Chapter 18 #2
“Ummm.” I had to think about it. “My parents wouldn’t let me go to this party one night, so I snuck out my window to go.
And then I got too drunk at the party and passed out with my friend somewhere in the house.
And my parents thought I was missing till probably noon the next day, which is when I finally woke up and texted that I was alive. ”
Adam nodded through my story, a smile glinting in his eyes as he no doubt imagined the scene. But the look faded away as he spoke again.
“When I was in high school, my dad got my mom a new car for Christmas and I took it on a joy ride a week later and totaled it,” he said, making my eyes widen. “Probably on purpose,” he added.
“What does that mean? That you kind of knew what you were doing when you crashed it?”
“Yeah. I knew what generally happened when I drove that fast.”
I nodded, trying not to look too fazed. I actually wasn’t.
I knew about the “speed demon” side of Adam from Holland.
He and Iain had both been like that. Adrenaline junkies with a taste for recklessness.
I knew Adam had stayed that way all through law school, but forcibly toned it down once he was promoted to agent at Engelman when he was twenty-five.
“That’s not too bad,” I said as I washed the vegetables. “But I know you used to fight a lot before you started having clients too,” I added. He’d actually met Iain mid-bar brawl. “And I’m sure those stories would horrify me more since you’d actually, you know, hurt people.”
“Yeah.”
I peered up at him in the middle of scrubbing, but he was spacing out as he played with the jump drive.
I had kind of hoped he would detail the stories of the fights he got into, because I was starting to realize that all these events in his life weren’t just due to him being “wild” or “a party animal” as he was often described at the office, mostly for the way he could rage till dawn with clients after events.
It definitely wasn’t just that. There were definitely more demons in Adam’s past than he liked to let on, and though I’d sensed that before, I’d never quite felt the need to fully know and understand it till now.
But as curious as I was, I didn’t bother asking.
To start, I didn’t want to sink him deeper into this mood on a Sunday night before the start of a busy week.
Plus, I knew I’d probably just get that shrug and the generic line that had always driven his sister crazy.
“I was just a bad kid.” That was it. The explanation for why his mother was abusive. Why she raised Holland like a prisoner.
I was back to quietly cursing her in my head when Adam asked about Caspar.
“He still bothering you at all?”
It said something when I was actually thankful to get Jeannie out of my head with the topic of my ex.
“Nope. I think you officially scared him off, but if you didn’t, I wouldn’t know, because I blocked him today,” I said brightly, placing a wet paper towel under the cutting board before I started chopping.
“Nice,” Adam said, but when I heard the tinge of strangeness in his voice, I looked up.
“What?”
“What?”
“You said that weirdly.”
“I said one word,” he argued, but he lost steam halfway through the sentence because he knew I knew better. “Fine. It’s just… I never told you something,” he said, grimacing as he rubbed the back of his neck. I stopped cutting.
“What?”
“The week you were getting ready to surprise Caspar, I was pretty sure I saw him on La Brea with some girl. I don’t know if it was the blue hair girl, because she was wearing a hoody.
But the guy definitely looked like Caspar and I felt like I should’ve given you a heads up, but Holland said not to if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, especially because you were so excited for his birthday that week, and I just…
” He held his hands out as he tried to figure out his words, but then he let them fall back into his lap.
“I don’t know. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to hurt you.
But you wound up getting hurt anyway. And I probably could’ve warned you. ”
I blinked at him, nodding as I took in all the information. And by information I meant the fact that he looked this level of stressed out right now over this total non-issue, and the fact that he’d been so mixed up about it the other week that he had actually consulted with Holland.
When I realized he’d cared this much before we’d ever even slept together, I almost wanted to make a face.
Great. I might’ve actually been better off not knowing that, I thought, because it made my heart melt to imagine my arrogant prick of a boss actually having a quiet meltdown over my wellbeing, and I really didn’t need to be any further endeared to him right now.
“You’re pissed,” Adam said to break the silence. I laughed.
“Not even,” I said, suppressing the urge to just round the counter right now and plant a giant kiss on his forehead.
