Page 144 of The Influencer

Fuck, he’s pretty. Handsome and gorgeous, and just plain beautiful all at once. And I don’t know whether he does it on purpose or not, I haven’t known him long enough to tell for sure, but he’s always doing something overtly flirtatious with his body. Like right now, just the way his head is tilted, and his eyelids are half-raised—it’s a come-on. A seduction. A pose.

It’s like somewhere along the way he forgot how to not work all his angles all the time.

I’m not as smooth as he is. I don’t know how to look sexy for him—to get him to want to tackle me the way I want to tackle him right now. I feel, in fact, like a big, horny loser who won seven minutes in heaven with the prom queen. Clumsy and too inexperienced to turn this into a “moment.”

Like I told Adam earlier, I’ve changed, but not in this regard. Jade is way out of my league, and I’m not sure how the fuck I wound up here, or what I’ve done that’s earned me the privilege of his hospitality, much less his love. “Are you mad at me?” I ask, like a stupid, insecure teenager.

“No. Are you mad at me?”

At least that makes two of us.

“No,” I tell him. “Do you have any interest in having sex with me tonight?” See? So damn smooth.

“Well, when you put it that way…” He gives a simple shrug of the shoulder that shouldn’t make my dick twitch but does.

“I know I’m fucking this up,” I say.

He rolls his eyes. “You’re not.”

“I am. I just don’t know how or what—fuck. Jade—will you come here, please?”

He snorts, but he sets his water down and gracefully walks around the island to stand in front of me. I take both his hands intending to say something to get us over this bump, but the way his fingers wrap around my palms makes a lump rise in my throat, cutting off speech and air for a second.

Like I told him earlier—there are feelings involved here—and they’re not just his. But while he feels comfortable enough to walk around in his like they’re a cute mesh top, mine feel itchy and twisty, and they make me sweat a little, too. Fuck, that therapy appointment can’t come soon enough.

The last time I liked someone this much, I wound up in hell. But I think he gets that. Maybe he’s not fully aware of how much I like him, but he understands my issues in general. I even think he knows why I’m holding back, even if he’s not sure what I’m holding back. He asked if we were fucking or dating and what I wanted to ask him was—isn’t this more of a fling? Maybe it started off as an “affair,” but it’s evolved at least some. And we won’t even make it to the holidays.

I’m just… so terrified. Afraid that if he puts his life on hold for me, then if he can’t get it put back together the way it was once he leaves, he’ll resent me. And let’s just say a year goes by, and he comes back from the tour, and he’s still single, and I’m still single, then I’d be out of the running for another chance with him because I once tried to control and change him. Like the way Olivia resented me for ever having sex with her in the first place. She said I compromised her morals.

And while on the surface, I know I didn’t pressure her into anything, that’s how she sees it now, and I was never able to say or do anything to change her mind about it.

To tell the truth—the absolute God’s honest truth—I want that second chance with Jade if it presents itself. I don’t want to be out of the running. I’m trying to keep my mind open to other possibilities—that there’s maybe someone better or just as good out there for me where the timing isn’t half as fucked up—but when he’s standing in front of me, he’s just fucking everything.

“Were you going to say something?” he asks gently after at least a minute passes where I haven’t spoken a word or made a move.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Sort of,” he says.

“What’s sort of not okay?”

“I have a headache, and um… a heartache, too, I guess.”

I hate this. “What did I do?”

“It’s not that you’ve done anything, Asher. It’s that we don’t have all the time in the world, and you’re trying to convince me to spend half of it with other people when you’re the only one I want to be with right now.”

Those words are extremely difficult to take. They settle in my gut like rocks. “It’s up to you,” I say, swallowing hard. “I didn’t mean to put any pressure on you.”

“I know that. And I know it shouldn’t hurt my feelings?—”

“It does?”

He nods. “But maybe I’m not used to having feelings. And maybe they all hurt, I don’t know. You should know that I feel very safe with you. And in my whole life there’s only been a handful of times where I’ve felt like this, and none of them ever lasted, but this feels different. And it made me fall for you, I guess. I swear I couldn’t help it. I did try.”

I smile at that, at the glance he gives me when he says it—shy, but coy, too. “I feel like I’m at a point in my life where I can’t trust anything I’m feeling,” I tell him honestly, “But I can say with complete certainty that you are safe with me. Always.”

He takes in a shaky breath. “Then if you’re still interested, I think I would like to have sex with you tonight.”

---