Kill me. Just kill me right now.
With a supreme amount of effort, I straightened up as much as I could and smoothed back my hair with my best business-like smile.
“Well Jake, if that will be all...” I prompted.
He couldn’t get out the door fast enough.
“Yes—right, right!” There was a slight crack as he stepped on a pair of my fallen sunglasses, but all of us were too eager to put the moment behind us to much care. All of us except Nick, of course, who looked like he was rather enjoying himself. “I’ll just...I’ll just call you later from the office, then?”
I closed my eyes and nodded again. The beginnings of a migraine were beginning to take shape—building up a constant, pulsing pressure at the base of my neck.
“Sounds good.”
There was the sound of shuffling footsteps, and a second later, the door closed shut. Jake even managed to lock it behind himself for good measure, before hurrying away—probably off to the nearest bar to purge the entire experience from his memory.
If only all of us could be so lucky.
“So...” Nick walked back across the room and re-perched on the edge of my mattress, looking more and more at home all the while, “he seems a bit high-strung, doesn’t he?”
I ignored this, bringing my hand to the back of my neck with a withering glare.
“You had to tell him that I wasn’t wearing any pants?” I asked flatly. “I’m not e
ven going to ask how you knew that—but you just had to add it into the conversation?”
Nick nodded pragmatically. “Oh yes, I think so.”
My cheeks flushed, but at this point, I was so far beyond embarrassment that it didn’t really register. Instead, I stretched out my legs beneath the comforter—pushing and kicking against him with all my might.
“Well in that case, I think you should probably go too. I’m sure you have a whole list of other people’s lives to ruin. And I’m going to need to get started finding a good therapist to guide me through this damn—”
“Abby?”
I looked up to see that he hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d started. Not only had my feeble attempts to kick him off gone completely unnoticed, but his every attention was now focused one hundred percent on me—freezing me in place again with that x-ray vision of his.
“I want to add on another condition to our arrangement.”
I stared back at him for a second, sure that I’d heard wrong. Then, in the first bout of relief I’d gotten all morning, I threw back my head with a giant laugh.
“You do, do you?” I managed, when I finally resurfaced. “After all the shit you’ve put me through, after this little stunt you pulled this morning...you want to add another condition?”
He didn’t even blink.
“I do.”
His lack of banter made me pause, as did that unflinching, undaunted look simmering in his eyes. Finally, when the silence could go on no longer, I had to ask.
“Okay...what is it?”
He smiled, but when he spoke, his voice was as steady and serious as I’d ever heard it.
“You don’t cheat on me either.”
Chapter 5
IT WAS THOSE LAST FEW words that stuck with me when he left shortly after. Haunting me as I got up to get dressed. Plaguing me as I brushed my teeth. Echoing back again and again as I slipped into my work clothes, and made my way to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee.
Let me start by saying, I had no intention of ‘cheating’ on Nick. None whatsoever. And not only because I currently had no social life to speak of (and thus, no one to cheat with), but because no matter the circumstance, I’d never been the cheating type.