“I really do appreciate the concern, Adam, but it doesn’t matter.
I’m not sure it would’ve changed things at the time and at this point, I’m just done thinking about Caspar.
Yesterday was pretty good closure,” I said, warmth in my cheeks as I remembered the words Adam had said yesterday.
The speech he made that I told myself was all an act, despite the fact that I was pretty sure it wasn’t.
“And even if there wasn’t that closure, I could never look at him the same after all those completely shitty things he said. ”
I’d barely finished my sentence before the thought of Schilling popped up.
Ugh. I wrinkled my nose. And for the next thirty seconds, the topic of what Caspar said lingered palpably in the air, the whole house silent save for the sounds of basketball and my chopping.
Peering up, I smirked. “Wow. I’m impressed,” I said.
“What?”
“You usually have zero impulse control but you’re refraining from asking me about the whole Schilling comment he made.”
Adam laughed. “If I had zero impulse control, you would’ve been naked and fucked on multiple surfaces of the office already,” he said with such confidence that I felt a little shudder.
“But yeah,” he relented after another second of silence.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about whatever happened with him. ”
Him. As in Simon Schilling.
Everyone in the sports world knew his name. Back when I knew him, he was just a superstar agent. Now he was the VP of Roth Talent Agency.
Also known as RTA, our direct competition.
“I met him when I was a sophomore. He was my professor for sports law,” I said before explaining just how coveted that particular course was.
Everyone in my major scrambled to get that class every year, because everyone knew that Schilling always awarded one lucky student an internship with RTA that included a front row seat to the MLB Winter Meetings—which was basically heaven for anyone interested in the business side of baseball.
“We learned negotiation strategies, participated in mock negotiations.”
“I’m assuming you crushed that shit.”
“I was definitely top of the class,” I said, grinning when Adam held up his hand for a high five, which I swiftly returned before getting into the race for the internship.
“We had to draft up the best mock contract, and everyone knew it was between me and this kid Corbin because we were the top two students. But between us, Schilling was always heaping more praise on me. Constantly spotlighting me and my work.”
Adam nodded slower now, and I mentally commended him for feeling wary this early in the story, because he was right to. But at the time, even Emily hadn’t suspected anything was fishy.
“I wound up landing the internship and after, Schilling invited me out to meet with him and some other agents from RTA. The first meeting went well. But the second time, it was just us two and Schilling started doing these… little things that I recognized as early trouble.”
I wasn’t looking at Adam as I detailed everything, because I was sliding two baking trays into the oven.
But I could actually feel his heated disdain, his rising anger as I talked about how Schilling started doing the things that all girls knew as warning signs, like touching my shoulder a lot.
Putting his hand on my back when there was no reason to at all.
He even asked if I had a boyfriend and mused about how much attention I probably got for being an attractive woman in a male-dominated field.
“I told my guy friends, but they said it was no big deal and it wasn’t worth getting up in arms about. Basically, they told me not to blow the opportunity by being sensitive and just look past it.”
“Did you?”
I looked up at Adam, feeling a tinge of regret as I said, “Yes. Just out of sheer hope that I was overreacting, because I really wanted that internship. I just wanted to learn. It was RTA. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Adam nodded, that handsome little frown knit in his brow. “Of course. I understand,” he said.
And while I knew he did, I still took a little while to muster up the strength for the rest of the story, because it’d been awhile since I’d said it aloud. Probably college, actually.
But after getting everything in the oven and grabbing the chicken from the fridge, I went into the start of my internship. How it had been amazing at first.
“I learned so much so fast that it felt like a whole semester of college compressed into one week. It was exhilarating. I loved it so much. But at the same time, I knew my gut feeling about Schilling was right, because he kept it super professional at RTA and barely spoke to me at the office, but at school, he’d always flip a switch and ask me to hang back after class.
He started letting his gaze wander more openly.
And then he started make comments about how as a woman, I actually had an advantage because I could showcase my ‘assets.’ To catch the eye of future clients. ”