Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mo
When did handing someone a ball of sopping-wet clothes become such a fraught movement?
Wes’s hand grazed hers as Mo passed him the bundle—the dress she had picked out so carefully an hour ago, and even the underwear, which she’d chosen even more carefully.
It wasn’t silk or anything, but it was blue and lacy.
She tucked it inside the dress so he didn’t feel it on top.
The robe cinched around her waist and fell to her knees, longer than the robe she had at home by at least three inches—which tracked, because he was about three inches taller than her.
She curled up on his couch, legs tucked under her. A fire roared in the fireplace across from them, reminding her of how lovely it could be to be safe out of the storm. Suddenly, she blanched. “My book. I’m sure—”
She jumped from the couch, ran to the front door, and dug into her soaked bag.
Her copy, so carefully spiral bound last week for way too much money, twice as much as any book of hers would retail for on a shelf, was more than damp.
She nestled it in her arms and carried the limp pages back to the couch.
“Well, there goes my project. Sorry the reading will be one-sided today. I don’t think I can even separate the pages while they’re this wet. ”
He pursed his lips, then took the soggy mess from her. “Let me put this in the kitchen.”
“So we can bake with it? I heard you repped cookbooks, but I didn’t know that was what you meant.”
He stared at her for a moment, and she self-consciously ran a hand through her hair. It was damp and as ragged as the book had been. “What?” she asked when the silence had stretched between them a second too long.
“Do you trust me?”
It was a hard question to answer. She shouldn’t, not with things as they were. He had reasons to look out for his own self-interest. Still, she answered honestly. “I want to.”
That response made him look at her face for another moment, reading her expression like he’d read his own words at the Hill: carefully, with reverence. “Okay, I have a few things to explain. Follow me.”
First, he detoured to the kitchen and put the lumpy book on the counter.
It hadn’t completely reverted to pulp, but its edges were curling up on the sides.
He led her up the staircase that she had ignored on her first trip to his house.
A place in New York with a second level was more telling than showing your bank account balance.
There was another room down the hall farther that teased her—she had to guess it was his office, probably full of books she wanted to talk to him about.
She wondered where he wrote his morning pages.
There? In bed? On the couch? She didn’t have much time to wonder as he led her to the lip of his bedroom and motioned for her to stop.
She scanned the room from her spot at the door—the quarter-sawn oak furniture and the kind of careworn woven tan rug over the hardwood floor that looked effortlessly thirty.
The kind of I’m thirty and I have things figured out that Mo longed for but knew she was about three pay grades away from attaining.
He leaned over the opposite side of the queen bed and pulled out a spiral-bound manuscript from under the crisp white linen. “So—this is also your book. Technically. Just another copy of it.”
Her heart beat against her ribs. “How … how did you get that?”
“Gary. When Talia and Flor came to the Hill, he made me a copy too.”
She felt her eyebrows rise, then lower quickly, thinking about how complicated that day had been in the best and worst ways. She focused on the question at hand. “You had a copy of my book this whole week?”
Wes crossed the bedroom, expression sheepish.
“Yes. But here—” He put the solid weight of the manuscript into her hands.
Her copy had been bound in pink, but this one had standard black rings.
The front page, and everything else, was the same.
She flipped through it and noticed notation in the margins—underlines and stars, even a few question marks.
The marks trailed all the way from the first page to the last. He hadn’t only had her book, he’d read it.
The whole thing. And judging from the multiple ink colors, he’d read it a few times. “You finished it? Since Sunday?”
“Twice.”
She couldn’t help but laugh, though her hands were shaking. “When I was sitting here reading and you’d already heard those chapters, knew everything coming up—”
“I read it between Monday and today. That wasn’t fake. Plus I wouldn’t have to act like I was enjoying you reading to me. It’s hard to fake things around you.”
“Except when you’ve got this major leg up on me!
” Mo realized she wasn’t feeling angry but jealous.
Jealous that he’d had a chance to read through her full book when she desperately wanted to do that for his.
She shook her manuscript, and the pages flapped.
“I call for a d é tente. I demand a copy of yours.”
