42. Playing Dirty
42
Playing Dirty
Sophie
Maybe Elle notices my sudden bad mood, because she walks over to take my arm and steer me away from the group I’m standing with, which has been growing more nervous and uncomfortable and seems visibly relieved when Elle takes me away.
Night has fallen fully now, and in the corner of the conservatory, a DJ is starting to turn the music up.
People are eating less now, drinking more, speaking louder.
The scent of cigarette smoke drifts from the gardens, where people are standing under strings of lanterns.
The mood, for a corporate event, is relaxed, almost fun—but I’m the opposite.
I’m tense, angry, and determinedly gloomy.
Elle presses a glass in my hand.
I take a sip without looking at it, and my entire body convulses.
“God! What is this, jet fuel?”
“It’s a double. You look like you need it.”
“No, no, no.” I lean over her to place the drink down on the tray carried by a passing server.
“I’m not getting drunk tonight. ”
“Why?” She frowns.
“Everybody else is. We’ve fulfilled our business obligations, and this is the last week of the internship. You can relax, honey.”
“You don’t understand.” I bite down hard, feel the twitching in my jaws.
“I can’t relax.”
Elle watches me for a second.
She looks phenomenal tonight: matching set in rose-red tweed, strappy heels and her long blonde hair is tied up in a ponytail that falls in one perfect coil down her back.
She looks like she wants to have fun, and I’ve seen how hard she’s worked all summer.
She definitely deserves to have fun.
“Is it because of him?” she asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know who you mean.”
She peers over my shoulder.
“Please, how naive do you think I am? You’re obviously standing here so he can stare at your ass in that dress—it’s working, by the way.”
“I’m sorry,” I intone in my frostiest lawyer voice.
“I’m not sure who you’re talking about.”
Elle reaches out to grab my cheeks, squishing my face as she turns it firmly to the side, forcing me to face a certain golden-haired idiot standing with his hands in his pockets, laughing at something the woman next to him is saying.
Since I refuse to look at him, my eyes fall on the woman—the one who pulled him away earlier.
She’s beautiful in a dark, swarthy way, but worse than that: she’s fucking cool.
Instead of a dress, she’s wearing black trousers and a structured, strapless black top with a sharp, asymmetric neckline that shows off the tattoos on her shoulders and arms. Everyone standing in their group is listening attentively to her, and the way she swirls her drink—plain liquor on ice—just screams poise and confidence .
And it burns like acid to watch the way Evan’s eyes rest on her, the way their shoulders brush with easy familiarity, and the burn is exacerbated to fresh, vivid agony by the fact she’s exactly the kind of woman Evan likes.
No, that this is exactly the kind of woman he should be with.
Confident, self-possessed, someone whom he could love openly, with no conditions, no history, no baggage.
The woman turns her head ever so slightly, eyes almost meeting mine, and I whip around like I’ve been slapped, heart pounding.
Facing Elle once more, I realise she’s long let go of my face.
“Him?” I say with a short, angry laugh.
“That’s ancient history, Elle, come on. Can’t you see he’s moved on?”
Elle frowns and turns to look back at him.
“What, the woman next to him? No chance. Isn’t she too old for him?”
I grab her arm and pull her away, out of the line of sight of Evan and his edgy brunette, half-hiding behind the people who are starting to dance in the dark space between the bar and the DJ’s set-up.
“She looks like she’d step on his neck,” I hiss at Elle, “and that’s exactly what he’s into.”
“No.” She shakes her head.
“I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding him. Your Evan doesn’t like you because you step on his neck. He likes you, and because you step on his neck, he likes having his neck stepped on.”
“If he liked me,” I say spitefully, “then why is he chatting up that woman and not me?”
“You’re jealous?” Elle says in a tone of surprise.
“Don’t be utterly ridiculous.”
“He’s not chatting her up, they’re talking . Those are probably his co-workers, look, they’re drinking a toast. Why don’t you go say hello? I’m sure he’d love to introduce you. ”
I narrow my eyes at Elle, and she takes a step back under the sheer venom in my stare.
