Chapter Seventeen Deeply. Desperately. Hopelessly. #3
“Oh, all the time. There’s a lake nearby that’s pretty nice in the summer.”
“Why weren’t you invited?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Like I said, always working. Also…it felt risky.”
“Says the girl getting caught in the theater.”
“It’s different,” she says.
“Don’t see how.”
She raises her chin, singsonging, “Well, you and I are very different people, then.”
“Maybe. But I like your kind of person.”
“The person who can’t even take a risky swim?” she asks.
“What makes it so risky? Truly?”
“Well, if we got caught—”
“We?” I tease.
Her face goes the deepest red.
“N-not you and me,” she corrects. “Just…the bigger…universal we.”
“Uh-huh. Beverly, are you considering that we go skinny-dipping?”
“You are such a—”
“Butt?”
She laughs and reaches out to push my shoulder. I’m chuckling, too, grabbing Beverly’s arm mid-swing and holding it at a distance. But then both our laughs fade into silence as we sit side by side with her arm held in my palm.
I think we realize at the same time just how close we are.
Our eyes trace over each other. Her flushed cheeks, pink in little patches across her smooth skin. That little freckle beside her eye, slightly darker than the rest. They’re intricate details of her face that I haven’t had the privilege of seeing before, now being digested intimately.
I notice for the first time how her green eyes swirl with color. Character is traced through every circle—rings of a tree, years of life embedded in every shade and tint of pine and moss, like the forest outside.
We both lower our arms at the same time, shifting her skin under my palm, leaving behind brushes of silk.
I trace my thumb up to her wrist and over her pulse.
It’s absolutely racing. Instinctively, my fingers start tapping out a beat erratically.
I’m keeping time with her heart. It’s a rushing, rhythmic need.
I swallow, watching her lips part. They shimmer with something glossy. It smells like berries. I let out a low involuntary hum, and my small sound makes us both raise our eyebrows. It says everything I don’t realize I’m thinking.
I want to kiss Beverly Lark.
Deeply.
Desperately.
Hopelessly.
I want to curl my palm against the nape of her neck and capture her for myself—to feel her smooth hair in my hand and the heat of her breath against my lips.
I want to consume that laughter and devour those smiles.
I want her light to radiate through me in a bursting sunbeam that rips through my dull clouds and pulls me to heaven.
I like Beverly Lark. I like her eccentricities and her ’70s fashion. I like her silly character voices. Her kindness. Her smile. Her laugh.
She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met.
And I want to kiss her.
Just as I exhale, cautiously tilting my head, a note strikes on the piano.
Loud. Off kilter. Jarring.
Beverly jumps. I jump. My hand releases her wrist. She folds her hands in her lap. Then we spot Ava with her palms on the piano, a giggle bubbling up her throat.
“Play!” she commands.
I run my palm over my beard. “What did I say about the piano, Ava?”
She giggles more, and I sigh, reaching down to tickle her side. She runs off, but the moment between me and Beverly is broken.
I glance back over to her. She’s staring down at her twisting palms, fiddling with her fingernail polish.
My heart sinks.
Beverly made it clear that our relationship is purely professional—a way to get Birds on the Block up and running.
Even our fake relationship is a convenient excuse to avoid questions about her ex.
Hell, I’m the one who arranged dinner back in LA.
I’m the one who lied about our relationship to Beau.
And now I’ve been mentally twisting our mutual agreement into something more.
Beverly’s not interested in me, and she doesn’t have to be. I like that she’s goal oriented. I like that my fame is irrelevant.
She’s a perfectly professional colleague.
Colleague. That’s all.
But she’s also the type of colleague I want to show off. I want to display her like a gold medal because it feels like bragging to say that Beverly Lark doesn’t mind spending time with me.
“Hey.” I clear my throat, but it doesn’t rid me of the want, the need, the selfishness. “Did you decide whether you’d like to go to the Grammys?” My finger absentmindedly plunks down a piano key. “If you can’t, that’s all right.”
“Oh. Well…we’re fake dating,” she says, twisting it into a joke. “I have to, don’t I?”
I slowly shake my head. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Beverly.”
We lock eyes again, and this time her expression fades to understanding. It’s the same worried expression she’s flirted with all day.
What’s going on in there?
“I’ll go,” she says, suddenly laughing, but it sounds forced. “Obviously I’d love to go with you, Griffin.”
Christ, nothing is obvious about how I feel right now. Her thigh is touching the outside of my own, and I can’t stop thinking about her lips, and she’s exhaling, and it’s soft and gentle and so Beverly.
Not one single thing about our relationship is obvious to me anymore.