just press the button.”

“This whole thing was a misunderstanding,” I tell her. She looks down at her feet, and I don’t stop talking. “The whole day has been one clusterfuck after another.”

“It honestly looked like it was a clusterfuck,” she says, and then she looks up at the ceiling with a pensive look on her face. “Or just a fuck. Which one was it?”

“I didn’t fucking touch her,” I hiss between clenched teeth. “She was all over me like flies on shit. Her hands were everywhere, and the only thing I could do was dodge her.”

“You don’t have to lie to me.” She laughs bitterly and then crosses her arms. “We’re just friends, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of your bathroom fuckfest.”