“Understand, Elle Laura Sinclair, that I would rather set fire to myself, this entire mansion, and everyone in it, than do that.”
“God, Sophie,” she mutters half into her glass, taking a gulp of her drink, “I never had you down as the jealous type.”
“I’m not jealous,” I snap.
“There’s nothing to be jealous of .”
“So you’re angry for no reason?”
“I’m not angry, I’m—”
“Desperately pent-up and horribly sexually frustrated?”
I blink at Elle.
And then I smile.
“That’s exactly it.” Straightening myself, I search the crowd with a glance.
“Where’s that guy that gave me his number earlier? The LA guy with the longish hair?”
“ Now’s the time you’ve decided to get over Evan?” Elle asks, agog.
“Really?”
“Better than never.”
I spot the guy who’s been eyeing me up all night.
He’s got his shirt sleeves rolled back and is finishing a cigarette on the porch.
When our eyes meet, he grins at me, and I answer by crooking my finger at him in a silent command.
He straightens, standing to attention, and hastens to look for an ashtray in which to crush what’s left of his cigarette.
Elle and I watch him, and Elle says, “Him?”
“Why not? He’s tall, good-looking, and actually has interesting stories.”
“He’s not interested in telling you stories, he’s interested in shoving his tongue as far down your throat as he possibly can.”
“Excellent.”
Wrapping my hand over Elle’s, I raise her glass to my lips and take a sip of her eye-watering cocktail.
Then I shake my shoulders back, dab my lips with my fingertips and blow a kiss at Elle.
“Don’t wait up.”
LA guy is a good time, actually.
He’s a little tipsy, and even though I’m not, it’s easy enough to get carried away by his good mood, his brash, showy American cheer.
He leads me to the dance floor, and even though I’m not in the mood for dancing, I let him.
I laugh at all his jokes—men’s version of foreplay—and when he touches my waist, I let him.
I don’t bother to look around and check if Evan’s watching.
It doesn’t matter if he’s watching.
This isn’t about him.
When LA guy starts leading me away from the conservatory, I hesitate.
I don’t want to go with him, but I have to.
More importantly—I can .
So I let him.
Why not?
It needs to happen at some point.
I need to do this because I’m not Alice Liu’s parents.
I can’t spend the rest of my life pining for my first love, my complicated high school sweetheart.
Real love is a myth that I’m too smart to believe, and if Evan wants equal investment, equal risk, equal pain and equal pleasure, he can get it from his cool new girlfriend.
Who cares? I don’t.
And then I find myself alone with LA guy in a small, luxurious coat room.
The room itself is warm, perfumed and claustrophobic, the walls upholstered in a deep, suggestive oxblood silk, the lights low, half-hidden behind fur coats and designer jackets, the plush carpet swallowing the sounds of our footsteps .
LA guy closes the door behind us and turns to me with a grin, his hands sliding down to my waist.
My heart seizes, a cold wave of anxiety crawling up my back.
Shit, what on earth am I doing?
Now that we’re alone here, I’m suddenly on the back foot.
How can I make Evan jealous if he’s not here to see this?
What’s the point of making out with this guy if I don’t get what I need out of it?
No—the goal wasn’t to make Evan jealous.
It was to move on, right?
“Hey, you okay?” LA guy laughs nervously, reaching out to cup my cheek with his hand and raise my eyes to his.
“You look like you’re a thousand miles away.”
“I overthink things,” I tell him.
“Yeah?” he laughs, and I envy how carefree he sounds.
I smell the alcohol on his breath and wish that I’d downed Elle’s deadly cocktail after all.
“You need help getting you out of your own head?”
That’s exactly what I need.
Only, the tragedy of it all is that the person I need to get out of my head is also the only person who can get me out of my head.
I let out a sharp, scoffing breath.
“You can try.”
“Oh, I will.”
