EXCERPT FROM RUNNING HOTT
RHYS
I’m starting to second-guess this hookup.
On the surface, everything’s going well. Kirsten sat down next to me at the bar where I was nursing a single malt and struck up conversation. She’s gorgeous—a tall, willowy, brunette with curves for miles, blue eyes, and full lips. Somewhere around the time she finished her first drink, she grinned, said, “So. What would you say about going somewhere a little more comfortable?”
I said, “Sounds good, as long as you’re okay with just tonight, condom non-negotiable, no sleepovers,” and she didn’t bat an eyelash.
She works in retail, managing purchasing for a city-wide chain of furniture stores. I don’t buy my own furniture, so our paths will never cross again. More importantly, I’ve never represented her or her ex in a divorce. That’s a line I won’t cross.
She texted my driver’s license to a friend, showed me a photo of her recent STD panel, and asked for mine, which I gladly provided. A “go” on both fronts.
In the back of the hired car, we made out, and it was great. No red flags, lots of enthusiasm.
But as we exit the car and reach the front door of my apartment building, she leans in and whispers, “How do you feel about role playing?”
I’ve never role played, but I did once take an improv class, and it was a total nightmare. I’m at home in front of a courtroom and a judge, but when I have to pretend to be someone else, something in my brain freezes.
“Not really my thing,” I tell her.
Kirsten runs a fingertip down the placket of my shirt, pausing to caress each button in turn. My cock hardens.
“Could you make an exception for me?” she purrs, finger reaching the bottom of my shirt and sliding across the top of my belt buckle.
“Uh—okay?”
This is a dick answer, as in, my dick answered while my brain was apparently somewhere else entirely.
The door sweeps open. Shit. Of course, Sarah’s the door person on duty tonight. She glares at Kirsten.
This is what comes of turning down Sarah’s proposition a few months ago on the grounds that it would be awkward since she works where I live. Since then, she has laser-eyed every woman who walks through this door on my arm—just a few, but unfortunately always on her shift—and she hasn’t stopped trying to convince me to change my mind. “Look,” she informed me, one evening: “I pay attention. The women you bring home? They’re upstairs with you for an average time of two hours and forty-seven minutes, and they leave here looking dehydrated and glowing. Do you have any idea what percentage of men in Manhattan can get a woman off? Lower than the chance of being killed by a meteorite. For the love of God, Rhys, just once.”
(Side note: she’s wrong about the percentage; I looked up the chance of being killed by a meteorite. It’s 1 in 840 million.)
Kirsten ignores Sarah’s fiery eyes of doom—or pretends to ignore them, anyway—draping herself along my side as Sarah calls the elevator for us. I breathe a sigh of relief once the elevator doors close. The relief lasts approximately three seconds before Kirsten says, “I’m so glad you’re down with role playing.” She smiles at me from under long, thick eyelashes.
I’d been hoping she’d forgotten.
“You can be the high school quarterback. And I’ll be the nerdy girl who didn’t get chosen for the cheerleading team.”
Okay. I can do this. Right? This is what she needs, and I specialize in what women need.
“Your name is Randall Westbrook,” she instructs. “And mine is Kristen Patton.”
“But that’s basically your real name,” I object, before I can think better of it.
“My real name is Kirsten Payton,” she chastises.
“Right. Sorry.”
She tilts her head. “You pretend you don’t know I exist, but you’ve been watching me for years. Since we were both freshmen. Wanting me. Wanting to cross all the clique boundaries that keep us apart.” She clasps a hand to her chest. “That time in PE when you made fun of me, you were just trying to make a connection with me.”
Remarkably specific. My blood cools. The elevator feels…small.
“Let’s say I’m in the library, searching for a book. You’re going to have to make the first move, Randall,” she whispers. “I’m too scared. You’ve never shown me the slightest sign that you care about my existence.” She turns her body toward the elevator wall, running her fingertips over the brass-colored panel.
