“Uh-huh.”
“And what was the worst thing you ever did?”
“Ummm.” I had to think about it. “My parents wouldn’t let me go to this party one night, so I snuck out my window to go. And then I got too drunk at the party and passed out with my friend somewhere in the house. And my parents thought I was missing till probably noon the next day, which is when I finally woke up and texted that I was alive.”
Adam nodded through my story, a smile glinting in his eyes as he no doubt imagined the scene. But the look faded away as he spoke again.
“When I was in high school, my dad got my mom a new car for Christmas and I took it on a joy ride a week later and totaled it,” he said, making my eyes widen. “Probably on purpose,” he added.
“What does that mean? That you kind of knew what you were doing when you crashed it?”
“Yeah. I knew what generally happened when I drove that fast.”
I nodded, trying not to look too fazed. I actually wasn’t. I knew about the “speed demon” side of Adam from Holland. He and Iain had both been like that. Adrenaline junkies with a taste for recklessness. I knew Adam had stayed that way all through law school, but forcibly toned it down once he was promoted to agent at Engelman when he was twenty-five.
“That’s not too bad,” I said as I washed the vegetables. “But I know you used to fight a lot before you started having clients too,” I added. He’d actually met Iain mid-bar brawl. “And I’m sure those stories would horrify me more since you’d actually, you know, hurt people.”
“Yeah.”
I peered up at him in the middle of scrubbing, but he was spacing out as he played with the jump drive. I had kind of hoped he would detail the stories of the fights he got into, because I was starting to realize that all these events in his life weren’t just due to him being “wild” or “a party animal” as he was often described at the office, mostly for the way he could rage till dawn with clients after events.
It definitely wasn’t just that. There were definitely more demons in Adam’s past than he liked to let on, and though I’d sensed that before, I’d never quite felt the need to fully know and understand it till now.
But as curious as I was, I didn’t bother asking.
To start, I didn’t want to sink him deeper into this mood on a Sunday night before the start of a busy week. Plus, I knew I’d probably just get that shrug and the generic line that had always driven his sister crazy. “I was just a bad kid.” That was it. The explanation for why his mother was abusive. Why she raised Holland like a prisoner.
I was back to quietly cursing her in my head when Adam asked about Caspar.
“He still bothering you at all?”
It said something when I was actually thankful to get Jeannie out of my head with the topic of my ex.
“Nope. I think you officially scared him off, but if you didn’t, I wouldn’t know, because I blocked him today,” I said brightly, placing a wet paper towel under the cutting board before I started chopping.
“Nice,” Adam said, but when I heard the tinge of strangeness in his voice, I looked up.
“What?”
“What?”
“You said that weirdly.”
“I said one word,” he argued, but he lost steam halfway through the sentence because he knew I knew better. “Fine. It’s just… I never told you something,” he said, grimacing as he rubbed the back of his neck. I stopped cutting.
“What?”
“The week you were getting ready to surprise Caspar, I was pretty sure I saw him on La Brea with some girl. I don’t know if it was the blue hair girl, because she was wearing a hoody. But the guy definitely looked like Caspar and I felt like I should’ve given you a heads up, but Holland said not to if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, especially because you were so excited for his birthday that week, and I just…” He held his hands out as he tried to figure out his words, but then he let them fall back into his lap. “I don’t know. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to hurt you. But you wound up getting hur
t anyway. And I probably could’ve warned you.”
I blinked at him, nodding as I took in all the information. And by information I meant the fact that he looked this level of stressed out right now over this total non-issue, and the fact that he’d been so mixed up about it the other week that he had actually consulted with Holland.
When I realized he’d cared this much before we’d ever even slept together, I almost wanted to make a face.
Great. I might’ve actually been better off not knowing that, I thought, because it made my heart melt to imagine my arrogant prick of a boss actually having a quiet meltdown over my wellbeing, and I really didn’t need to be any further endeared to him right now.
“You’re pissed,” Adam said to break the silence. I laughed.