Chapter 7 #2
She swallowed hard. “That I can be manipulated by sex.”
“Everybody can be manipulated by sex,” he said. “It doesn’t make you particularly special if you can be too. It definitely shouldn’t rise to the level of scandal, not when Alan ran away from you when you were halfway down the aisle.”
“I agree,” she said. “I don’t think that it should rebound on me, I don’t think that I’m the one that should look like I did anything wrong, but you know that people are going to look for a reason.
Look for a reason that he left me. Look for a reason that I wasn’t actually right for him in the first place. So, if I immediately sleep with you –”
“Then what you had with him was never right,” he said.
“Take fucking control of it, Addison. Don’t be so worried about your reputation, because here it is, out there for everybody to see, and I get why maybe you want to protect yourself,” he said, wondering why his voice was burning with so much conviction, maybe because he was good at this, at marketing, at PR, but maybe also because there was something else underneath it, and he didn’t want to think about that, “this is your chance to make yourself seem like you have it under control. Like he didn’t do anything to you, like he didn’t ruin anything.
Like you’re the one that has it all together.
This is your chance to take it and redeem it.
Now, if I were you, this is what I would do. But if you’re too afraid…”
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “But just days ago I was supposed to be getting married, and now I’m… what am I? What do I even have? I’m… viral, for the most humiliating thing that I can even think of, and I don’t know what to do.”
She looked like a lost child, and part of him wanted to comfort her instead of pushing harder. But only part of him. Because the other part of him remembered all the nonsense she’d pulled for all those years and that part of him thought she needed to marinate in this discomfort for a bit.
In the reality that he was going to be the one to save her.
“You go big,” he said. “You go big, because that’s the thing that’s going to surprise people the most. You go big because he won’t expect it, nobody will.
You go big, because then you make the story and you turn it into something triumphant.
You go big, because a guy leaving you like he did, that was big.
It was big, and it was visible, and you need to match it. You can match it. I believe in you.”
She looked up at him like he might have some further answer, but all he had was what he just said. And she couldn’t be sure if it was self-serving, because neither could he. That was the honest truth.
She looked away from him and chewed on her fingernail.
He noticed that three of them on her right hand still seemed to be glossy, with white tips, but her thumb and pointer finger were dull and bare.
“I don’t… I don’t know how to project that I immediately left my wedding and went and had great sex. ”
His stomach went tight. The blood running through his veins was already fire, but now somehow hotter, and he knew that he shouldn’t say the first thing that popped into his head. He knew that. It was common sense, and beyond that, it was self-preservation.
The trouble with Walker was that he had never been very good at letting either of those things take the lead.
And he didn’t let them do it now.
“I could help you with that.”
Then he smiled, slow and lazy because he knew exactly what it would look like, because he knew exactly how it would drive his point home. And he watched as her cheeks turned crimson.
“Oh no, thank you, I don’t need an object lesson.”
“Really? You just said you did. And if you’re looking for a way to thank me…”
“No,” she said. “I’m not looking for a way to thank you. I mean, I appreciate what you’re doing, but if you think that that means I owe you sex, then you have another thing coming.”
“Sorry, just teasing you,” he said, getting more out of watching her be riled up than she could possibly imagine.
“I don’t take sex as payment for services rendered, because that implies that someone’s under a certain amount of duress.
And no woman has to be coerced into my bed.
They beg for it. Now, I wouldn’t take it off the table that at someday soon Addison Carey, you’ll be begging to be in my bed. ”
“Oh please.”
“Yes, exactly like that. Oh please, Walker.” He looked at her intently. “I expect to hear that at some point.”
“You are so —”
“Just don’t fall in love with me, Addison Carey. That would only end in heartbreak.”
“Walker, there is no one on earth that I would be less likely to fall in love with. You have nothing to worry about.”
Her words were like barbs, but he wasn’t fifteen, so he enjoyed them. A lot. There was something about the fire, something about the fight, maybe that it was unusual.