Page 82 of The Write Track
I knew the name. I’d met him at various conferences. I thought back on our interactions, what I knew about him, and frowned. “How come I haven’t heard any of these stories?”
“Are you sure you haven’t? Every female writer I know on the conference circuit is well aware. His reputation is far flung. When he was caught trying to sexually assault his own assistant on the beach in Miami, he blamed it on low blood sugar.”
“Oh, so diabetes makes men predators?” I wanted to find this guy and throttle him. Something occurred to me, though, and I managed to hold my temper. Just barely. “Bella, did he ever do something to you?” The mere thought filled me with rage.
“No.” She vehemently shook her head. “I never went near him, but that’s because there’s a whisper network. The women share the information among themselves first. Then, eventually,they allow trusted men into the circle. After that, they try to get the untrustworthy men on their side. That doesn’t always go as planned.”
It made me angry on behalf of all the female authors. The mere thought that I’d added to their burden filled me with shame. “I’m an asshole,” I realized.
“No.” She reached over and placed her hand on top of mine. “You’re not. People know you’re a playboy. They are aware that you’re not in it for anything serious. You don’t have a single sexual harassment complaint, though. In fact, the only complaints about you I’ve seen are from women who were looking for a conference fling and you wouldn’t flirt with them.”
“I still don’t like it.” I blew out a breath. “You can’t change your behavior until you’re aware of it, though, right?”
She didn’t look convinced, but she nodded. “You’re not a bad guy. Heck, you’re a white knight in my book. You swooped in to help me with Preston when you’d known me for a grand total of five minutes.” She took a breath then barreled forward. “I’ve always wondered why you did that.”
I didn’t go with a knee-jerk response, something cutesy and only half true. I gave her what she was really looking for. “I felt a spark with you the second we met,” I admitted. “I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought it was just because you were so beautiful. It was more, although I’m still not sure I can put a name to it.”
“Neither of us are good at this,” she agreed. “You know I’m messed up, too, right?”
“I never would have guessed,” I teased, poking her side. I only turned serious when she didn’t smile. “That’s why, even when I recognized I was feeling things for you, I decided to wait until after the retreat to tell you.”
She giggled, relieving some of the tension I was feeling. “Omigod, I was doing the same thing. I was convinced you were going to shoot me down, but I knew I would have to tellyou eventually or constantly wonder. I didn’t want to lose our friendship, but it was getting harder and harder to keep my lips zipped.”
Impulsively, I leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to her mouth. “I don’t want you to keep your lips zipped. I want to hear it all.”
“What if I say something that scares you away? What if I put too much pressure on you?”
That was baggage she was holding onto from her relationship with Preston. She didn’t realize it—and now wasn’t the time to talk about it—but we would have to get through all of that eventually.
“You can’t put too much pressure on me,” I assured her. “I have just realized that I want you to pressure me. I’ve been floating for a long time, since…” I didn’t mention my mother and what her death had done to me. I didn’t bring up my father and his crushing expectations or how I started evading all expectations because of him.
Instead, I shook my head. “We have time to get into our traumatized pasts,” I said, earning a grin from her. “I can’t make promises about forever.Yet,” I added quickly. “I just know I want to be with you, and I want the space to figure this all out.”
She nodded, seemingly pleased with my answer. “Okay, well, I want that too. I just don’t want you getting upset when Preston presses a button—because he’s nowhere near done with us—and I melt down.
“It’s not about him any longer,” she continued. “I’m not sure it ever was. It’s about something inside of me. He just wants to get me going. I do my best to avoid him, but he’s sneaky.”
“He’s the sneakiest,” I agreed, wrapping both of my arms around her. Talk of Preston inevitably made me want to start ripping heads off necks. “Don’t worry about him. If we do our best to ignore him, then he will eventually have no other optionbut to explode in public. When he does, it will be all over for him.”
Bella didn’t look convinced, but she nodded. “Yeah. What about the others—Bree, Brody, and Hayley? What are we going to tell them?”
I hadn’t gotten that far yet. “What do you want to tell them?”
She hesitated then shrugged. “It feels as if they’ll add to the pressure, even if they don’t mean to, and we might crumble underneath their expectations.”
She’d nailed my feelings on that subject as well. “How about we keep it a secret for the next week or so, huh? We’ll just pretend everything is the same as it was. We can hold hands in public, and it’s fine. We were already doing that.”
“And in a week?”
“We’ll talk about it again. I want us both on the same page. A week gives us time to settle in.”
“And have a lot of sex without having to answer the obvious questions?” Her smile was mischievous, and it did funny things to my insides.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“Somehow I knew that.” She squealed when I pulled her on top of me. “I’m so irritated that we have readers here and are contractually obligated to show our faces in public today.” I brushed her hair back from her lovely face. “I would stay here in this bed, with you, all day if I had a say in the matter.”
“Anticipation is half the fun.”
