Chapter 5
Dane
Ava was surprised. Hell, I surprised myself. But as much as I hated this entire fucking idea, I didn’t want to tell her to get on a plane and go home. I’m an asshole, I know that, but I draw a line at being disrespectful to Ava. And telling her to get lost when she’d come all this way was disrespectful.
Aidan, my best friend, didn’t know our history, but he knew that Ava was the only person I wouldn’t tell to fuck off. Which was why he’d sent her. He really was the devil.
I showered and dressed in jeans and a white tee. I tied my hair back from my face. Then I stood in the bathroom, my hands braced on the counter, and got up the courage to see her again.
If I wanted to see Ava anytime in the past seven years, I could have done it. I could have gone to New York. I could have called her up or sent a text like a normal human. But we weren’t normal, Ava and me. We’d left normal behind a long time ago.
Because she could have called me, too.
I’d never expected her to. I knew she didn’t want to see me again. I knew she didn’t want to talk to me.
It didn’t stop me from asking Aidan how she was every chance I got. Or reading her blog—more than once, to be honest, though I barely understood what I was reading. That, I could do. But calling her, seeing her, crossed the line.
Until today.
“You’re thirty-four years old, Scotland,” I said, still gripping the bathroom counter. “Get a grip and get this done. It’s just Ava.”
Right. Just Ava. Just the woman I’d lost my virginity to, the woman who had trusted me with hers. The woman who had turned my world from gray into color for one cold winter eleven years ago. Right now she was blonde and curvy, sexy, a successful fashion stylist with friends and—I gritted my jaw—boyfriends. But I could still see that girl—brunette, beautiful, serious, smart—who had come into my room late one night and said the words that stayed with me even now: I’m tired of being a virgin.
There was no man on earth who could have resisted Ava in that moment. Including me.
Seeing her now was strange, like the last few years had lasted decades—and like they hadn’t happened at all. But she was waiting for me, and coward or not, there was no way I wasn’t going to go. Even if we were going—Jesus, what a nightmare—shopping.
I left the bathroom and walked back through my apartment. Used the voice commands to moderate the temperature and lighting while I was gone, to activate the security system, to power off my computers. I shoved my wallet and phone in my back pockets and left my penthouse, arming the security pad and getting in the private elevator.
I’d been rich for a long time now, but I never once got in this elevator without remembering the elevator in the building I grew up in, which was old and unreliable and not very clean. I’d lived in with my parents in a high rise near the South Side that had seen better days, a building we lived in because my grandmother lived just down the hall. My parents both worked shift work and were hardly ever home, even more rarely at the same time. The apartment was usually empty, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Until I was thirteen, she’d pretty much raised me.
Then my grandmother got sick with cancer. It happened fast—seven months after she first complained of chronic pain, it was over. She was gone. After she died, my parents worked even longer shifts than they had before, and when I wasn’t at school I was home alone all the time. I got an under-the-table job with a landscaping company, hauling gravel and pulling weeds after school. With the money I saved, I bought my first computer and taught myself how to code.
Coding made sense in my brain. It came to me as easily as breathing. When I coded, I didn’t have to deal with the real world—I made the real world. I didn’t care about school anymore, though I still went sometimes and managed a passing grade. I didn’t care about how I looked or what I wore. I didn’t even care about girls—at least, not much. If I had my computer, I could do whatever the hell I wanted. I was free.
At fifteen, Aidan, Noah, Alex, and I all left home and got an apartment. It was cheap, and of course we had to lie to the landlord to get it—we got the janitor to swear he was Noah’s father when he signed the papers. And it worked. I left that rundown high rise and its bad memories without looking back. I moved in with my friends, and not long after, Ava started camping out with us. She was eleven, just a kid who didn’t want to be home with her uncaring mother, and I barely noticed her as I worked on my code day and night.
Years later, I noticed her. But Aidan was my best friend, so I never let on. Not until that night.
Now, instead of living in that shitty old South Side apartment, I walked through the posh lobby of my building, nodding politely to the security guy. I went down to the parking garage and got in my top-of-the-line Lexus, which I drove maybe once a week, and made my way through traffic to the Langham hotel.
Ava was standing out front. She had changed—now she was wearing a leopard-print dress that barely skimmed her knees and black high heels. For a woman who worked in an industry full of stick-thin women, she had Marilyn Monroe curves. One of the posh, gray-haired guys walking out of the hotel practically tripped over his feet when he saw her.
I opened the door and called to her before George Clooney Lite could make a move. “Ava.”
Her eyes widened and she came toward me, completely oblivious to the daddy figure walking off dejected to get a cab. “I like a man with a nice car,” she said, making her voice a feminine purr.
She was playing with me, I knew that, but the sound still traveled over my skin like an electric charge. “Get in,” I said.
She did, settling into the cream leather seats and wafting me with her sweet vanilla scent. She told me where we were going, but the words tumbled out like a foreign language. Definitely French, but I didn’t recognize anything she said, even though I’d spent the past three weeks learning French from my teaching algorithm.
“I have no idea what that is,” I said.
Ava rolled her eyes. “Of course not. It’s only the poshest menswear company in the city. I made you a measuring appointment.”
I started the car, punching the coordinates she told me into my GPS. “What is a measuring appointment?”
“An appointment where you get measured, Dane. For custom clothes.”
“I already know what size I am.”
“Are we doing this or not?”
Right.
We were doing this.
Ava and me.