Home > Craft (The Gibson Boys #2)(20)

Craft (The Gibson Boys #2)(20)
Author: Adriana Locke

“That’s exactly what you want and I’m not mad about it. Why would I be? I just don’t want to be one of your app girls.”

“But you’d be someone else’s? You’d be History Hunk’s and that’s okay with you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I grab the handle and he steps back. I pull the door closed. Rolling down the window while I shift the car in reverse, I look at his handsome face. “I don’t want things to be weird tomorrow.”

“Are they ever weird between us?” he asks softly. “Hell, we can even be other people and they aren’t weird. I bet we’d role play like a couple of motherfuckers.”

I try to smile. I try to hold onto the Lance I hear every day. I attempt to put myself back in that box and keep things separated but I can’t.

There’s a nod. A little wave. There’s even a fake smile as he watches me back out of my parking spot and head for the street.

There’s also a feeling in the pit of my stomach that the road ahead isn’t going to be easy.

Fourteen

Mariah

All of the ingredients to make lemon bars are lined up on the counter. They’ve been sitting there since I got home. Two loads of laundry have been washed, dried, folded and put away. The new flannel sheets fit perfectly on my bed and the carpet in the living room smells like the lavender scented water I used in the shampoo cleaner.

It was enough to provide a semi-distraction from the day. The goal, however, was missed. While my body might be tired, my brain is not.

Extending my arms across the table, I rest my forehead on them. The water and soap from cleaning has washed away Lance’s cologne. I sniff around my shirt, shoulder, forearms, and it all comes back lacking his scent.

My groan is obnoxious. It’s repeated, quieter this time, as the click of Whitney’s key frees the front door.

“You home?” The door clasps shut. “Mariah!” She mumbles about knowing I’m here, that my car is out front, about what a jerk I am to make her play hide-and-seek. But when she comes into the kitchen and our eyes meet, she stops. “Um, what the hell happened to you?”

I angle my face toward the table so I don’t have to see her.

“Are you okay?” She drops into a seat next to me, her palm resting on my wrist. “Talk to me.”

“I never should’ve used that app,” I mutter.

“You used it? I didn’t know that. I’m kinda proud.”

Groaning again, not so obnoxiously since I have an audience, I drag myself into a sitting position. She performs a quick evaluation of my appearance and flinches.

“Don’t be,” I puff. “There’s nothing to be proud of in this fiasco.”

“Did you meet someone from it?” She squirms in her seat. “There are rules about meeting up with people, Mariah. You didn’t meet a freak, did you?”

Lance’s smile flutters through my memory. The way he showed up out of nowhere when I ran into my mother when he could’ve just stayed away. Remembering the way he buffered that situation makes me fill with an outrageous warmth.

“No,” I ruminate before answering. “He wasn’t a freak.” While I’m scrubbing my hands down my face, the muscles in the back of my neck become tense. “I met someone though. Someone I already know.”

“Um …”

“Yeah.”

“I’m humiliated, Whit,” I cry. “I tell students every day to watch who they are online. To not do or say things they wouldn’t say to someone in real life. I preach and preach and preach, setting out pamphlets about this topic. Hanging these cute little posters around the library to remind them about the dangers of social media, and what do I go and do? Exactly what I tell them not to.”

I could cry real tears. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I shut my eyes and feel like a fraud. “I said things to him on that stupid app that I would never, ever say to him in real life. And now I’ll have to see him every day knowing he knows that I said those things. I just …” Dropping my hand, my shoulders fall right along with it. “I just want to climb under a rock and die.”

She watches me warily. “Can I ask who this guy is?”

I brace myself for her reaction. “Lance.”

“The hot teacher?” she says, poker-faced.

“Yes,” I grouse.

“The guy who was here the other night. Who took you to his grandma’s house.”

“Yes.”

Her amusement knows no bounds. “Let me get this straight. Out of all the men on that app, you somehow managed to find him?”

It’s a rhetorical question. Or it better be because I’m not holding her hand through this process.

“It is a semi-local, kind of regional app. So it’s not entirely impossible, but I am leaning towards fate, Mariah.” She gets to her feet and floats around the room like a cartoon princess.

