Page 57 of Director's Cut

She knocks her foot against my leg. “I gotta get going soon, but you’re welcome to hang in my office so we can meet up after my class.”

I happen to glance at Charlie. As much as I do want to sit in Maeve’s office and stare at her couch and think about fucking her on it, I’m needed elsewhere.

“Charlie, wanna work on campus?” I ask him.

Unlike me, Charlie does kind of like going out in public. He scratches his temple and looks at his pajamas. “Uh, didn’t Maeve just say you guys had to get going?”

I glance at Maeve. “You can have until I get out of this lazy cat costume.”

Charlie nods and runs back to his room. Once his booming footsteps have faded, Maeve looks back to me.

She tugs on the blazer. “Thanks for letting me borrow your suit. I promise I’ll have it laundered—”

I hold up a hand. “I’ll have it laundered. Please.”

For a moment, a hardness falls over Maeve. My heart jerks in my chest, but then her features soften once more.

She squeezes my hand. “Thanks, babe.”

I know it’s only been a month since our first kiss. But sitting in the kitchen with her early in the morning, watching her have breakfast with Charlie, is doing something to me. Something too powerful to deal with before 9:00 a.m. I’m about to leave a room to go change for maybe five minutes, for god’s sake, yet I want to kiss her goodbye. I’m going to see her again in a matter of seconds and I can already anticipate the ache of being away from her.

But I lean over and give her a peck anyway. Just the way my parents did every day before work, despite the fact that they worked in the same office.

“See ya in the car,” I say.

She blushes. “What was that for?”

“I guess I like you.” I even nail a wink as I walk out of the room.

The high lasts for a while afterward.

It lasts through the car ride, where Charlie blasts his Lady Gaga and All Time Low mix. It lasts through a contactless goodbye with Maeve in her office as she exchanges us for some binders and rushes off somewhere. And it’s still there even after she leaves, when Charlie plops onto the couch Maeve and I almost had sex on and smirks.

“Zero to one hundred, huh?” he says.

My face gets hot. “We’re not married.”

“Yet you’re already lining the floor she walks on in money, and you’re following her around like a puppy. You’re pretty smitten. It may even be time to take her out somewhere other than the movies.”

Then there’s a pause. A pause where Charlie should say And she’s crazy about you too.

Charlie’s not saying anything, and now there’s this gross thought growing in my head. One I’m definitely supposed to identify as irrational and kick away. Here with Charlie—away from Maeve—I have some perspective, and I realize that this bit of dating is the easy part. That I have been deliberately choosing dates that have low chances of another paparazzi encounter. I have no idea if she’ll get more comfortable with the idea of me being famous, or if her reaction at the tar pits is indicative of a bigger issue, one that won’t be easy to handle no matter how good I am in bed. I bite my lip.

“That’s not entirely up to me,” I admit.

He looks up from his script. “What do you mean?”

“You know how we got photographed together on our first date? We haven’t really talked about it.”

“So talk about it. The last thing you need is to make this a bigger issue than it is.”

I rub my forearms. The room is a comfortable temperature, but the hair on my arms is standing on end. “When we’re at the house or here at school, I have her wrapped around my finger. But the second we cross that line again and go out in public and we have to dodge paparazzi and rumors and my public persona, I’m one bad day from losing her.”

“Do you think maybe you should tell her this?”

The words lurch out of me. “I signed on to teach another semester, and Trish is riding me about what my commitments will be if Oakley gets into any spring festivals. Maeve has no idea, and I don’t know how to bring it up now.”

“Is that what this is really about?” Charlie takes a deep breath, then places a hand on my shoulder. The gesture, coming from Charlie, means I know I’ve done fucked up. “The semester hasn’t even started. Just tell Maeve you got too excited and—”

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