The door opens.
It opens noiselessly, and we wouldn’t have noticed it if the coatroom wasn’t so small.
We break apart slightly, my heart leaping into my throat.
Evan doesn’t barge in: he leans in the doorway, arms crossed, his presence saturating the room like electricity before a thunderstorm.
He doesn’t seem angry, or even annoyed.
His eyes lock on mine, curious and patient and unbothered .
He doesn’t even deign to look at LA guy.
He looks straight at me, and there’s a shadow of a smirk on his face.
He doesn’t demand to know what’s happening, doesn’t kick LA guy out, doesn’t ask a question, as if he already knows why we’re here, as if he’s been expecting this very moment.
He tilts his head questioningly, mockingly, and speaks in a soft, amused tone.
“Don’t play dirty, Sutton.”
“I’m not .”
I answer in a bitter snap, too fast, too defensive, and I hate that I’m riled up, angry and restless and embarrassed, and I hate that this guy’s hand is on my waist where I don’t want it, and I hate that Evan’s not even looking at him, as if he can see right through my pathetic, paper-thin scheming.
LA guy, who’s looked up at the sound of Evan’s voice, blinks glassily, gaze shifting between me and Evan.
He doesn’t remove his hand from my waist, and his grip tightens ever so slightly, a wordless claim.
Brave. Stupid, but brave.
“Are you done playing yet?” Evan asks me.
Oh, I hate him, I could kill him, I could do unspeakable things to him.
“Hey, man,” LA guy says, finally letting me go and turning fully towards Evan.
“You’re kind of interrupting, so—”
“No.”
Evan finally looks at him.
Just a glance. Up. Down.
Disinterested. Dismissing him not as a rival but as some mild inconvenience.
“You’re done here.”
He says it with such deadly, dismissive calm that for a moment, there’s nothing but a stunned, heavy silence.
Then LA guy steps towards Evan, hands curling at his sides.
“She came here with me .”
Evan’s mouth quirks at the corner, almost pitying .
“But you’re not what she wants.”
And then Evan steps into the coatroom: it felt small before, but the moment he’s inside, the space and air is sucked out of the room, everything reduced down to the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his limbs, the blazing blue of his eyes, the sheer heat of his skin.
He bypasses LA guy without so much as looking at him, standing right in front of me, and it takes every morsel of strength in my soul to resist the urge to flinch back into a pile of fur coats.
“Tell him,” he says to me, voice so low it’s almost a whisper.
“Tell him what you really want.”
I shake my head.
The air is so heavy, so warm that I can barely breathe, chest heaving as I squeeze in sharp, shallow intakes of air.
“No.”
He tips his head back, looking at me through half-lidded eyes, blue irises glinting through gold lashes.
“Lie, then.” His breath glides over my lips.
I can tell he’s not been drinking, and the realisation that we’re both stone-cold sober sends a wave of panic through me.
“Tell me you want him. I dare you .”
I shove him hard, but he doesn’t move so much as an inch, his body a warm wall of muscle blocking out the rest of the world.
“Arrogant asshole,” I bite out.
“So what, if you like it?”
“I don’t like it—I hate it.”
His fingers slide up.
He grips the back of my neck firmly but without force, tilting my head back.
“Two years since we left Spearcrest, and you’re still lying to yourself.”
“I’m not—”
My voice breaks, snapped in half under the cutting blue of his gaze, melted to nothing in the heat of his hand on the nape of my neck, his fingers digging into the base of my skull, his touch, commanding but not cruel, possessive but not forceful.
“Say it, Sutton.”
His voice is low, silken, laced with promise and authority.
I spit out the words like poison.
“ I want you .”
“Sweet girl. I know you do.”
And then Evan pulls away, and I almost stumble back into the coats and furs and blood-red walls, dizzy from the loss of his heat, his hands, his grip, his control.
I blink around, disoriented and breathless, only to realise that we’re alone in the coatroom, the door already closed.
LA guy is long gone.