Chapter 11
In the end, Jack vacuums in his apartment and then orders the pie—plain cheese and not some weird fruit-and-meat-combo topping, blessedly—and I run off to shower before it arrives.
I don’t examine too closely why I put on makeup at ten o’clock at night.
But when I take the seat Jack indicates, I swear I detect the intoxicating scents of woodsy cologne and mint mouthwash.
We eat. Jack puts on the Mets game and swears at it every once in a while.
“Why do you own a ‘Penis Colossus’ magnet?”
“Won a contest.”
I swallow my laugh and shake my head.
“A gift from one of my cruder friends. Oh, come on,” he says, the TV snaring his attention. “Catch the ball.”
“You’re one of those? A couch coach?” I rip my pizza into bite-size pieces. “Boring.”
“I’d be torn up by your disdain if you ate pizza like a normal person,” he says. “The hell is that?”
“It’s called ‘if I had a knife and fork handy, I’d use them instead, but I’m too lazy to get up.’”
He stares at me, absolutely horrified.
“Really? You, Mr. Vacuum-To-Control-The-Chaos himself, can’t understand not trusting a floppy piece of anarchy leaking sauce and cheese and oil everywhere?”
He grabs a slice purposefully, folds it in half, and takes a bite, staring at me all the while. To prove a point.
I’ve never been so gratified to see a renegade chunk of sauce fall on someone in all my life.
“Ah, shit.” He looks adorable, pressed in the far corner of his sofa, grimacing over his shirt. I feel a sudden, appalling wave of affection for him.
There have been times during the game when I was sure he was watching me, when I could almost feel the heat of his gaze moving from my cheeks to my throat, to…
other places. And the feeling—that tense, heavy awareness in the air—made me want to crawl into his lap, biting and licking my way up his neck, to tease him into a response.
But right now… I honestly just want to give him a hug, to curl myself into his side while he grumbles at the game.
Instead, I say nothing and pick apart my slice with a smile.
“Gloating is not attractive.”
“I’m not trying to attract you. I leave that to the poor, unfortunate Yelenas of the world.” I’m midway through her name when the pizza tastes sour in my mouth.
“Why do you still remember my appraiser’s name?”
“Mind like a steel trap.”
“Left to rust in the elements?”
“Hmm.”
“More like jealous and too chicken to throw your hat in the ring. I get it.”
My next bite of pizza goes down hard. I don’t like whatever this is.
If he’s going to live next door to me, I can’t indulge whatever this banter is leading toward.
I don’t last with guys. I’d be squatting where I eat.
A fling next door, forever, if he buys his place.
It hits me like a blow to the stomach. Which, in turn, annoys me.
You were wrong about him cheating, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a dickhead.
Who you kind of goaded into being a dickhead, but still.
There’s the sound of fumbling in the hall, and then Avery and Anna burst through.
“Goddamn it, the people in this building need to stop letting people without keys in,” Jack announces.
“This is cozy,” Avery says, smiling broadly at me. His inebriated surprise at my pizza détente with Jack is evident. He’s probably proud of me for growing up or something.
“I’m sleeping over,” Anna tells Jack.
“Me, too,” Avery says to me.
Jack sighs and gathers up the pizza box as Avery and Anna retrieve the last two slices. “I guess I’m sleeping on the sofa.”
“Me, too.” Avery gives me a silly smile.
I raise an eyebrow at Avery. “You’re tipsy on a weeknight.”
“I’m not.”
“Your ears are red.”
His face grows red, too. To glimpse Avery, disheveled and handsome, minus his glasses, one wouldn’t be blamed for thinking he’d drop some toxic frat-guy cockiness on them.
Instead, he’s down-to-earth and capable of blushes in front of a girl he likes.
I stand and link arms with him, leading him toward The Hole.
Before I step through, I turn toward Jack. “Thanks for the pizza. Unless it was poisoned.”
“Too painless,” Jack says from the kitchen, without looking up. But there is humor in his voice.
Meh. This is all Pirate Duke’s fault. I can’t do anything of an R-rated nature with him—I don’t want to do anything of an R-rated nature with him. But I do not want to be at war with my neighbor forever, either. How do I make this truce long-standing while maintaining a healthy distance?
As I ready my sofa for Avery, I pin him down with a look. “What is going on with you?” I whisper. “She’s engaged. This isn’t like you.”
“I’m boring,” he whispers back. “I’ve been boring and playing it safe my whole life.
I want a fiftieth anniversary someday, too, Penny!
Maybe I’m not on my way there because I’m always doing what this thinks is right instead of this.
” He points to his head and then his heart.
And then he pushes the sofa up against the wall right under The Hole and flops onto it before I’ve had a chance to fully tuck in the sheet.
I frown. If this were literally any other guy, I’d think he was thinking with neither of those things. But this is Avery.
“Besides,” he says, yanking the blanket from my hands, “I’m not trying to sleep with her. I just like being around her. Okay?”
“Whatever you say, Drunky McDrunk.” Who am I to judge, when my own personal life is such a disaster?
It isn’t until I’m back in my bed that a very bad thought surfaces, and I launch myself into an upright position. The glitter. There will be no truce if he uses that shampoo or shower gel.
Avery is snoring on the couch. Though we’ve still got the sheet up to cover The Hole, there are places along my pockmarked disaster of a wall that have punctured through to Jack’s side, so I can tell that his apartment is as shadowed as my own.
I tiptoe to the sofa and step up on it, straddling Avery’s prone body and gingerly pulling back the sheet.
