then I’ll come down. Would twenty minutes from now be okay?”
“Yeah,” I replied in a voice so choked, I was surprised I could speak at all. “Yeah, that’d be fine.”
For two seconds too long, there was nothing but air passing between us. Whispers of the mind, secrets of the heart, and I wished I knew what to say to take the awkwardness away. Hell, forget awkwardness—I wished I knew what to say, period. But Audrey … She always knew.
“I’m really excited to see you,” she confessed quietly, making it seem easy to speak her mind.
The nature of my being wanted to scoff, insistent that there was no way she could possibly be excited about seeing me. But before I could give in to instinct, I found myself wondering what the good doctor would tell me to do. What would she tell me to say? Because it was Saturday, she wasn’t working, but if she was, I’d take my bike over there right now and ask her to coach me in how to talk to pretty girls. But I was left to my own devices, so I took a deep breath, focusing harder on the saint in my heart and less on the devil in my brain.
Then, I replied, “I’m excited to see you, too.”
***
“Okay, Blake. Stand just like that and look down. Right into my lens,” Toby, the cameraman, instructed, crouching to the ground at my feet.
I felt like an idiot, standing outside the shop with my arms crossed over my chest, but I did as I was told without protest. I let my lids droop as I looked directly at the camera and Toby nodded with approval as he snapped a few shots.
“Perfect, awesome,” he praised absentmindedly, shifting his heels and grabbing another shot from a different angle. “Look over here now—excellent. Great.”
A few more clicks of the camera and he rose to his feet with a directing wave of his arm. “Lex, this damn wind is killing me. Can you fix his hair again?”
Toby walked away to change his lens and Lex the stylist came over with her damned comb in hand. As she reached to fuss with my hair for the umpteenth time, I took that as my cue to relax my arms and push a disgruntled sigh from my nose. My eyes shifted toward the cluster of familiar faces standing off to the side. Cee and Shane watched with amusement creasing their eyes and pulling at their lips, and I felt the temptation to tell them they wouldn’t find it so funny if they were the ones with some strange woman raking their hair back. But I maintained my silence as my eyes fell on Audrey.
She had come by over forty minutes ago, when we had just started with the shoot, and I’d stopped everything to greet her with a sheepish grin. She had been so serious then, encouraging me to get back to work, but now, her pale blue eyes lit with laughter as she bit her bottom lip. Cee said something to her, and I saw Audrey’s mouth move with her reply. Dammit, I wish I knew what they had said, because Audrey doubled over with an eruption of giggles and Celia clapped a hand over her mouth. They were laughing at me, I knew that much, and not even the defensive part of my brain could stop me from basking in the glow of that sound.
“Your girlfriend is cute,” Lex commented, following my gaze.
I damn near jumped at the insinuation. “What? Celia’s not my—”
“No, I know; Shane’s into her. I mean the one in white. What’s her name? Audra?”
“Audrey,” I corrected. “And she’s not my girlfriend.”
“Ah.” Lex brushed my hair back and strategically laid a few strands against my forehead before declaring, “Okay, Toby, he’s good.”
“He better be,” Toby replied and came back to instruct me into a few other poses while I mulled over my brief exchange with Lex.
This thing with Audrey had begun coincidental, was damn near accidental, but it’d quickly become something close to habitual. We had exchanged numbers. We’d slept together. Hell, she had even spent the night. Everything about that was screaming relationship to me, yet I still wasn’t sure that was what I even wanted. Maybe all I wanted was someone to fuck every now and then, now that Cee was clearly out of the picture. Maybe I just wanted someone to make me feel the way Audrey did when she was around.
Actually, she left me terrified.
Terrified