Page 37 of The Show

“Hey, Mom, sorry I missed your call. What’s up?”

“Just checking you got home last night; you didn’t call.”

My stomach knotted in annoyance and guilt. Annoyance that now they were back in the city I’d have to deal with her constant monitoring again, guilt that I felt annoyed and should have known better. But I’d crashed the second I’d walked through my front door.

“Sorry, Mom. I was tired.”

She tutted. “You’re working too hard, LoLo. You should have come to Europe with us.”

I held my tongue just as the barista held my coffee in the air and shouted my name. “Mom, I gotta go, I’ll talk to you later, okay? Love you.”

I hung up before she could start telling me about another single guy she wanted to set me up with, and grabbed the coffee which was in danger of sloshing everywhere from the speed at which the coffee guy was waving it around, then made my way back to the office.

I sat back down on the floor, growling at my code-filled laptop screen still staring at me instead of miraculously fixing itself and reappearing as my website, like I’d hoped and prayed for on every one of the four hundred and twenty two steps I’d taken for my caffeine fix. Nor had Josh arrived in my absence.

I perked up immediately as my phone rang. “Josh, where are you?”

“Sorry, Lowe, I’m running late. Gonna be an hour or so; my professor summoned me, but I’ll come straight over after that ‘kay?”

My shoulders slumped in frustration. Guess I had time to start unpacking. “Yeah, okay. No problem. See you soon.”

I should have listened to my mom when she told me to hire a professional, someone who already had a career in web design instead of still studying to get there, but I’d been determined to use my hard earned savings to set this business up, and not my trust fund. I’d seen fliers from Columbia tech-ed students needing design time to build credits for their projects - and they were cheap.

I got up and pulled the rest of the tape off the box I’d been picking at, and set about unpacking. Every few minutes I checked my laptop just in case, only to become more irritated when nothing had changed.

It was as I blew an annoying, lone strand of hair out of my eyes that I caught movement by the door frame. My hand flew to my chest as I let out a shriek.

“Holy crap!” I waited for my breath to catch, which was hard due to the pounding of my heart against my ribcage. It wasn’t Josh coming early; it was the guy who’d filled my brain with more confused thoughts in the last forty-eight hours than Cody Mellor had after the summer I turned sixteen, when I learned the meaning of the wordghosted. “What are you doing here?”

Penn pushed off the doorway - which seemed so much smaller than it usually did - his biceps rippling under his t-shirt from the movement. It wasn’t even tight, yet somehow, from the way it stretched across his chest and hung smooth over his perfectly sculpted abs, was one more item of clothing he could have been born in.

“Why were you slamming your laptop?”

“It’s broken.” I looked up at him, as his thick eyebrow rose in question. “My website is broken. My website guy is coming over.”

He took a step in and the air seemed to thin, because my breath shallowed like I couldn’t get enough oxygen all of a sudden. It was worse when he sat next to me and all I could smell was him, the scent that was still permeated in my frontal lobe from the seconds before he verbally pummeled Bryce Wexler. The scent that had my pulse notching in a way it had no business doing.

“Let’s see.” He held his hand out for me to pass my laptop over, which I did mutely, because I wasn’t quite sure what was happening. This man I’d known most of my life who’d hardly spoken to me, was now sitting on the floor of my office like he was trying to pass the time of day. “What did you do to it?”

“I was trying to upload some images, but then that happened instead.” I tapped the code in the corner which I hadn’t been able to get rid of.

Instead of handing the laptop back, telling me ‘yeah, good luck with that’ and then explaining why he was sitting on the floor with me, his fingers were tapping furiously on the keys. He was still doing it five minutes later, having barely looked up, so I continued with my unpacking, though instead of unpacking, I sat back, picked up my coffee and watched Penn.

I watched his forearms flex from the speed at which his fingers moved; big roped forearms making my laptop seem Lilliputian in comparison. In fact, this whole office suddenly seemed smaller, narrower, given his long legs were stretched out in front of him and practically touching the opposite wall. The jeans hugging his enormous thighs had dropped down low enough when he sat that I could see the bright white elastic of his boxers in the tiny gap where his t-shirt had caught and ridden up. I shook out my head, specifically the raging impulse I had to run my fingers underneath it.

I looked at my coffee… maybe I’d been given a triple strength one instead, because I didn’t normally feel so lightheaded.

He spun my laptop round, his Yankees ballcap creating a slight shadow over his features which made his grey eyes sparkle. “This what you’re after?”

Holy shit.

“My website!” I snatched it off him, running my fingers over the cool screen which now had logos of brands I’d worked on rolling across a carousel, while my own personal logo sat on a banner across the top. “How d’you know how to do that?”

“I know how to do a lot of things.”

Undulating waves of heat flowed through me. Why did that sound sexual? Or why did I take it like that? And why was he looking at me like he was working hard to bite down a smile?

“Um, okay…” I turned away before he noticed my cheeks reddening, picked up my coffee and slurped it, just for something to do. I prayed the cool ice would stop me from melting under his gaze, the same one he’d used on Saturday, but as he was less than a yard away from me it felt so much more intense. Like staring directly at the sun. “Well, thank you, I really appreciate it. Seriously, that was awesome.

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