Despite the pretty view, my, er, enthusiasm, flags. “Uh, Kirs—Kris—ack, sorry.”
“Kristen,” she prompts in a whisper.
“Kristen,” I obediently repeat, and then, unable to stop myself, “It seems like maybe high school was a hard time for you?”
I mentally add another item to the list of lines I won’t cross during casual hookups: If I find myself delivering therapy, something has gone very wrong.
“I’m fine. It’s a game,” she says sternly. “Say, ‘You think I don’t see you, Kristen, but I do.’”
“You, uh, think I don’t see you, Kristen, but I, uh—I do.”
I wince again.
But apparently it works for her, because her fingers caress the brass wall, leaving sweaty streaks. “Me? Randall, are you talking to me?”
She gives me an innocent look over her shoulder.
“Yes, you. I see you all the time when you’re—” My mind goes blank. “—you know, answering questions in class. And I don’t think you’re a nerd?—”
“No, he likes me because I’m a nerd,” she corrects, just as the elevator pings and the door opens. She peels herself off the wall/bookcase and we step into the hallway.
I draw my first full breath since we left the lobby. “You know,” I attempt, “I think maybe role-play isn’t my?—”
“You’re doing amazing,” she tells me, and—perhaps noting that she might be losing me—reaches up, wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me.
Ah, yes. This. This is great. I kiss her back, and yes. Now we’re on track, kissing, groping, stumbling toward my apartment. I fumble in my pocket and find my key card, opening the door, guiding her inside, turning her around to press her against the door, my front to her back.
“Say, ‘You dirty little bookworm,’” she prompts, and?—
I can’t force the words out. I open my mouth and all that comes out is a slow hiss of sad air.
“Say, ‘You dirty little bookworm,’” she murmurs again, like the problem is that I didn’t hear the first time. Or didn’t understand.
But the real problem is, this is all wrong. Randall Westbrook (or Randy Weston, or whatever his real name was) clearly never had the slightest interest in Kirsten Payton. And yet, more than a decade later, she still fantasizes about him rocking her world.
Why the fuck do women persist in having such romantic, optimistic, self-destructive ideas about love, when it’s pressingly clear that men and women, if left to their own devices, will tear each other to shreds?
Like the voice of God—or a vengeful spirit—a warbly baritone comes from behind me:
“Rhys Hott. You can’t stay cynical about love forever.”
When Kirsten and I stop shrieking like little kids who’ve been jump-scared, I say, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
The short, balding man in my living room gets to his feet, waving a single sheet of cream-colored paper. “I’m serving you with the letter from your grandfather’s will. Nice place, by the way,” he says, scanning our surroundings.
My apartment is my castle. I’ve put a ton of time and effort into turning a generic Manhattan one-bedroom into my perfect bachelor pad. I hired a designer; I okayed every design decision. I signed off on the the mission-style furnishings, the William-Morris–influenced textiles, the Arts-and-Crafts–era paintings and handcrafts. Heavy, dark, comforting.
“Who is he?” Kirsten, quite reasonably, demands, pointing at the all-too-real specter in my apartment.
“He,” I say, with a heavy sigh, “is Arthur Weggers, my grandfather’s attorney and the executor of his will. He lives in Rush Creek, Oregon, where I grew up.”
“Why is he here?”
Weggers puffs up his chest. “I’m here to read Rhys a letter from his grandfather.”
“My dead grandfather,” I clarify, since that part isn’t always obvious. “There’s this thing—” I close my eyes, because, where do you even start with this? “My grandfather is making me and all my brothers—I have four—jump through these weird hoops in order to keep the land we grew up on and save my sister’s business, and it’s Weggers’ job to make sure we all do the things we’re supposed to. I really wish I’d taken you to court way back when you read Quinn’s letter,” I growl at him.
“You still can,” he says, with a shrug.
“And be the brother who dragged this out until the deadline was past and got Hanna’s land and business taken away?”
“You said it, not me.” He shrugs again.
