Chapter Twenty-Four:
Hopelessly Hopeful
Sterling
It didn’t take longfor me to feel the wine she was feeding me. I could drink whiskey like it was water, but wine? My cheeks were hot, everything was funny, and Zeppelin’s teasing was making me want to touch her.
Reason won out for the most part and I settled for patting her head and her swatting my hand away. “Oh, don’t do that. How Many More Times ... are you going to run away from me?” I snorted, unable to help myself when I saw the look on her face. “Come on, you didn’t think I’d be able to resist Led Zeppelin puns forever, did you? You must be ... Dazed and Confused.”
Zeppelin’s laugh was more beautiful than any song I’d ever heard as she hit me with her stuffed penguin on the shoulder. “I guess I had them coming. Just so I’m prepared though, how many of those puns do you have up your sleeve?”
“I don’t know, they’ve got a lot of songs.” I smirked. “I could Ramble On for days.”
She rolled her eyes so hard her flushed cheeks and even messier bun than earlier rolled with them and she took another sip of her wine before speaking again. “You should drink wine more often, your smile is one of a kind.”
My eyes danced as I leaned in a little. “Are you buttering me up so I’ll spill my secrets to you, Miss Bryce?”
“Maybe, Mr. Handsome,” she teased, laying her head against my arm with a soft sigh. “I’ll share mine if you share yours. Believe it or not, there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“Okay, then. You ask me a question and then I’ll ask you one. Nothing is off the table.”
She hummed for a moment and then went right for the fucking jugular. “Did you love her?”
“I thought I did,” I said honestly. “She’s also not the person I thought she was, so that might have something to do with it. What about your ex? What was so fucking special about him?”
“Nothing,” she said simply. “He was charming when we met at a bar, present in some of my darkest times, and then he was gone. Kicked me out, strung me along, continued fucking me while he had a new girlfriend — though I didn’t know about her obviously — then he told me “we’re good here” and never spoke to me again. Or at least until he decided to become my boss. Now Kylie says he keeps trying to get a hold of me and the fucker is still married. There’s absolutely nothing special about him, I was just too blind to see that when I should have.”
The fucking rage in my system was nearly overwhelming. I could forgive a lot of things, but that? “Holy fuck, Zeppelin.”
“My turn,” she deflected. “Was she your most painful breakup? Or do we have to worry about more exes showing up when they realize what they truly lost?”
“She didn’t want me back. Just her job, and that’s fucking insane. And yeah, I mean, I guess you could say she was the most painful, but probably not for the reason you think. Do you remember how I told you about Caffrey having a witness that said I stole all that money?”
She sat up to meet my eyes, hers filled with a fire I’d never seen before. “No way. Her? Your fucking girlfriend was the witness?”
“Yeah. She tried to say she didn’t know Caffrey would pin it on me, and said she didn’t come to me first because my mom had just died and I was a fucking mess.” I fidgeted, then drank straight out of the bottle. “Claimed she didn’t want to put anything else on me, so she went to Caffrey instead like she didn’t know that would be a thousand times worse.”
“That’s bullshit. I’m so sorry, Sterling.” Zeppelin placed a hand on mine and squeezed lightly. “And you were together at this time? Like your actual girlfriend thought it was smarter to go to a prosecutor over her own boyfriend?”
“Like I said, she wasn’t the woman I thought she was. And now she wants her job back, like her helping me find the money at the last goddamn second could really make up for trying to screw me in the first place. But it’s my turn,” I said quickly. “Tell me something else I don’t know about you.”
She seemed taken aback by the switch but not in a bad way; she seemed to understand when I needed to move on, and respected that in a way that surprised me, especially with how much she normally pushed for things she wanted. “About me ... well, I come from a broken home so I spent my childhood split between two opposite ends of town. Both of my parents were only children so I don’t even have any first cousins. My dad built me a treehouse to fill that void when I would visit in the summer, and I had a record player in there and hundreds of old vinyls. I’d save up my allowance for new ones whenever I could, and before I knew it, I didn’t have space for other toys up there. Your turn, same question.”
I didn’t want to talk about me anymore. There were a million follow-up questions I was dying to ask — like what her favorite music was, what happened between her parents, what she used to dream about up there in that lonely treehouse, if she ever let anyone else up there with her. But a deal was a deal, so I bit the inside of my cheek as I tried to focus. “I haven’t had sex with someone who didn’t require payment since Anna.”
Her eyebrows raised a little, and I could tell she had some follow up questions of her own but the one she went with was, “Do you think you’ll ever be able to let someone in again?”
“I think I already have,” I slipped, then cleared my throat as I reached over to awkwardly tap her shoulder. “Good—good question, Miss Bryce.”
She glanced down at my hand with a furrowed brow, then reached out and patted my shoulder back roughly. “Why? Why do you pat me like a dog?”
My eyes widened. “A dog? That’s not what I was going for.” I thought back to the times I’d touched her and realized that’s exactly what it seemed like, so I tipped my head back and laughed. “Oh, fuck. Yeah, I think I should probably explain.”
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Zeppelin
I NARROWED MY GAZEat him as seriously as I could, but the wine combined with his infectious smile made being serious impossible. “I’m listening, Businessman.”