Page 92 of Win Some Love Some
“Phone. Now, mister.”
“I don’t have to if I don’t want to.”
“I’ll tell my dad you’re having dirty thoughts about me.”
“I’ll tell your dad you showed up at my apartment and offered your virginity to me.”
“I’ll tell my dad you get a boner every time I walk into a room wearing a dress.”
Our gazes collided. Challenge on. He held out his phone and I took it. I went to the app and tapped the saved videos button.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe one or two of mine when I was being funny. Or the time I got the tour of the Eiffel Tower from the engineer, and it had gotten really specific about the mechanics of it. I’d thought of Nick the entire time I chatted with the engineer, knowing he would love it. I almost sent it to him directly, but managed to talk myself out of it.
But no. He’d saved everything. All my content. From the stupid videos I made in my dorm room, to all the videos I made in Paris. The first day I arrived. My first croissant. All the thrift stores and markets and my sun-splashed apartment learning how to cook. Years. Thousands of videos. All of me. Only of me.
“There were times you felt so far away,” he said quietly. “The videos…they helped.”
I jerked my gaze away from the phone and looked at him. I’d been right. All those years ago, I’d been right.
Nick was my person.
And he hurt me, but I hurt him too. He rejected me, but I spent years rejecting him right back. Maybe he needed that time to understand what I meant to him. But I also needed that time. To grow up. Mature.
He coughed into his fist, like he couldn’t quite handle me staring into his soul.
“Anyway, you have a knack for that shit. Making the mundane seem like fantasy. It’s great you’re doing the videos for the garage. It’s fun, but it’s not what you should be doing. Look at that cake they just brought out. You totally want to do a breakdown of that cake.”
It was on a large buffet table. Three layers of smooth white buttercream, with piped green vines and lush red roses. Yeah, that cake was totally something I would have broken down in great detail.
But there was something else I wanted to video instead.
I got up from my seat and sat down in his lap, surprising him, but he didn’t push me away. No. His hand came up around my hip, holding me.
“Nora, what are you…”
I hit the plus button and flipped the camera so it was on both of us. I wouldn’t need to add sound, because the background music would serve as a track. I leaned back against him, my head on his shoulder, our cheeks pressed together.
“This is Nick, everyone. He’s going to take me back to his apartment right now and do dirty, dirty things to me.”
“Nora!” He laughed. “What are you doing?”
“Telling the truth,” I said. “I’m not pretending anymore.” I looked into his beautiful eyes. “It feels good. You should try it. So, am I right? Are you going to do dirty things to me?”
His tilted his face toward me, his nose brushing mine. There was no smile, no teasing sarcasm. Just my Nicky.
“Yeah. I fucking am.”
I steppedinto his apartment and took a deep nervous breath. Six years delayed, but my plan that night was finally in motion. I was going to have sex with Nick. And I was pretty sure it was going to be awesome.
We could basically read each other’s minds. We knew each other’s souls.
How could that not translate into awesome sex?
Not that I’d had a lot of sex, awesome or otherwise. The truth was, I’d mostly been disappointed by it all. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy sex, it was just that growing up I’d had such expectations.
Mom would tell me I’d read too many romance novels. But shouldn’t the books be right? Shouldn’t two people who were in love be better at sex? Make it more meaningful, more passionate?
Maybe my problem was that I’d never been in love.
