Page 13 of Praise Me: Pilot
Just when I think I have Joel right where I want him, he pulls back. Regroups.
Why can’t he just be considerate and let me seduce him already?
“I don’t need you to heal my broken heart, Joel. I’m fine.”
The room is bigger than I expected with a small kitchenette and separate bedroom, off to the right. The windows are open and overlooking downtown Nashville in the distance, the hotel parking lot below. We’re still standing in relative darkness, the streetlamps outside combining to fill the room with a gentleglow. Joel brightens the space slightly now by turning on a lamp and sitting on the couch in the living area.
“You didn’t seem fine when we were outside your apartment,” he says.
“I am,” I insist, horrified to hear my voice crack.
His chest dips, as if it’s hard for him to see me upset. “Come here, angel.”
“I don’t want to be comforted.” My knees feely wobbly out of nowhere, as if I’ve been ignoring the pain of abandonment, distracting myself with my plan to seduce Joel. But at the slightest hint of sympathy, the avalanche of emotion is cascading down the side of the mountain. “If you comfort me, I’ll cry.”
“You can cry.”
“No.”
He sits back and watches me patiently. And I don’t exactly know what happens. One second, I’m standing there with my arms crossed, and the next, I’m stumbling toward Joel, his image blurred by a veil of tears, falling into his lap like a marionette with severed strings. He arranges me sideways on his lap, tucking my head beneath his chin, and he holds me while I sniffle and sob, my tears soaking the front of his dress shirt.
“He told me once that I was ruining his life,” I whisper.
Joel jerks beneath me. “What?”
I nod, wiping my face on the material of his shirt. “Once, when I was fifteen, he was getting ready to leave on a date and I started coming down with the flu. He had to cancel his date to take care of me. ‘Why are you trying to ruin my life, Haylo?’ I can still hear him saying it.”
“He didn’t mean it. No one could ever mean that about you.”
“I hear it in the back of my head every time I fail. Every time I get a bad grade or don’t get invited on a girls’ night. Those words get in deep, you know?” I swipe at my eyes. “They make me wonder if I was the reason he was never around. Like maybeif I’d been someone else, someone better, it wouldn’t have been such a hardship to be my father.”
“No. Oh God, don’t think like that.Hefell short, not you. You’re not supposed to be perfect growing up and parents are supposed to guide you through that. They’re supposed to take joy in being the one you depend on. Otherwise, the fault lies with them.” He strokes my hair and kisses my forehead. “You got the flu, angel. People get the flu.”
“I’m a miserable sick patient. I—”
“Cry?”
“Yes. About the unfairness of the universe picking poor me to have a stuffy nose. I’m very self-centered when I’m ill. What about you?”
A beat passes. “My father was strict when I was growing up. An Air Force guy like me. He expected me to always be tough. Sickness wasn’t supposed to slow us down. Not when there are men going into battle, fighting wounded.” I sense a wry twist of his lips. “My mother used to send him on errands when I got sick, though, so she could sneak in and feed me soup. I let her, even though I could do it myself. She needed it more than me.”
“I like to think my mom would have done that, if she’d stayed alive.”
“She would have.” He rubs his lips against my temple. “And someday in the future, you’ll feed soup to your daughter and when you see how fulfilling that is, you’ll know the fault was not with you, Haylo.”
His words impact my chest. Hard.
Along with the reality of what I’m doing.
I’m seducing this man…and my actions could ruin him. Not only would I wreck his relationship with my father, but Phil has a lot of power at the airline. Seniority. Sleeping with Joel could potentially jeopardize his job.
He doesn’t deserve that, does he? Look at him trying to comfort me.
He’s a good man.
Still, he came to parents’ weekend knowing my father was lying about his whereabouts and plans. Joel lied right to my face, didn’t he? Telling me that Phil was stuck in Thailand because of the weather? Sure, that was before we’d met and…bonded.
Oh no, wehavebonded, haven’t we?
