Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
“Is this like the time you asked me to prom?” he asked, wishing that he hadn’t, because there really was no reason in all the world that he should be throwing that out there in a moment like this.
Hell no. What he should be doing was playing it cool, not bringing any of the past up, and he definitely shouldn’t be standing there, gut churning, blood flowing like lava through his veins.
“Um… No,” she said, pausing and looking away for a moment. “I’m kind of topped out on humiliation, but I can definitely apologize for that. I was a bitch.”
“Your words,” he said.
“I was also seventeen, so…”
“So was I.”
She went still. “Yeah. I know. But, I just think that it would be really good if we thought about this critically. I think that critical thought shows that the narrative has spun to show that people think you rescuing me was romantic. They think Alan sucks, and amen to that, and I think that if we spin this as the best thing that ever happened to us, we are both going to be better off.”
“That’s what you think?” he asked.
“It is what I think,” she said. “Because the whole Internet has turned you into a sex object.”
“Well, how nice for me. Do you think that maybe I might want to capitalize on that rather than pretend to be in a relationship?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Would you rather have sex or would you rather have your business boom a bit?”
“Difficult to say,” he said.
“Well,” she said, her throat suddenly feeling scratchy, her face hot, from saying the word sex in front of him, “I think that this is probably a bigger opportunity, a more unique opportunity for you than getting laid.”
“What’s the endgame?”
“We both get what we want. It’ll be an amazing story, it’ll help me with my campaign, and it’s going to turn this into a love story. Baby, just say yes.”
He glared at her, hard, arms crossed, his irritation high.
The trouble was that it wasn’t a bad idea. Not at all. He could see immediately what she was pitching.
It was spinning all of this into a twist of fate, something serendipitous.
The high school bad boy, and the golden girl in the town finally finding their way to each other because the groom ran away.
The much-maligned and mischaracterized bad boy’s heroics finally creating the ideal situation for them to find love with each other.
And then, once she got elected, once the story had faded from any kind of headline that extended beyond the town, the two of them would manufacture a breakup.
“Okay. I mean, I can understand where you’re coming from.”
“We may end up on the news,” she said. “But wouldn’t you rather be in control of the story?”
“I’m not going to lie to you, I look pretty cool in the current story, so it’s not me that’s urgently trying to spin this.”
In spite of himself, he felt like a little bit of an ass when those words exited his mouth.
Because she looked upset. She looked like she was genuinely grappling with the realization that she had no control here.
That everything was in fact pretty terrible for her, and not even half as terrible for anyone else.
Yes, things looked pretty bad for Alan, that was true. But he was going to come out of it way less injured than she was. He was a doctor in a small town. It wasn’t like people had a lot of options as to who they could go to.
Also, she was a woman. So flat out, hands-down, she was going to get the shorter, sharper end of that.
“My business is in danger, and I figure that I can make sure it’s in no danger. Spin it so that the ranch looks as good as possible. But I personally? I’m fine.”
“Well, very glad for you and your roping skills.”
“My roping skills have gotten me a lot.”
He looked at her, and he didn’t think he imagined that little glint of something in her eye before she looked away.
No. He couldn’t imagine Addison thinking that he was speaking in double entendre, because she would probably burst into flame.
“Okay. So, I think what we should do is begin to soft launch this. We should go to dinner, maybe in a week or so.”
“Nope,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what I said. No. Going in with a whimper isn’t going to do anything for you, isn’t going to let you control this how you want.”
“What do you mean?”
“Right now, everyone is watching, so capitalize on it now. Next week there will be a whole new bunch of viral videos, and you’ll just be the girl who got left at the altar.”
He felt a little mean saying that, which annoyed the hell out of him because nothing he’d said to her was mean in a way that matched the way she’d treated him back in the day. But she was like a wounded little creature now and he couldn’t go crushing her.
That statement, he could see, had crushed her a bit.
“Sure, in the wider world. And this being a story in the whole world embarrasses me, yes, but town is where everybody knows you, and everybody knows me. Town is where that’s going to be a story.”