In an act of supreme self-control, I don’t wring his neck.
“Wait,” Kirsten asks me, “What do you have to do?”
“Do you want her here while I read the letter?” Weggers asks.
I contemplate all the possible ways this plays out, and I realize that I have just been handed a brilliant exit to at least one of my night’s problems. “I think I would prefer for the reading to be private,” I tell Kirsten.
“Ohhh-kay,” she says. “We could, you know, meet up a little later? Or tomorrow night?” She pins me with a hopeful, wide-eyed gaze.
“Remember what I said—about the once-and-only-once?—”
I try to murmur this low enough that Weggers doesn’t hear, but he’s hovering, and the gleam in his eye suggests I’ve failed.
“But we didn’t actually, you know—” Kirsten makes a vague gesture that is definitely intended to indicate sex.
“True. But I’m very strict about this rule, and once someone passes through the door of my apartment, that counts as the once. So even if for whatever reason”—like my apartment has been invaded by a self-important gnome—“it doesn’t actually culminate in”—I’m not usually this cagey about sex, but I can’t say the word fucking while Arthur Weggers is in my apartment, which pisses me off even more—“penetrative sex, it still counts as the once. I’m sorry. I have to be very strict. For reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“Yes!” Weggers cries gleefully. “We all want to know what reasons!”
I press my hand into Kirsten’s back and usher her to the door, glaring over my shoulder at Weggers as I do. “For reasons,” I repeat, and manage to maneuver her outside my apartment, whereupon I say, “Bye! It was nice hanging out with you tonight!” then shut the door, tightly, and lean against it like I’m trying to keep out some kind of paranormal horror.
Which leaves me in here with this other paranormal horror.
“How’s the hookup life working out for you?” Weggers asks, smirking.
“Screw you,” I say.
He snickers. Snickers! The real miracle of the fifteen months is not that we never took Weggers to court. It’s that none of us offed him in his sleep.
“Why are you here?” I demand.
“You already know why I’m here.”
“Why didn’t you summon me to Rush Creek?”
“Would you have come?”
I consider. “Probably not.”
“That’s why I’m here. I learned from chasing your brother all over creation that it’s not worth my effort. So I came straight to you.”
“How’d you get into my apartment?”
But I already know. Never, ever alienate the doorperson. Sarah knew Weggers was sitting in my apartment when she sent Kirsten and me upstairs in the elevator. She’s down there laughing her ass off as Kirsten slinks by on her way out, far under the average two hours and forty-seven minutes later…
I point my finger at my grandfather’s proxy. “It’s illegal for a process server to misrepresent?—”
“Save your breath,” Weggers says, waving his hand again. “I told her the truth. I told her I was your grandfather’s lawyer and that I was here to let you know your grandfather’s legacy to you. I asked if I could wait in your apartment and I showed her proof of my identity, evidence of my lawyer-client relationship to your grandfather, and a copy of the letter, which she read. She approved of it, by the way,” he adds.
“Who cares whether my doorperson approves of my grandfather’s—? No, you know what? I don’t want to hear your answer to that. I don’t want to hear anything?—”
“Too late!” Weggers crows, eyes dancing. “I already read the first sentence!”
“What first sentence?”
“‘Rhys Hott. You can’t stay cynical about love forever.’”
I sigh. “I can. And I will.”
Weggers peers through his reading glasses at the letter and carries on. “‘Let’s see if we can turn your grim view of love around by exposing you to a rosier view of romance. At the time of the reading of this letter, your sister is in charge of some number of weddings. Exactly fifty percent of these, plus or minus one, designated by Arthur Weggers, will become your responsibi?—’”
Fucking fuckity fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck he did fucking not!
I don’t lose my shit. I get paid—supremely well—not ever, ever, ever to lose my shit. So I don’t say that out loud, but apparently something on my face gives me away, because Weggers cries, “I wish your brothers were here!”
I don’t. They’d have way too good a time with this.