Page 62 of Holding Out

They both dissolved into helpless laughter.

30

What are you doing?

Griff’s text sounded an awful lot like the prelude to a sexting session, and Becca’s whole body flushed hot in anticipation.She was still wet and swollen from their lunchtime encounter.

I’m sitting at the reception desk trying not to fall asleep.

If she was right about Griff’s intentions, his next question should be eitherWhat are you wearing?OrWhere are your hands?

Would it be really, really wrong for her to drop one hand under the desk?

She decided the answer wasyesand squeezed her thighs together instead.

Any chance you could get Sibby to spell you for a bit?Someone’s asking for you.

Her brain did an abrupt, tire-screeching stop.Unless he’d started referring to his dick as an autonomous being—she had known guys who did, but Griff didn’t seem the type—she’d been barking up the wrong tree.

What?What are you talking about?

Her phone rang.

“I’m at KidsUp,” he said.“I’m putting Jed on the phone.”

“Wait—”

She could hear the sounds of the phone being shuffled around, and then the slightly awkward breathing sounds of a teenage boy.

“Is this Ms.Drake?”A man’s voice but with that just-into-puberty husk to it.

She almost didn’t recognize her own name.No one ever called her anything but Becca or Bex.“Yes.”

“I brought my English assignment in.”

She squinted.What was this about?Griff trying to make her feel better about herself?

“Griff can help you with that.”She squeezed her phone, too hard.It hurt her hand.

More breathing.“He said I could ask you to help me.”

“I’m not a tutor,” she said, but the protest sounded weaker than the last time she’d made it.

“You said writing was hard for you.I thought you might know how to get me through this.”

Either Jed was a damn good actor, or his voice shook on that last sentence.

And why the fuck not, right?Why couldn’t he mean what he was saying, what he was asking for?If Griff could be wrong about how good he’d be at leading that R&R support group, she could sure as shit be wrong about this.

But what if she couldn’t do what Jed was asking her to do?What possible right did she have to think she could help someone learn to write a high school essay, when she’d sucked at it herself?Writing had stayed hard for her, and that was how she’d gotten herself and Alia into trouble with Nate.Alia had ghostwritten Becca’s letters to him, and he had found out.

That was a whole other story, though.

The point was that she still didn’t think of herself as a particularly competent writer.She got through by dictating pretty much everything longer than a text—emails, letters, Instagram posts.She let her natural voice flow rather than getting hung up on the process, but she wasn’t exactly writing the next Great American Novel or anything.

Somehow, though, there was a kid on the other end of the phone who thought she might have some useful advice for him.And she couldn’t quite bring herself to say no.

“Let me see if I can get someone to cover the desk for me,” she told Jed.

---