Page 63 of Just Not That Into Billionaires

“Like you did with me?” she asks.

“That’s right.” I grab the heat pack and head to the kitchen, tossing it in the microwave, stopping at every ten seconds to get it just the right temperature—just bearable to the touch. That was always the goal. I rest my palm onto it and then I give it another few seconds and then I take it into her.

She holds it, evaluating the temperature. “Perfect,” she says.

“Move over.”

“Just give it to me,” she says.

“I’m right here. Let me.”

“I have these things on the ends of my arms, you see.” She holds up her hands.

“It’s better for somebody else to hold it and you know it,” I say. “You can concentrate on softening the joint.” That’s what dancers always used to say.

“Leave me alone. Let’s just get through this thing, okay?”

Get through this thing. What the hell am I doing? I should tell her she can have the papers. They’re still in my briefcase. All I have to do is sign them and give them to her to sign.

“Move over, come on.”

I see it in her face when she’s about to relent. I feel it in my chest. We’re too connected, or at least, I’m too connected to her, a woman who discards people as easily as peanut shells.

She rolls her eyes and scoots over. I settle in next to her and she puts her legs over my lap, wincing briefly. I don’t like it. Her pain tugs on something deep inside of me—some primal need to protect her, to find a solution.

Fuck.

I hold the heat pack in a concave manner so that it gets all the spots at once. She leans back, eyes closed, finally relaxing. “Thank you. I guess this is nice,” she says.

“You guess,” I say.

A smile lights the corners of her mouth. She smells like spicy flowers—even the shampoo she uses is her specific Jasmine. A melodic song is playing over the sound system. Something sweet and old by Bowie. I’m glad it’s not something annoying.

Her legs feel fucking amazing on my lap. I could so easily lean down, press my face to her PJ—pants-clad thighs. No other woman has ever inspired the urges in me that she does. Even her flaws are sexy—her impulsiveness. Her fanaticism. Her pigheadedness when it comes to injury—even that makes me want to kiss her.

But I keep it objective. I’ve seen guys lose their objectivity over a woman and it’s not pretty. She ripped a hole inside me once before and I won’t be that besotted kid again, twisted up in painful knots of one-sided love—or what he thought was love.

“That’s the problem with palatial penthouses,” she says. “Everything’s far away from wherever you’re sitting. Extreme wealth really is so inconvenient.”

“Oh yeah?” I say.

“In little apartments, the microwave is just a few steps away from the comfortable living room chair. Way better.”

I keep the contact light and present, nearly all the way around to the back of the knee.

It’s strange. In my long-gone juvenile ideas of us together, it was always her dazzled by me in some way; it was never anything so human as this. One person caring for another.

“You have good friends,” I observe.

“I do. I’m really lucky—I absolutely lucked into that building. And then my roommate moved out, and I was so sad, but this shy, rural girl answered my ad and we were instant best friends. Noelle—you met her.”

“The mail carrier,” I say.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’ve been here for years and I don’t even know my neighbors,” I say.

“Most people in the city don’t. I think part of it is that a lot of us are just so passionate about the things that we’re passionate about, and that connects us. I have friends who are artists or in the theater or starting their own little businesses…they all get what it’s like to be giving up a lot of your life to chase a dream, and not everybody understands that. Not everybody understands when you’re not automatically free to watch a football game on Sunday or go out on the town. Not everybody understands when you say you won’t be free for the next six months. But my crew at 341 understands that. You understand it.”

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