17. Closer
Chapter seventeen
Closer
“T he things I do to get laid,” I grumbled as JP slid the patio door open.
“Text someone and then show up at their house?” he replied skeptically.
I gave him an unimpressed look. “You know what I mean.”
“Not really.”
He closed the door behind me. When he turned around, he found me frowning at him.
“What?” he asked.
“What’s wrong?”
His eyebrows flicked up. “What do you mean, what’s wrong?”
“I dunno. You seem weird.”
“Pretty sure you’ve told me multiple times that I’m not normal.”
“That’s true, but you’re extra weird right now.”
“I’m fine, babe.”
“Don’t call me babe.”
And maybe if he responded like he usually did, I would have assumed JP’s initial weirdness was me reading things wrong. Like, maybe I was still stuck on the worry that things were weird because I’d asked him to be my date at the Diamond Gala. Or maybe he was a little tired or extra horny and couldn’t think straight. But for the second time in the thirty seconds since I’d snuck into the Marchands’ house, JP didn’t run his mouth in response to something I’d said like he always did.
“Whatever you say,” he said, not even throwing an infuriating “babe” at the end, but before I could accuse him of lying to me, he gestured towards the staircase. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”
“I swear, you only want one thing from me,” I huffed as I walked past him to the staircase. “No ‘hello,’ no ‘how are you,’ no—”
“I thought that was your preferred way of doing things,” he said, following me. “But you can tell me how the funeral was while we go.”
“Why? So you can put my mouth to better use once we’re in your room?”
Finally, he chuckled. “Obviously.”
Unfortunately, I probably shouldn’t have taken JP up on the offer to tell him about things as we walked up to his room. The Marchands had a big house, but it wasn’t nearly a long enough walk to tell him everything that had happened that day. When we reached his room, I’d only managed to cover my general feelings about Arthur Kroft and the kind of person he was and had just started to tell him about Arthur having two daughters even though only one of them was in the funeral procession.
“That’s crazy,” JP said as he opened the bedroom door. “Sounds like I didn’t miss much.”
“Oh, you missed tons,” I said. “That doesn’t even get into the fact that Clinton was there being his usual prick self. You wanna know what that asshole said to me?”
“Uh… sure,” he said.
“Okay, well, first of all, he almost caught me texting you,” I said. “Luckily I don’t have your actual name in my phone.”
“What do you have me in your phone as?” he asked.
“Bastard.”
His lips curled downwards in concession. “Fair.”
“I know.” I pulled the bedroom door closed behind me. JP was standing near the edge of his bed expectantly, but I didn’t go to him right away. “He legitimately thinks I’m playing hard to get. Like, he thinks me outright saying he disgusts me and I want nothing to do with him is a game. Like I’m flirting.”
“He is pretty disgusting,” JP agreed.
“Right? And my dad still thinks I should give him a chance.”
“Sounds like you need something to help you forget that.”
“Like anyone could forget that.” I huffed, turning away from JP as an echo of the rage from earlier perked up, and paced past the foot of his bed. “But what can you expect from a guy who thinks a funeral is the best place to talk an investor into working with him? Oh, and not just any funeral. The funeral of that person’s partner .”
“Not much, I guess,” JP said, his tone resigned.
“Exactly. He doesn’t see the problem with that.” I let out a dry laugh, looking out JP’s window. “To the point he asked me to drop everything I was doing and drive out here for a thirty-second introduction to this person. Which, of course, I screwed up by having the audacity to give my condolences to a seventy-something year old woman who, again, just lost her partner .”
It wasn’t quite a conscious decision to let my feelings about the day spill from my mouth like that. It just happened, words blurting themselves out as I paced JP’s room, reliving every annoying moment of the day from my interaction with Clinton to my dad’s reaction to my screw up and even seeing Claire’s cleavage in the bathroom. The occasional hum of agreement or mumble of understanding underscored my rant, but apparently I’d gotten so swept away that I stopped looking at him at some point.
“Oh, and that was all after Anne-Marie dragged me over to say hi to Ms. Travers, who decided to—” I stopped speaking and moving, staring at JP. “You’re not even listening to me.”
JP, who was sitting on his bed, flipped a page of the book he was holding. “Yes, I am.”
“You’re reading a book.”
“I can do two things.”
“You’re literally reading a book and ignoring me,” I said, trying not to sound as hurt as I felt.