“You’re thinking too small,” he said, crossing his arms and rocking back on his heels.
Oh yes. She was thinking far too small. He knew exactly what to do in this situation.
He did it. He hadn’t considered this before, but now…
Yes, now he was starting to get the big picture.
Fake dating was all well and good, and he was happy to have even that, but they could make it something that captured people’s imagination.
And by the time they dissolved it all, people would’ve moved on. It would be a footnote.
Something that people had to google in the coming years. Whatever happened to that couple where the bride got jilted at the altar and she dated the guy who stopped him…
And no one would remember enough details to even look them up. Because at the end of the day, they weren’t public figures.
They were just unwittingly pop culture’s new fascination, and when those kinds of things happened nobody cared about reality.
What they cared about was the version of events that made them happiest. They were going to go creating stories with or without him and Addison participating. So they might as well take control of that narrative.
Big time.
“We can’t wait. We have to jump on it now. We need to make a plan. We need to make the timeline look clean.”
“Fuck planning. This can’t be something that we plan.”
His heart was beating just a little bit faster, and he moved closer to her in spite of his better judgment. This was the problem with being a man who generally didn’t heed better judgment of any kind. “It has to be passionate.”
“But…”
“It has to be,” he said. “Your groom ran off, leaving you there all alone. I swept you up out of the aisle, and then I took you back here, and we had the best sex of your life.”
He wished he could be neutral. He wished that his heart were harder.
He wished that his whole body didn’t feel tense, that the desire that he had felt for Addison from the time he was fifteen years old wasn’t cumulative inside of his system, building up more and more now, making him feel like he couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, because he was supposed to be antagonizing her and helping her at the same time, a complex balance, but one Walker was uniquely suited to.
He was not supposed to be antagonizing himself, and he was not supposed to be putting himself in a position where he was pining for her again.
Now.
He knew what it was. Now, he was old enough to know exactly what all these feelings were. It wasn’t half so romantic, impossible, or complex as young Walker would’ve liked to believe.
It was his first experience with absolutely debilitating lust.
And hell, he couldn’t lie, it was debilitating now. But at least now he knew what he really wanted was to fuck her until neither of them could breathe. That hurt a lot less than feeling like he wasn’t seen by somebody that he had feelings for.
She never needed to see him. That was just fine.
But someday, he realized, standing there with fire running through his veins, and a need so sharp inside of him that he felt like it was going to cut him into pieces, he really wanted to touch her.
Before he left this world, he wanted to touch Addison Carey, and he could be patient, he had been patient enough up until this moment.
But yeah, he still wanted it. Down to the soles of his boots, down to whatever soul he had left inside of his body.
Fuck.
She was bright red, and she had moved away from him, just a fraction of a step, but she was definitely not entirely comfortable with his speech. Fair enough. He wasn’t comfortable either. His jeans were getting tight.
“I can’t do that,” she said.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because everybody is waiting for me to be that person, don’t you see?”
“I don’t, Addison. I don’t think anyone was waiting for you to do anything, except to have your wedding, and now, you have a whole bunch of people who don’t know who you are at all, that are waiting to see, I guess, what you do next.
But I don’t think anyone is waiting for…
What exactly do you think they’re waiting for? ”
“For me to prove that I’m like my mother.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Do tell.”
“I just… You know, she ran away with the gardener.”
Was that even salacious? Not in his world.
His mom had certainly had a reputation – three kids out of wedlock with no father confirmed.
Her parents had gotten divorced. It might have been a little scandalous at the time, but surely no one was actually sitting there, rubbing their hands together waiting to see if she’d run off with the —
Oh.
Right.
With him.
That was the real issue, wasn’t it? She felt like people were waiting for her to prove she wanted to be beneath someone they saw as beneath her.
Someone she saw as beneath her.
As she always had. But there had also always been a spark between them. Whether she wanted to admit it or not.
He lowered his tone. Lowered his eyes to look at her lips for just a moment before looking back up at her. “Oh. I see. They’re waiting for you to prove that you want to slum it?”