Page 13 of One More Time
She held the card over the keypad, and the lock clicked open with a sound that echoed in Nicky’s brain.
He braced his hands on either side of the doorframe to keep himself from reaching for her body, her curves, those infuriatingly silky little straps that held her top up.
She turned to face him and exhaled a ragged breath. ‘You want to come in?’
‘So much,’ he moaned. ‘But I try not to make the same mistakes twice.’
A flash of confusion and hurt passed over her blue eyes. ‘Okay.’ She turned quickly back to the door.
Nicky scrambled, ‘No, shit! That’s not what I meant.’
Lucy turned back to face him, and a wisp of hair slipped over her mouth. He dragged his index finger slowly across her lips and pushed her hair back over her ear. ‘I don’t want it to be like last time. I don’t want to … rush with you.’
Her eyes searched his face, her cheek tilting ever so slightly toward the hand that he couldn’t bring himself to move from her jaw.
Nicky leaned in close, brushing his lips against her ear. Her body shivered, and he felt it everywhere. ‘Let’s do this again. Tomorrow.’
‘I’m busy,’ she whispered.
Nicky groaned and rested his forehead against hers.
She finished, ‘Until five.’
‘I’ll be here at five-oh-five.’
She chuckled.
‘Five-fifteen?’ he begged.
‘Five-fifteen,’ she echoed.
Nicky pressed a kiss to Lucy’s cheek, soft and slow. He breathed her in one more time and then, with a level of self-control he’d never employed before in his entire life, he backed away.
‘Thank you for dinner,’ she said, gripping the door handle with white-knuckled intensity.
‘Thank you for joining me. See you tomorrow?’ He really had to practice saying that so it didn’t sound like an open-ended question.
‘Five-fifteen,’ she replied.
Lucy slipped inside her suite, and the door snapped closed.
Almost immediately, Nicky regretted his newfound discipline and the chivalrous nonsense that had generated it. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans to keep from knocking on the door and taking it all back, from blurting all the questions that had formed over the previous hours. And then kissing her senseless. Maybe not in that order.
But it would be better this way. What was left of his higher reasoning knew it was true. He’d completely fucked things up the first time around with Lucy and really didn’t want to do that again. Didn’t make it any easier, though.
As he shuffled back down the hallway, Nicky’s mind turned back to the one thing that had grated at him that night. Her damn Spotify. It had been a kick to the gut.
Her playlists were good. He respected them. She seemed to be into the blues and soul now. There were some all-girl bands he didn’t listen to enough. The only problem was that his own music was conspicuously absent.
There had been plenty of Pearl Jam. An ungodly amount of Foo Fighters. Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, Rage Against the Machine, The Black Keys, Pixies, The Hives, even Maroon-Fucking-5. Not a single Super song. Not even ‘The Breathing Room.’
Nicky knew for a fact that it alone had something like eight-hundred-million streams on the platform. Was it possible that not even one of those had been her? The idea made his fists clench.
If he could just think of a way to ask her about it that didn’t make him sound like an asshat. Unfortunately, ‘hey, what’d you think of that big hit I wrote?’ was flat-out douchey no matter how many winks and smiles you added. (Ask him how he knew.)
What Nicky really wanted was for her to bring it up. He needed her to. Maybe she didn’t realize? Maybe she didn’t know about ‘The Breathing Room’? Didn’t understand?
What if she just hated Super? What if his whole life’s work was just an annoying aside to her? Maybe she was one of those people who heard his songs on the radio and thought ‘not these jokers again’ before changing the station? Would it matter?
