Page 61 of Wish You Were Her
“No,” he murmured, looking briefly into her eyes and thenback down to where his hands were touching her skin. “You. I want you. And I want you more than anyone else.”
The words were said so matter-of-factly, Allegra almost laughed.
He shook his head as he looked at her, as if trying to break free of a trance. “There’s something different about you.”
Allegra swallowed. “Jonah—”
“You’re not like everyone else. And not because of movie contracts or glamor or any of the crazy things you left behind to come here. There’s something else.”
Allegra heard this often, usually with an accusatory tone. But Jonah sounded fascinated. Full of wonder. And it made her nervous.
“Someone said something true to me tonight,” he went on. “They said, ‘everyone is in love with you.’ And it’s true.”
“It’s not, Jonah,” she said weakly. “I could show you—”
“And so I gave myself permission,” he said, ignoring her frail protestations. His voice had changed, it sounded deeper and more full of heat. “To stop being an asshole, to stop covering up what I want with unconscious meanness. And if you hate it, okay. If you don’t feel the same in any way, I’ll live. Not happily, and without much color, but I’ll survive. Rejection doesn’t seem as horrible as regret. I’ll lose you either way, might as well do it with the knowledge that I tried.”
“What about your email girl?” she asked, surprised by how breathless she was beginning to sound.
“I thought she and I might be kind of soulmates because of how we write, but she didn’t come tonight. Allegra. Stop hiding. Look at me.”
She did.
“Reject me,” he said. “So I can start getting over you.”
She glanced down at his hands which had now climbed up to her elbows. He was so close she could breathe in the smell of the night air on his body. He lifted one hand to gently move her long hair away from her face. He pressed his lips against the newly exposed skin of her throat and she closed her eyes.
“Tell me to go away and I will,” he said against her neck. Her hands had drifted up to pull him closer and his arms had encircled her. They were tightly locked together. Every part of her was humming.
Allegra’s first kiss had been on camera. She had performed love scenes with other young actors, sometimes with an intimacy coordinator, sometimes the director would flatly refuse. Usually, the love scenes she shot were impossible to mistake for anything real. The other actor would be angling their face so that they were completely visible on camera. Nothing felt true. And it saddened Allegra, who had chosen the life of an actor because she loved the delicious cocktail of a fairy tale on the screen mixed with the truth of the human condition.
Jonah wasn’t like any of those actors. Sometimes he wastootruthful. It was why they caused one another to flare up so often.
He reminded her of who she had been before focus groups, industry luncheons and award seasons.
She slid her hands into his hair, and his came to rest on her hips.
When he spoke, he sounded starved. “Kiss me.”
She heard herself make a small noise of encouragement, and then everything caught fire.
His mouth came down on hers and she pressed her body against his until it elicited a groan from him. He hoisted her up so he was holding her flush against him, her legs moving automatically to drape around his hips.
Allegra kissed him back as he maneuvered her to one of the shop tables. “Not the paperbacks, the jackets will bend.”
She felt him smile against her mouth. “Hardbacks it is.”
He shoved some expensive books from the table and laid her down on it. She bit his bottom lip, he licked her collarbone. She slid her tongue into his mouth. He dragged her hips against his once more.
“Fuck,” he groaned, as his hands found her breasts and hers found his belt.
She was about to respond when they both heard a noise, a scuffling at the front door of the shop. They froze in the near-dark, and then Allegra rolled gracelessly off the table. She crawled underneath it to hide, pinching the heels of Jonah’s shoes until he did the same. As soon as they were safely hidden, the door opened.
They watched George’s feet cross the shopfloor and listened to him as he whistled jauntily. He moved straight through the door that led up to his and Allegra’s apartment, too distracted by his own thoughts to see their feet or the books on the floor. Before she could even process his arrival, Allegra felt her phone ringing. There was no tone, just vibration, and it was enough to push her into sensory overload, given everything else that she was feeling. She rolled onto her back beneath the table of books and answered it.
“Hey. I’m almost home. I’ll be up in a minute.”
She spoke very softly and Jonah leaned over to press his mouth between her breasts. She almost gasped and almost grimaced in a mixture of pleasure and anxiety.