Jack is sleeping on his side on his own sofa. The moonlight reveals his hard jaw, sleep-slackened in slumber. He didn’t shave, so it’s covered in stubble, and his arm is flung over his eyes. He doesn’t look like a human disco ball…yet.
I stare at his shadowed bathroom door longingly. There’s no way for me to leapfrog over him and get to his shampoo.
He didn’t shower earlier, so he’s definitely going to in the morning. But maybe he’ll reach for a fresh bottle, since there was so little shampoo in there to begin with?
Maybe.
I’m awoken by my own mumbling, and by a strange feeling. I open my eyes and stifle a scream, but it emerges anyway as a choked squeak.
The morning light in my bedroom is faint, trickling in through the open space between my curtains. Jack is leaning over me on the bed, his face looming close, his hands braced on the mattress, bracketing my shoulders. His skin…sparkles.
I draw the covers up over my nose to hide the hysterical, fear-tinged laughter bubbling up within me. Please be a dream. “I know what you are,” I whisper, visions of an iridescent teen vampire flashing through my mind.
Jack leans closer until his face is just two inches from my own. I can feel his breath on my face, minty with the promise of retribution. And then he opens his mouth.
“Sleep with one eye open.”
My eyes widen, and he straightens, walking out of my room without another glance.
I worry my lip and sidestep a woman walking her dog, my sneakers eating up the space between my apartment and my office without me noticing.
That was stupid. Glitter allowed for no plausible deniability. I should’ve gone with something subtle. Like the bird-crap-fire-escape thing he did. Or you could’ve bowed out of the game, like Rochelle said.
Whatever! It’s done now.
I’m so wrapped up in my thoughts that I almost miss the big white trucks unloading lighting equipment and a whole lot more in front of my building.
I text Margie, and she responds right away: she’s on my floor. With all that’s been going on, I’d forgotten the show was filming in my office sometime this week. I rush to the elevator, eager to tell her about the development with the apartment, but when the doors open, I crash into someone.
We both drop our bags, bend to retrieve them, and speak at once.
“Sorry! I—” we say. I look up and freeze.
“Hey! The Femme Fatale. Don’t tell me… Penelope?”
Holy shit. Lucas Webb is squatting right across from me in the lobby of my office building, doing super-sexy things like gathering up his stuff and mine, remembering my name, and breathing. He extends a hand to help me up.
I cling to him, staring into his eyes—they’re not arrogant or cocky like Jack’s.
They’re calm. Self-assured. I’m faintly conscious of whispers crescendoing around the lobby as people realize who I’m holding hands with.
I release my grip on Lucas and brush the wrinkles out of my skirt. “Oh, hi. Yes. That me.” Words. Hard.
“You visiting us on set? We’re up on twelve.”
I shake my head. “I’m actually here to work. I work here. In building. On twelve.” Stop. Babbling.
He smiles. It’s a kind smile, but one that lets me know he’s used to starstruck idiots. “I’ve got to run an errand. Nice seeing you again.”
We say goodbye, and then he’s gone, hefting his bag over his shoulder as he walks across the lobby, his slacks absolutely loving his ass. Necks break as people double-take in his wake, and I float up to the twelfth floor on a cloud pulled by cherubs.
I beeline to the boardroom, where I spy Margie’s statuesque frame, but Rochelle heads me off. “Penny, hi! What are you doing Friday night?”
“I—”
“There’s a dinner after my staff meeting, and I’d love for you to come. Sam Greenfield is going to be there.”
“I’m supposed to be at an anniversary party—”
“Maybe you can go after. Listen, this is very important. You can casually work in how the global project’s going, and that’ll grease the wheels when we ask for that raise for you.”
“Or we could just ask for it and point to all my hard work even before this…”
Rochelle’s expression does not change. Not a flicker of an eyelash. Not a twitch of the lip.
“Okay, let me know where to be and when.”
Margie is perched on the edge of my desk when I get to my cubicle. She snorts when I tell her about the exchange. “Pushover. You can’t miss Mr. and Mrs. Vaughn’s anniversary party. Avery rented out the hangar deck of the Intrepid.”
“I know. His dad served on the ship during Vietnam. Look, I’ll be there. Just… Just a little late, maybe? Ugh, I need the money to get my mortgage, Margie.”
Margie shrugs and sucks in her lips. “Okay…”
I decide to change the subject. “I saw Lucas downstairs. He remembered my name.”
“He asked about you, actually. And I don’t know why you’re surprised, Pen. You’re hot, and you spit a joke about murder at him the first time you met him. Not to mention his thing for redheads. But you’re not doing the go-nowhere thing anymore, right? That’s why we’ve had a two-year dry spell?”
“Yes…”
She tugs on a strand of my hair.
“I did a stupid thing,” I confess.
“Besides agreeing to go to a dinner on the same night as your best friend’s party for his parents?”
“Stop making me feel shitty! No. Not that.”
“You slept with Lucas? How? You haven’t seen him since that day you came to set.”
“No, not— No. I did a thing. To Jack.”
“You slept with him?”
“No! I didn’t fucking sleep with anyone.”
Heads peep over cubicles.
I lower my voice. “I didn’t sleep with anyone. This is worse.”
I explain about the glitter, and after I finish, Margie stares at me a bunch. I can’t tell if she’s questioning our long friendship or if she’s delighted. Goddamn poker-faced actor.
“Say something!”
“I’ll help you brainstorm. He’s going to hit back. You hit back harder.” Someone calls her name. “My scene. Got to go.”
She stands, and I roll my chair toward her, wrapping my arms around her middle. “This is why we’re friends.”
She snorts. “This is why we’re going to end up in prison.”