he wasn’t good at it, right? And I wasn’t talking about prose.
I want to kiss you, Presley. So fucking bad. I’ve spent hours thinking about you … about what you’d taste like.
I wasn’t sure I would ever forget those words, or the sexy rumble of Jake’s voice against my ear. Or the way he’d felt when he fucked me, the heavy weight of his body trapping me against the door, the warmth of his lips, the way he kissed me as though I actually mattered.
Trying to shake it off, I thought about the things I’d read about him. The fact that he dated a lot of women. A lot of women. I knew based on what I’d seen on social media that women were throwing themselves at him left and right, offering to be one of his characters, to get an up-close-and-personal glimpse of what it was like to be ravaged the way the females were in his books. Hell, even the woman who’d interviewed him on television had been ogling him.
And I’d read about some of the women he’d been associated with. Not one of those stories had resulted in a positive outcome.
“Ugghh.”
I flopped over onto my side. I needed to sleep, to find a way to flip my days and nights back the way they belonged. There had to be a way to get my life back on track, to find my inspiration, and the lack of sleep definitely wasn’t helping.
As tired as I was, I knew I could drift off any minute if I would just close my eyes.
So why did I reach for my phone?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jake
Thursday evening
Despite everything in my head screaming at me to track Presley down and talk about what had happened between us last night, I’d managed to make it through the day without doing so. It hadn’t been easy. With Gavin living right next door, I could’ve easily knocked on his door and asked him for her phone number.
But I hadn’t.
Instead, I’d spent countless hours thinking about her, fantasizing about all the things I wanted to do to her the next time… Only I knew she wasn’t planning on there being a next time.
After last night, those few minutes we’d spent together… I relived them over and over again. The sweet scent of her hair tickling my nose, the warmth of her skin so close to mine, the way she’d inhaled sharply when I’d slid deep inside her body… Something had happened in that moment. It was almost as though I actually knew her deepest, darkest desires.
Only I didn’t.
Not well enough to fantasize about a future with her. Yet I did it anyway.
Thankfully, there would be no thinking of her tonight. At least not for the foreseeable future.
Thursday dinner, once a month, was a ritual with my mother. She would warn me ahead of time that she expected me to be there, regardless of what was or wasn’t going on in my life. For the past six months, I’d only missed dinner once, and that time, my mother hadn’t spoken to me for a week after that—not until I had apologized and showed up the following week in an attempt to make it up to her.
Because having your mother ignore you was weird, I now did my best to accommodate her schedule whenever possible. Even if it wasn’t something I looked forward to. It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do anyway. Ever since I’d gotten back from New York yesterday afternoon, I’d been trying to psych myself up to write, to no avail.
And now the only thing I seemed to want to do was see Presley again.
Which wasn’t the same as writing.
I couldn’t help but remember the way it had felt to get lost in the characters once again after I’d seen Presley on Sixth Street. For that brief period of time, I’d been able to write, but then, for the past week and a half, my inspiration had dried up like a creek bed in the desert. Nothing.
The trip to New York had done nothing to help, either. Unless stirring up my anxiety and making me worry that I’d never get another book written counted. Then yeah, it’d fucking helped.
So, now, as I pulled my Mercedes up to the big, red-brick, two-story house in the quiet suburban neighborhood where my mother now lived, I took a deep breath, trying to forget all of the other stressors in my life so I could focus on this one.