“If you keep ringing it, eventually he’s gonna come.”
To that, she got a full on laugh, a light, musical sound, one you didn’t often hear from Jules.
Except, of course, when Kai was getting it out of her.
She let the subject go, knowing that if she pried too hard, Jules would lock down tight, and she’d never get anything out of her again.
Besides, she had gotten what she had wanted.
She got her to admit that Kai was cute and interesting. And worthy of attention.
If Miller knew her – and she thought she did – she suspected that the only reason Jules never gave Kai serious consideration – the work ethic thing aside – was because he didn’t check all the boxes she had in her head somewhere.
Jules was all about her boxes.
Hell, even after all this time, Miller still caught her actually checking off a daily to-do list before going home at night.
Kai was clearly missing a few of her boxes.
It was a damn shame that she was too stubborn to realize how much fun could be had with a guy who seemed completely wrong for you on paper, but was oh so right in real life.
FOUR
Jules
I like Miley Cyrus.
There.
It’s out there.
And not the cool, edgy, naked on a wrecking ball, licking various objects with a short haircut Miley Cyrus.
I mean cowboy-booted, All-American girl up on a truck bed singing Party in the USA Miley.
I maybe even had a dance to go with it.
Okay, fine.
I totally had a dance to go with it.
And I sang it in my hairbrush too many times to mention.
And the reason I was thinking this in the car on the way to my fake fiancé’s work, you might be wondering?
Because of the man sitting beside me.
See, he didn’t know about my deep, dark Miley guilty pleasure.
He didn’t know I binge ate Ritz crackers in my car when I was stressed.
Or that I sometimes taped two of my toes together to keep my feet from hurting during long work days in heels.
Or that I sometimes had a slight obsession with my extraction tool, making my face all red and splotchy for half a day while it recovered.
He didn’t know all that stuff.
The silly stuff.
The ugly stuff.
He saw one very small part of the picture from a distance. Not up close where you could see all the brushstrokes, all the little mistakes, all the smudges.
I knew what everyone thought, what they even said when they thought I couldn’t hear.
That Kai was in love with me.
I wasn’t blind.
I had seen his crush-like behavior since I first started working for Quin.
But that was what it was.
A crush.
Puppy love.
You couldn’t love someone until you got to know all about them. And he didn’t know all about me. He knew just the surface.
That being said, I was only human. My body reacted to things that my mind didn’t get a chance to mull over.
So when he got soft and sweet, when he said the exact right things at the exact right times, it impacted me. It sent a shiver through my belly. It made that chest-tightening thing happen.
And today, today he had been full of the right words, the right looks, the right touches.
More right than anyone else could have been.
He was good at that.
Knowing what I needed to hear.
He was good at it all.
My mom was obsessed with a book about love languages, swearing it was the sole thing that helped revamp her marriage when it – inevitably, it seemed – started to get a bit stale after a couple decades. And I had sat and listened to her go on and on about how my dad showed love through physical touch and giving gifts and that she gave it through words of affirmation and physical touch. And that the reason they went stagnant was because they didn’t ‘speak the same language.’ So once they learned to speak it, everything changed.
Because I had heard so much about it, I had this knee-jerk ability to see it in everyone, even if I wasn’t sure I bought into it.
And Kai?
Kai showed love in all the ways. Affirmations, touch, time, gifts, and service.
It was so much.
So incredibly much.
Maybe even too much.
Even if I truly believed he loved me for me – not some image he had of me in his head – I wasn’t sure I could accept that much love. I wasn’t sure I had it within me to hold onto it all.
“Jules?” Kai’s voice called, snapping me out of my wandering thoughts, making me realize the car was stopped, the engine just idling. “You want me to go alone?” he asked, misreading the moment, my absent-ness.
“No,” I objected immediately, voice a little off. “They know me. I can get in without it raising too many eyebrows.”
“It’s a Sunday, honey,” he reminded me. “No one will be here except maybe some security guards.”