“I promise you, I was listening,” he said, finally glancing up. “You have to remember I have ten years of experience listening to the AMNN. This is hauntingly similar.”
“You read while Anne-Marie talks to you?”
“Talks at me, but yes. I read the whole Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy over multiple updates about Ives Clement’s affair and can still tell you every last detail.” He tilted his head to the side. “Though, I did put the book down for a bit when the whole hitman thing came into play.”
“The what now?”
“Hitman.” He put his book down beside him. “Ives and Stacia, the woman he was having the affair with, allegedly tried to hire a hitman to kill his wife so he could inherit her money, which he wouldn’t have gotten if he divorced her because of the prenup. Fortunately, not only is Ives an idiot, it wasn’t the first time Stacia tried to pull the same thing, so they ended up trying to hire an undercover cop. And the whole thing went down over the course of, like, two weeks.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know, right? I can’t believe I read five books in two weeks, either.”
“Not that,” I said. “The fact that Anne-Marie knows someone who—and wait .” I pointed a finger at him. “You’re full of shit.”
“I’m not. It’s only ‘allegedly’ because Ives claimed it was a misunderstanding and that he didn’t know what a hitman does.”
“Not that. You said it was a trilogy. Now it’s five books?”
“ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a trilogy of five.”
“For all the Latin you lawyers use, you’d think you’d know that tri means three.”
He nodded towards the bookshelf beside his desk. “Second from the top, about a third of the way in from the left. Count ‘em.”
“I’m not going to look just so you can laugh at me.” I glared at him. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter. You seriously don’t see how you sitting there reading a fucking book while I’m talking is rude?”
“I’m not saying it’s not,” he said.
“Oh. So you’re being rude on purpose.”
“It doesn’t mean I’m not listening.” He sighed. “I just… you said you didn’t want to talk about it. And I thought you were here because…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Probably because he realized how much of an asshole it would make him. But it didn’t matter because I finished the sentence for him.
“Because we both wanted to get laid,” I said. “Which is reasonable, I guess, because that’s what this whole thing is.”
“Nell—”
“Whatever. You’re right. We’re not friends or anything, so it’s not fair for me to make you sit there and listen to me. Especially when regardless of what you said, you are acting weird.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be.” It came out snappier than I intended. “It’s fine.”
He sighed. “It’s not. You’re right and I’m sorry. I was being rude.”
“And petty.”
“And petty,” he agreed.
“And shallow.”
“Like a kiddie pool in a drought,” he said. “But I promise, I was listening."
“Don’t lie to me.”
He raised his eyebrows, studying me in silence, then took his book and moved it to the nightstand.
“You were about to tell me about Ms. Travers—who I’m guessing is Sylvie Travers, who was one of Anne-Marie’s teachers and works with the HueManity Foundation, which is probably why Anne-Marie was introducing you—and what she said to you,” he said. “Right after whatever that was, you ran into a woman named Claire and her fiancée, Julie, when you were all hiding in the bathroom, but you aren’t sure what they were hiding from. There was a tangent about how good Claire’s boobs looked and that she said you were funny and pretty after you joked about the dead guy being involved in animal testing. And that segues nicely into your rant about Arthur Kroft, who you thought was a gem of a person so long as we’re talking about the way kid’s jewellery sets from the dollar store have ‘real gemstones’ on them.”
I bit my lip. “Well—”
“You also thought it was arrogant that he claimed to have invented the ‘Cheeky Sham-Sham,’ which is just Chambord in champagne. And this goes a little off book, but I’m assuming this is all at odds with your frustration about how fake and performative everything was because you wanted to be offended on his behalf, but he’s a massive asshole, so you don’t feel all that bad about it.”
“I… object,” I said, frowning. “Speculation.”
A puff of laughter escaped his lips. “On top of all that, Clinton was being Clinton and your dad was being your dad by trying to turn a funeral into a business opportunity, which I fully agree was slimy of him because said business opportunity involved the widow of the deceased. Oh, and despite gossiping about everyone and everything, you couldn’t get Anne-Marie to spill why I got out of the funeral, so had to take on the onerous task of asking me yourself.”
He looked at me expectantly, though not sarcastically. It was more hopeful, like he genuinely wanted me to acknowledge that he’d heard everything I said.
“See? I knew you weren’t listening,” I said.
He made an incredulous noise. “What? What did I miss?”
“They weren’t married. So she’s not a widow. He was her ‘life partner.’”
