that my dick had been hard for the past thirty minutes and I wanted him to raw me right there on the hallway carpet.
But my heart…
“Anyway, I decided not to shave it,” Hadley went on, her voice musical and light even when muffled by the door, “and keep it a little shaggier. Looks closer to Gus’s, that way. So, drumroll please.” She paused, clearly waiting for Holden or me to provide one, and there was an audible sigh when neither one of us did so. “Guess I’ll make my own then.”
She hammered her hands lightly on the door for a few seconds, then turned the knob and threw it open wide.
“Ta-da!”
The long brown locks she’d come to Maine with had been gathered in a ponytail and lopped off with a pair of Holden’s kitchen scissors. The ponytail sat coiled on the bathroom counter, and the hair that remained on her head was now fashioned into a charming, if messy, pixie cut.
Add amazing hair stylist to her list of infuriating talents.
I dropped Holden’s hand. “It looks really good,” I told her, faking my enthusiasm but not my admiration.
“Really?”
“Really. It’s actually kind of annoying how good it looks. I’d look like an escaped convict if I ever tried to cut my own hair, but you look good.”
Hadley turned to Holden, which made me turn and look at him too. “What do you think?” she asked.
What Holden thought was plain on his face.
“It’s amazing. You’re amazing. You’re perfect.”
I knew he just meant, ‘perfect for this subterfuge we have planned,’ but did he have to look quite so much like he wanted to kiss her?
I mean, I trusted that he didn’t. I believed him when he said he was gay. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine someone being so twisted that they’d invent that whole tragic gay backstory just for sympathy sex points, and even if Holden had invented it, he’d barely capitalized on those sympathy sex points at all.
But that was kind of the problem.
Yesterday morning when we’d woken up in his bed, I’d been eager for a repeat of the previous night’s activities, but Holden had insisted we had more serious matters to deal with. The fact that he was right didn’t make it any less annoying. And then last night…
Hadley had gone to sleep early—something about wanting to time her dreams to some sort of asteroid’s movement through the sky—so it had just been me and Holden down in the library. I’d finished my cataloging for the day—his grandmother had a truly epic collection of books on fly fishing—and was curled up in my chair reading while he drove himself crazy checking for updates on the gossip blogs he followed.
So far, no one seemed to realize that the other person in that picture was me—or a guy, period—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t worried. I think he might have been more worried about those creepy guys discovering I was here at Edgecliffe than I was. There were various theories about who the mystery ‘woman’ was, and that suited his plans, but still, he worried.
“You’re going to give yourself wrinkles,” I said after looking up from my book to find him frowning for the eighth time in so many minutes.
I had the strangest sense that I’d said that before—or maybe that someone else had said that to me. It was weird, and annoying, how little bits of my past seemed to filter up through the impenetrable mud of my mind, but nothing useful.
I could almost see the face of a woman, maybe middle-aged, maybe with brown hair, smiling as she said that to me. But was it actually a memory, or just something I’d seen in a movie? I couldn’t say.
Holden snorted. “Good.”
“Good?” I arched an eyebrow. “You want wrinkles?”
“They made me get Botox injections for the final season of Infinity Falls.” He set his laptop down on the couch cushion and stretched. “I was only twenty-three, but that’s forty in L.A. Having a face that could move again was one of the best parts of coming here.”
I grinned. “What if I’m actually forty, and I’ve just had hella Botox? What if I’m even older than you?”
I refrained from adding, ‘Daddy,’ to the end of that sentence, though it was hard. It had honestly just slipped out of my mouth that night Holden was fucking me—well, thigh-fucking me, but a boy can dream—but I hadn’t missed the way his hips had stuttered when I’d said it, the way he’d pumped into me even harder