Page 69 of Wicked Me
Sam’s arms dropped to his sides, his hands squeezed into fists, body ready to spring until I hissed out a garbled warning.
“Sssst.” It sounded like I was leaking air from the lady balls Charlotte had said I had, but I really, really didn’t.
Rick hiked his dress shirt sleeve farther up his forearm, a cocky grin plastered to his face. “Tell your mom I said hello, Sam.”
Then he walked out, leaving me to deflate in silence.
20
Paige
ALMOST TWO WEEKS LATER, I sat in the Library of Congress cloakroom smelling my hair, looking at a picture of an empty store, listening in to Charlotte and Nicole’s conversation while Adele’s “Hello” played from my phone, and shoving a chocolate éclair into my mouth. The éclair was for research. Also, I needed to remember to put multi-tasking ninja on my resume.
“You could do a crowdfunding campaign,” Nicole said from her seat on the floor next to me. She leaned against the wall of lockers behind us and hugged her knees to her chest with hands that were only marked with two numbers each: eleven and thirty-four. The rest had been scrubbed off, and I still had no idea what any of them meant. “Other start-up businesses have done it, and some have even done it successfully.”
Charlotte sat on a short bench in front of us, one leg sticking straight out. “I just don’t know about asking people for money, though. Doesn’t that seem...weird?”
“Businesses need capital,” I said, handing her back her phone with my non-chocolatey fingers. “Sometimes you have to rally people so they realize that, but for an all-night bookstore, I know a few people who would get behind it. Myself included.”
“This would be the perfect place for it, too.” Charlotte sighed wistfully at the picture on her phone.
Before the company who had owned it upgraded to a bigger facility, it had been a quirky gift shop with such items as a ‘Ask me how I set feminism back fifty years’ pin and socks covered in cats with laser-beam eyes. Nicole had squealed loudly that she owned a pair exactly like them. It was the feminism pin that had really struck a chord with me.
My time was up, according to Rick, but I hadn’t wormed myself into a trip with Sam to see his sister or revealed any more dirt on the Clearys other than Riley’s strange text about an abandoned warehouse meeting. My next set of actions all came down to what I wanted, and depending on my location, that ebbed and flowed. With Sam, things were as easy as his smile. Warm and comfortable, too, mixed with the riotous pleasure that coursed through my body whenever he touched me, looked at me, anything with me. We hadn’t been physical since—how had he put it?—I fell on his dick with my mouth, because it felt like things were building between us. Not a brick wall but a constant connection to each other’s thoughts and moods. Being close to him, whether figuratively or literally, filled me with a warm, happy buzz.
But here at the LOC, my clothes and hair infused with the rich scent of ink written centuries ago on musty paper and then bound in leather, the history, the ornate architecture, made it that much harder to resist my childhood dreams. It was like a drug to book junkies, and I was so addicted to it, I no longer cared that smelling myself may not be socially acceptable. And yet behind all that in the swatch of hair I had curled around my lips was the smell of that morning’s bacon breakfast.
I grinned in spite of myself. At the end of my internship, I would probably need the name of a good cardiologist.
Did I want to make my parents proud even if it meant using the man I could definitely maybe be falling for in order to appease Rick? What if I didn’t get chosen for the library job even if I did Rick’s bidding? What if I chose Sam, but he didn’t want me when he found out the truth that I was trying to dig up dirt on his family? Could someone like him, so young and fiercely sexy, accept that I had a daughter with Rick?
At the literacy center with Keisha, he hadn’t clammed up or adopted a fake kind of enthusiasm. He had been his real self, and like most females, Keisha had fallen in love with him in seconds. He wasn’t Rick, and for whatever reason, I desperately needed to witness that undeniable truth even though I already knew it. Deep down, I knew that not all men were the opposite of what they appeared to be or pigs in disguise. I just needed a little reminder every once in a while.
Still, my trust in the opposite sex had a shaky foundation, but somehow Sam knew that. Or could sense it, anyway, which was why he never asked me about Rick after what happened at the literacy center fundraiser, never forced anything out of me, never shoved past personal. And that made it even harder to ignore him and the way he made me feel.
So maybe he could accept Her. But could I?