He let out an exasperated breath, but a small smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “Fair enough, babe. Why don’t you come sit here and tell me what Sylvie—sorry, what Ms. Travers said that got you upset enough to hide in the bathroom.”
I rolled my eyes, even as I let his words draw me a step closer to the bed. “I wasn’t upset . I just needed a break.”
“Right. But what she said contributed to that.”
“Well, yeah.” I pinched my fingers together, not looking at JP. “I was kind of a brat when I was in her class.”
“You? A brat?” he said.
“More than usual.” I tapped my fingertip to my thumb. “I was enough of a little shit that she still hates me, like, ten years later.”
“That seems unfair.”
“Yeah, especially since I kind of had a reason for it.”
“You did?”
I nodded. “That was when my parents were getting divorced.”
He made a knowing sound. “That makes sense.”
“Not to her, apparently.” I scoffed. “She said I’d make a good mentor with HueManity because apparently she thinks I have something wrong with me. But when I said I don’t have ADHD she was like, ‘Oh, I guess you’re just like that .’ Because obviously it couldn’t be that my parents were splitting up and fighting all the time. There has to be something wrong with me.”
“Having ADHD doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you,” he said.
“The word ‘disorder’ is literally in the name. Disorder, aka something that’s out of order.”
“It’s a condition, not a—” He stopped and sighed. “Look, I’m not saying what she said was appropriate, but I’ve been running for Illumi-Nite for seven years. Anne-Marie puts more hours in for HueManity than I do. One of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met was—” Another pause, followed by a shake of his head. “He had ADHD and yeah, that made some things in his life harder, but it didn’t mean there was something wrong with him, okay?”
The words came out more heated than I think he intended. I flicked my fingertip across my thumbnail nervously, not sure how I was supposed to respond. JP looked down at his hands, like I wouldn’t be able to see the way his face had reddened a bit.
“You’re smart as fuck too,” he said. “There wouldn’t be anything wrong with you, either. If you did have it.”
“Okay, seriously,” I said. “What’s going on with you?”
He looked up. “Why do you think something’s going on?”
"You just called me smart."
"So?"
"And didn't even add 'for a blonde' or something to it." I crossed my arms again. "Like, you’re kinda cranky for someone who somehow got out of going to a funeral today, but you’re also all… distant or something.”
JP stared at me. I thought he was going to cave and tell me what was going on, but he shook his head a moment later. A moment after that, a familiar roguishness was sparkling in his eye.
“If you think I’m distant, maybe you should come closer.”
It wasn’t an order, just like it wasn’t a suggestion. It was an invitation and a challenge all at once, something woven through the gravelly tone of his voice. I almost shivered, but tightened my folded arms and stood firm. “Tell me what’s going on first.”
“It was a long day.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you.”
I raised my eyebrows so it was clear I wasn’t buying it. “JP, come on.”
“I’d love to, but my aim isn’t good enough to hit you from all the way over here.”
For as many times as I’d tried not to laugh at JP because I didn’t want him to know how funny I thought he was, sometimes I couldn’t help it. A laugh slipped out and the smile on JP’s lips grew.
“Come closer, babe,” he said.
And maybe I shouldn’t have.
Maybe I should’ve kept listening to that little voice, like the tingling of a bell, warning me not to let it go.
But that little voice seemed to support decisions that didn’t get me laid, so I took half a step forward, bringing my legs against the foot of JP’s bed.
“Closer,” he said.
I unfolded my arms and knelt on the edge of the mattress. JP’s eyes took on a heavy look.
“Closer,” he said again, his voice going soft, and softer still when he repeated it after I inched forward, and again when I crawled forward, and again until I was on his lap.
“Just a little more,” he whispered.
“Any closer and you’re gonna end up inside me,” I said.
“And they say blondes aren’t smart.”
“You’re blonde, dumbass.”
“No one said I was smart.”
“Since when do you consider yourself no one?”
He chuckled, his face close enough to mine that his breath puffed against the tip of my nose. His hand moved to my hip, tracing over my running shorts and up my sides until his fingertips were caressing my cheek.
“You’ve had a shitty day,” he said, so quiet I felt his words more than I heard them. “Let me take your mind off it.”
“How’re you gonna do that?”
His mouth twitched, the corners tugging up into a smirk that was becoming far too familiar.
“I’m gonna make you come”—all at once he twisted, so sudden and so confidently that I was on my back before I even realized we’d moved—“here, babe.”