Chapter 6
AJ
Imay or may not have crushed two full Makers and gingers while Adam was in the shower.
But in all fairness, I had every right to.
Aside from the whole Caspar-blowing-up-my-world-by-cheating-on-me thing, I’d had fresh mountains of logistical bullshit to deal with, namely the fact that this hotel—along with every neighboring one in Palm Beach—was fully booked for the weekend thanks to some golfing tournament, and on top of that, I couldn’t even cancel the reservation I’d made for my philandering liar of an ex-fiancé.
Did I expect to be able to kick him out on his ass tonight? No. Did I fully hope I’d be able to do that for tomorrow and steal his reservation as my own?
Yes. Absolutely.
But apparently, canceling wasn’t allowed without forty-eight hours notice, which meant my ex could still cheat on my dime if he so pleased and I was shit out of luck in terms of a place to stay for tonight or tomorrow.
My third drink was consumed while avoiding eye contact with a freshly-showered Adam as he acted like it was no big deal if I just stayed with him tonight.
And that consumption only accelerated as he turned to face the bar, allowing me to drunk-stare at the way the damp cotton of his T-shirt clung to his shoulders, dipping into those muscled lines in his back as he poured himself a drink.
“Considering you’re already hammered, it’s probably best for you to just stay in and try to relax,” he had said to me, to which I’d argued, “I am not hammered,” while stuffing an ambitious handful of fries into my mouth—a famously hammered behavior of mine.
And that was the end of that discussion.
I couldn’t remember if I’d put up much more of a fight about staying or not, but it no longer mattered, because at this point I wasn’t moving.
It was well past 10PM and I was tipsy, tired, and very cozily snuggled in the plush sheets of Adam’s king-sized bed while he lay ten feet to my right on the couch in a white V-neck and sweats.
And thanks to the mental fogginess, I kept drifting in and out of realizing—despite how quiet and relaxed we were—that what we were doing right now was absolutely wild.
Because for how close Adam and I were, we had definitely never done this before.
We had never spent non-work-related time together, let alone hung out in pajamas together in his hotel room late at night.
We’d also never gone such long stretches without trading barbs or being snarky in some way, and all this would be actively mind-fucking me right now if it weren’t for the fact that my brain was simultaneously exhausted and in a million other places right now.
It was halftime of the Lakers game when I’d turned on my side to grab my phone off the nightstand, but then a whole thirty seconds passed before I actually looked at my phone, because lying on my side, Adam was now directly in my eye line.
And as much as I didn’t want him to be, he was very distracting.
His long body was stretched out with one leg bent and one arm behind his head, and for how relaxed and casual the position was, it really did stupid wonders for showing off his hyper-athletic build.
I was basically forced to look.
With his arm folded behind his head, his bulging bicep was just right in my face and I could see his sculpted lats straining against the soft cotton of his tee—which, annoyingly enough, had ridden up, giving me a slight but very noticeable peek of his very deep-carved hip bone.
This is your boss, I told myself.
When I was this level of drunk and emotionally exhausted, it was all I had in my arsenal in terms of mental pep talks about not checking out certain people. Adam. Boss. Don’t look, I told myself in a caveman voice, which made my stupid drunk ass laugh.
Adam peered over at me. “What?”
I blinked as I averted my eyes to my phone. “Nothing. Just putting Caspar’s number on silent,” I said since it was exactly what I turned over to do in the first place.
Adam had turned back to the TV after his initial question, but now he was looking at me again, his eyebrows pulled together in a frown. “He’s still texting?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said, my bleary eyes skimming the latest message. The hundredth version of “we need to talk about this” with some dig thrown in about my maturity. “God, why the hell does he think this is salvageable?” I muttered.
“Because he’s delusional in every sense of the word.”
“This is true,” I murmured distractedly as I clicked around on my phone, proceeding to look at things I told myself I wouldn’t look at till Adam firmly interrupted.
“AJ. Stop.”
I didn’t look up as I frowned. “Stop what?”
“Facebook-stalking the girl he was with.”
My eyebrows lifted as I paused mid-scroll, peering up to see Adam still watching the game. Damn. He hadn’t even been looking at me while I was doing it. But I wasn’t totally surprised. Sometimes he just had a sense.