“Fate? Since when is fate a form of hell?”

The spinning stops and she laughs. “Since when is screwing a hot history teacher a form of torture?”

“I didn’t screw him,” I mutter. But I’ve fucked myself to thoughts of him a million times.

“That’s your fault.”

Yes, it is.

I appreciate the few quiet seconds as she flops back in the chair again. My fantasies of Lance were just that—fantasies. Make-believe. Not real. Now my reality has been skewed, flipped upside down and it’s all merging together in one ridiculously hot, yet slightly mortifying, situation.

Whitney shakes her head. “You are the only person in the universe who can find fault with an app that helped you meet a gorgeous and sexy man who already likes you to begin with!”

It’s so much more complicated than that. So complicated, in fact, that I don’t even know how to boil it down to make sense of it.

“How’d he take it?” she asks.

“Oh, he thought it was the greatest thing ever.”

“And you should’ve too.”

“Look,” I gulp, feeling my cheeks ready to betray me. “We have one relationship, for lack of a better word, at work. What we had online wasn’t really me and wasn’t really him. Or maybe it was him, actually. But I definitely wasn’t being myself.”

It’s easiest to leave it at that. There’s no sense in bringing up the fact that he’s a hook-up guy, a one-night stand—a couple nights at best. And even if I could pull off a one-night-er, I couldn’t do it with Lance.

Whitney is my best friend for a few reasons. One, she’s loyal. Two, she takes me as I am. Three, she can read all my nuances appropriately.

She gets comfortable, curling a leg beneath her. “So what you’re saying is you are the book nerd in-person and a little vixen online?”

“No,” I say too quickly.

She barely contains her laugh. “How vixen did you go?”

“I’m not a vixen.”

“Clearly or you would’ve rode his cock like any other hot-blooded female. I saw him, Mariah. Your self-control is on a whole other level.”

“Can we focus here?” I say, pulling her out of that line of questioning. “I don’t know what to do.”

I expect a quick chirp about how to have sex or something equally inappropriate, but she surprises me.

It’s a moment you can only have with someone you’re close to, a moment where you don’t have to speak but thoughts are still being exchanged. Her foot starts to bounce on the floor as she grasps my panic. I, on the other hand, inflate my lungs a little more easily than I have been able to in the last handful of hours.

“I’ll see him in the morning,” I say, resolved. “How do I navigate this, Whit?”

“I didn’t think you’d use the app, to be honest. I love that you did, but I’m surprised.”

“Yeah, me too. Surprised, I mean,” I clarify. “Not loving that I did it.”

“Let’s start there. Why did you do it?”

A sense of calm settles over me, like when you’re in trouble and finally accept that everyone knows it was you who did it. You go through the motions of telling the truth because it’s only going to delay the inevitable if you dance around it. You just want the conversation to be over and the fallout realized.

“I was sitting here one night right after I heard about Chrissy being pregnant.” My throat is scorching as I put the thoughts I’ve kept to myself into the universe. “And I guess I kind of broke down, you know. Not crying and all that, but more of a pity party. Wondering if there’s something wrong with me. Considering adopting a cat.”

She drops her jaw in mock horror.

“Anyway,” I continue, “I just needed that confirmation. I just wanted to know I could still reel a guy in. That I wasn’t lame.”

“You can’t believe that. I won’t sit here and let you say you think you’re lame.”

“You know what I mean.”

She scoots her chair closer to mine and kicks at my foot. “I know you thought you’d be in a different place right now, but you aren’t for a reason.”

“I’m fine with that. Really,” I insist when she looks at me like I’m lying. “I’m happy I’m not with Eric. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have some nice, sweet, cute guy want to be with me.”

The words don’t make it past my lips before Lance’s face pops back into my mind. It’s the image of him at my car, his arms stretched overhead, a soft look in his eyes that is such a contrast to the playful one I often see.

“Like Lance?” she asks carefully.

“The end of that story would be a happy one,” I laugh. “That excludes him.”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

“It does.” Getting up, I head to the oven and get it pre-heating. “He’s the most woman-hopping man I’ve ever known. Ever seen. In my office alone he talks to a different woman on the phone at least three times a week.”

   
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