Chapter Seventeen
I’m in way over my head. But I can’t let Parker know that.
I’ve always been a long-term relationship kind of girl.
I met my first boyfriend at Columbia. He was the only man I’ve ever known to unironically fill in the “occupation” field with “lyric poet.” Graham and I only made it to graduation.
And although the relationships that followed were just as unremarkable, I stuck them out for at least two years before calling it quits.
Suffice it to say, a casual relationship is uncharted territory—and with the boy next door, whose puberty I had a front-row seat to?
There’s no playbook in the world that could’ve prepared me for this.
I still haven’t figured out where we stand.
Can you be friends with benefits if you’re not really friends anymore?
At no point has friendship come up again since our talk at the café, and we don’t hang out apart from when we hook up.
From our limited texting, I know that he spends most of his time dining with clients and attending sports games.
Occasionally, Parker will ask me for restaurant recommendations, and I’ll reply with something from my Excel spreadsheet of Manhattan eateries, because I once sent him the entire file, and he replied, “I’m not reading all that.
” But we haven’t met anywhere outside of his hotel room since this arrangement started.
We do, however, have something of a system down: One of us will shoot a text—You free tonight?
—and within an hour I’ll be at the St. Regis.
All I know is that in the last two weeks, I’ve been having the best sex of my life.
What is it about being with Parker Tran?
I feel like I’ve unlocked a sixth sense devoted solely to pleasure.
I feel like a woman possessed, an alternate-universe Dani who doesn’t think twice before shoving a man onto a bed and riding him into the sunset.
I’ve never been with someone who knew exactly what I wanted, and at the same time, I’ve never been so in tune with another person to know exactly what they wanted.
It’s as if everything that had been chaotic and confusing about us falls into perfect balance when we’re naked and horny.
Emerging from the bathroom of Parker’s suite, I observe him sitting upright in bed, shirtless and scrolling on his phone.
I wonder what the inner dialogue in his head is like after coming down from the high of orgasm.
I suspect that, unlike me, he isn’t overanalyzing every last detail.
It must be all mental fist bumps up there.
I reach for my clothes at the foot of the bed, and Parker looks up at me. “How are you still wearing clothes from high school?”
I gaze down at the Green Valley insignia emblazoned over my chest. “It’s still a perfectly good shirt. Would’ve been a waste to throw it out.”
“I don’t know if it’s your hoarding that’s more concerning or the fact that you haven’t outgrown your teenage wardrobe.”
“You’re talking, but all I hear is fee-fi-fo-fum.”
“Giant jokes? Really? When I’ve thrown footballs bigger than you?”
“I’m actually average height. But I guess anyone would look small when you’re a descendant of Ents.”
Parker looks like he’s trying to recall what an Ent is, and I use the pause to slip out of the bedroom, through the marble foyer, and into the living room.
The square footage of this suite is still so disorienting.
My MacBook sits on the corner desk, and I wake it to an abandoned article where my last note reads: Important!
Check with source re: cost of . . . Cost of what?
I can’t recall what was so important, because Parker had returned from the gym at that moment and lured me into the bedroom with a kiss that had me seeing the curvature of space-time.
He arrives behind me, looking over my shoulder. “Why’d you bring your laptop on a Sunday? Do you take your job with you everywhere?”
“Coming from you—the guy who has every meal with a client?” I retort. “The last time I was here, I ended up waiting an hour for you. I figured I could use the time to get ahead on work.”
He lifts an incredulous brow, and I know he’s going to tell me to be a normal person and turn on Netflix instead, but his eyes travel back to my screen. He grins to himself as he reads out loud, “How much does a marketing director make.”
I shut the laptop with lightning speed. “Just research for work.”
A sly tilt of his head is all it takes to challenge me. He’s so annoying.
“Fine. I was curious,” I relent, rolling my eyes. “I mean, Venture set you up with a hotel that has complimentary butler service! By the way, Anton dropped off your freshly pressed shirts.” I point woodenly in the direction of the closet. “It seems like you’re a pretty big deal.”
“Most of it is performative.” He ruffles his hair, smooth strands weaving between his long fingers.
“We work with a lot of high-profile clients—professional athletes with huge price tags attached to their names. I’m their point of contact, so Venture wants me to look a lot flashier than I really am. ”
“In other words, you’re a big deal.”
He simply shakes his head as he retrieves his own MacBook from the desk drawer, pulling up his emails.
In a blink, the unread messages triple in number.
As I watch his forehead crease with focus, I look for the boy who’d once been convinced we could communicate from our bedroom windows through a string and two cups.
The memory stows itself away as I slip into my coat. “So, about the hotel’s free luxury car drop-offs—what’s the sitch?”
“It won’t take you far and definitely not all the way to Brooklyn.” Parker glances at his phone. “Service also ended three hours ago.”
“It was worth a shot.” Collecting my laptop, I make a swift exit toward the foyer.
Parker is close behind, leaning against the doorframe as I open the double doors to his suite.
He’s still shirtless, wearing only a pair of black sweatpants.
Thanks to him, I’ve just realized at the age of twenty-eight that I apparently have a thing for guys in sweats.
“You don’t have to leave every time,” he says as I’m opening the Uber app. “It’s late, and I don’t mind if you spend the night.”
“Um, you know that if you rolled on top of me in your sleep, I could die.”
He doesn’t laugh. “The actual reason?”
I frown at him. “I feel like the morning after would be too weird.”
“And everything else we’re doing isn’t weird?”
“That’s the thing. It’s weird enough. And waking up to your face would make it even weirder. I wouldn’t know how to act or what to say.”
“I’m sorry that you find my face so unsettling,” he deadpans. “You can just act normally around me.”
Nothing about our arrangement is normal, and for him to suggest that it is makes me wonder if his brain has turned into postcoital goo. “I can’t find anything normal about waking up to you spooning me.”
“First off, I would never spoon you.” Parker grimaces, but with a renounced sigh, he drops it. “Forget it. Have a good night, Dani.”