Page 5 of One Time Only (One Time Only 1)
I wait for his answer. I’m confident he doesn’t know this detail about me, because I don’t share shit with him and my life is not lived on the internet. I’m not the open book he is. The book of me is closed, and there is no social media to scroll through.
For reasons. For necessary reasons—namely self-preservation.
He huffs. “No. Thanks a lot for trusting me with your innermost secrets about your siblings.”
I laugh. “Thanks for never asking.”
“Would you have answered if I had?”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Why don’t you ask and find out?”
He takes a deep breath, like he’s settling himself. “Jackson Pearce, do you have a sixteen-year-old sister? And while we are doing the family tree thing, do you have any other siblings?”
I grin. “I have a twenty-six-year-old sister named Caroline who’s a high school algebra teacher. She’s also good at chess, and she and her boyfriend do competitive couples kayaking together. Bethany is my sixteen-year-old sister, and she likes all kinds of music. She likes Imagine Dragons and Nirvana, the Beatles and Alanis Morissette, show tunes and Greyson Chance. She also likes Beethoven. Her taste is wide and varied and eclectic. Also, Imagine Dragons’ ‘Radioactive’ was first released on alt radio before major labels picked it up.”
That musical debate mic drop leaves Stone speechless for a minute. He drags a hand through his shoulder-length hair, lingering through the strands, making me think for the briefest of seconds what it would feel like to run my hands through those dark-brown locks.
How it would be to tighten a fist around it. Tug it. Yank his head back.
I tell myself to settle down. What I really ought to be telling myself is to walk away. I should not sit here at this bar with him. I should not have a conversation with him where we’re simply talking.
Talking leads to feelings.
I have to stop believing this kind of talking is okay if it’s surface level.
None of these feelings for him are okay.
Especially not tonight.
Especially knowing he was in the suite with Ivy and Callum, her bodyguard. That’s what’s driving me crazy—the thought of what he might have been doing in there with everyone.
But maybe especially with Callum. Especially with another guy.
My muscles tense all over at the reminder, like someone turned the crank inside me.
Stone sets his elbows on the table. “But why do I have to ask? Why don’t you ever share?”
His question pierces me, as if he can poke through the protective layer I wear when I’m around him. The one to keep him away because I can’t stand how I feel.
I pick up my glass, drain the rest of the drink, and set it down. Then I sidestep the messy truth. I don’t share, because I don’t want to let him in. It’s easier to make him think he’s keeping me out.
I give a casual shrug. “Because you don’t really talk about anything besides yourself.”
Stone points at me, incensed. “That’s not true. You know that’s a bald-faced lie. We talk all the time. We talk as we walk. I don’t walk ten feet in front of you. I walk next to you all the time, brother,” he says, his words piling on top of each other. The man is worked up, and it’s kind of hot, kind of sexy.
Wait. Better revise that to all hot, all sexy.
“Yeah, you do?” I ask, just to keep him going, to hear him talk, because I’m a masochist.
“I walk next to you every day and we discuss restaurants, clubs, the cities we go to . . . We talk about shit all the time.”
He’s not wrong. But tonight is different. The late hour possesses its own kind of energy, and so does this place, this bar, this conversation. It all feels dangerously close to not work. It feels too personal. And I’m simmering with my own latent jealousy, an emotion that’s starting to make its way to the front burner. Nighttime tempts you to cross lines you shouldn’t cross. So, once more, I deflect. “And yet I know you have a little brother and you didn’t know I had any sisters.”
He slams a palm against the table. “That does not count. None of that counts. You do not get to say that about me, because the world knows about Zane. The world knows I have a little brother. Hell, he joined me on a concert tour a few years ago, doing the lights. Everyone knows everything about me. I am all over the internet. And you? You’re nowhere. You exist in this bubble of no one knowing anything about you.”
I lean across the table, closer to him, in his space. Maybe a sick part of me likes doling out crumbs. Maybe that part likes it because it gives me some semblance of control over this desire. “Fine. So, since we supposedly talk, do you have any idea where I grew up?”