“Mine?”
“Of course. I’m sure you have one around here, maybe stuck on the other side of your mattress. It’s only fair.”
He paused, blinked. A sheepish look crept over his face. “But then you don’t have a reason to come back here.”
“Of course I would, you jerk! First, you have the best robes in the city.” She took a step closer to him, all sharp edges melting at the uncertainty in his expression.
She had misjudged things, obviously. She had seen the differences between them with all the power on his side—his wealth, his position in publishing, his parents’ connections—but she had somehow upset his balance, unsteadied him.
She liked that, the ability to get into his head as much as he’d been messing with hers, to crawl into his life and arch her back to make herself take up more room, a pocket meant for her.
He hadn’t been caught in the rain. He had been allowed to keep on whatever he’d chosen to see her in tonight, and she took in his choices for the first time.
A pale-blue shirt, rolled at the elbows.
His hair had product in it that made it look controlled but soft.
She reached out and touched his hair, pushing a strand away from his face.
He reached his hand up to touch hers, then brought her fingers to his lips. “You taste like rain,” he said.
“Wow, city rain is toxic bathwater, so apologies for that.”
He laughed and pulled her hand up slightly, kissing up her wrists, letting the robe drape backward to her elbow.
She shivered as his butterfly kisses moved up the inside of the middle of her arm.
It wasn’t ticklish, that was for sure, but she felt a stirring of something that made her feel the need to swallow a laugh.
She had to stop her mouth before she ruined everything.
She caught his jaw with two fingers and redirected his lips to meet hers.
He put his hand on the belt of her robe, but she moved it off. Mo knew they hadn’t come upstairs to do this, but his bed was right here. It was all so close. She dropped the manuscript and shoved him lightly. He fell back on the bed, smiling up at her. “You are so beautiful,” he said.
“Don’t be corny,” she said.
“Like Cornhuskers?”
“That’s Nebraska,” she chided, kissing his cheek. “Again with failing the Midwest cultural competencies, Wes.”
He turned his head to catch her lips with his.
The robe had parted slightly now that Mo straddled Wes’s body.
One of his hands ran down the back of the robe while the other sat patiently on her bare thigh.
He glanced down at their bodies, which were suddenly tangled.
“I didn’t bring you up here to seduce you. ”
“Your moves are just too effective, I guess,” she said.
He sat up slightly, forcing her to do the same with their position. His eyes scanned hers, as if trying to translate her thoughts. “We shouldn’t. You came over here to read, right? We should read.”
She pulled her robe closed, trying to understand what had changed in the last minute. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want you to hate me after this. Do you know what I mean?”
She sat across from him, removing her weight from on top of him. His expression was guarded, more guarded than it had been when admitting he’d had a secret copy of her book. “No. Tell me.”
“I don’t want to do this because you feel like you have to.
With me. Or to make it feel like I expect it because of what we did the other night.
We said once we got back from the Hill that, well, that we got things out of our system.
Just friendly. I’m fine with being friends. I want to be friends with you.”
“But that’s it. Is that what you’re saying?” She couldn’t help but be offended.
It was only because she was watching him so closely that she saw the fear in his face. “No, I’m just saying we can slow down. We don’t have to rush anything. I don’t want you to regret …”
“Is this because you’re sure you’re going to win?”
His eyebrows knotted in frustration. “This has nothing to do with the contest. It’s that when this, whatever this is, ends—”
She kissed him, stopping his mouth with hers. She felt his face relax, his hand moving up to her cheek. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be. Don’t worry about endings. This doesn’t need to be outlined, okay? Just improv a little here.”
He nodded against her lips and muttered, “Okay.”
She needed to pull him out of his head, so she changed tactics. “Aren’t you at all ashamed of keeping a secret from me?” she asked. “Reading me in private?”
“Oh, I should have been reading a dozen other things, but I couldn’t stop.”
“Praise me, then,” Mo said, her tone light. She leaned back on an elbow, tried to look puckish and self-assured. He rolled her sideways so he could get on top, then he brushed the damp hair away from her face.