“It’s just I recognize her,” I said quietly as I put down my phone. Grabbing a pillow, I hugged it against me. “I mean… pretty hard not to.”
Adam looked over at me. “Why?”
“Because she has green and blue hair.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Does she also shop at Hot Topic?”
I cracked a faint smirk. “Well. She’s definitely young.
Still in college,” I said, feeling a twisting in my chest as I remembered when Caspar first introduced me to her in December.
His new PA who was in her second year of undergrad at USC.
“I remember thinking she was really shy and awkward, but I figured it was just because she was a kid. Not even old enough to drink,” I said with a weak laugh of disbelief as I zoned out at a random spot on the floor.
Uh oh. I could feel a ramble coming on, and though I wasn’t looking at him, I could see Adam’s head still turned to study me closely, as if he sensed I was going into a place.
“And it’s not that I ever imagined Caspar would cheat, but if someone told me I had to, I don’t think I would’ve pictured a college kid with green hair who can’t even make five seconds of eye contact at a time.
I just… I never would’ve thought that’d be what he’d want more than me,” I said.
But I’d barely finished my sentence before Adam cut in.
“It’s not, AJ,” he said sternly.
And when I lifted my eyes to him, I found him looking at me from the couch like I was a total dumbass, which was fine and actually made me want to laugh, because it felt normal.
As much as Adam and I supported each other on a daily basis, we were never outright nice to each other.
And if he was going to be this nice to me tonight, I understood that it was probably going to come with some level of taunting and ridicule.
“Let’s just be real here, alright?” he said in his I can’t believe I have to explain this to you voice.
“You’re way smarter than that girl. Way more interesting.
More sophisticated. You can hold a conversation with Caspar or anyone else in this world for way longer than she can, and I don’t even need to see her to know that you blow her shit out of the water in the looks department,” he said so matter-of-factly that I could barely process the compliment before he was already barreling on.
“Your idiot ex just wants someone who’ll be blindly impressed with him regardless of his achievements.
He wants someone who doesn’t know about all his flaws yet.
His failures. If he can’t be the person he wishes he was, he wants to at least live the fantasy of it, and that girl he cheated on you with—she still believes that fantasy,” Adam said simply, looking me dead in the eye.
“And that’s the only thing she’s got on you, AJ. Naiveté.”
I stared.
Well, shit.
A giant lump formed in my throat as I hugged my pillow tighter to my front. Because apparently, I hadn’t been ready for Adam to give such a surprisingly accurate read on Caspar. Nor had I been ready for him to be this sweet to me tonight.
This protective.
It was silent for several seconds before I finally gathered myself enough to speak again.
“Naiveté’s a big word for you,” I observed softly, to which Adam promptly snorted.
“Alright,” he said, rolling his eyes back to the game and adding something or another about me being a smart ass, which I barely heard because I’d only cracked that joke to deflect from the realizations sweeping over me.
Hindsight really was twenty-twenty, because in retrospect, I could admit that things had been declining between Caspar and me for awhile.
That I’d been blinding myself to a lot of things about him that angered me to no end—in particular, his painfully fragile ego, and his constant need to be praised and assured.
“I don’t even know why I stayed for so long,” I said, staring blankly at the game.
“Sunk cost fallacy,” Adam replied. When I looked at him, he explained. “You put all that time and energy into someone, you don’t want to feel like it was for nothing. Especially when you love them. Makes it hard to know when to cut your losses.”
My eyebrows pinched together as I found myself reckoning with the fact that Adam casually nailed it again. I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Were you always this smart?” I questioned.
He laughed. “Me? Yeah. Believe it or not, I’m more than just a pretty face.”
I snorted despite the fact that I couldn’t help myself from studying his face when he turned back to watch the game.
Though my eye line was angled toward the TV, my gaze subtly lifted toward Adam, running along his razor sharp jaw, those strong cheekbones and that goddamned dimple that lingered the way it always did when he flashed that deceivingly boyish grin.
Fuck that grin, I thought. But then my eyes raked through his thick brown hair, which was fully dry now and tousled in a way that made the corners of my mouth curve up.
Ugh.
It was undeniable that Adam Maxwell was impossibly handsome.
Gorgeous, really.