I grin at her, throwing my head back. "I'm not keeping anything a secret. It's hard for girls to focus on anything else except my good looks and big dick."
Her eyes roll to the heavens, lips curled like she's about to spit something out of her mouth. "Pig," she mutters, turning away. "I'll see you later."
I'm tempted to yell "prude" after her but I know that's a total playground maneuver, so I just watch her climb into her Mini Cooper, another rich girl accessory. While she speeds out of the parking lot, I can't help but feel a strange tremor of excitement run through me. Not about working with her—definitely not about that. But this project, this idea which just a few hours ago was dormant in my head, is now a living breathing egg ready to hatch. I haven't felt that creativity, that drive, for a long time. Maybe it's the right thing to get my work-in-progress back on track.
Too bad I still have to deal with Audrey during this whole process.
And it's too bad that when I'm jerking off in bed later that night, the image that pops into my head is her wet ruby lips around my cock. I come so hard at that, it takes me a few moments to catch my breath, the room spinning.
Looks like the next month is going to be hell after all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Audrey
"So how did it go last night?" Anna asks me the next morning as I settle down at the kitchen table with my coffee and a protein shake. No sign of turnip pancakes to be found, though this morning I think she's been practicing her contouring because her face is looking mighty Kardashian with a bit of 90's RuPaul thrown in there.
When I came in last night after the library, Anna was still out and I was absolutely zonked, even though the minute my head hit the pillow my brain started churning over and over the meeting with Harry.
"It wasn't as bad as I thought," I tell her before taking a timid sip of the scalding hot liquid.
And that's true. I mean, it kind of started out that way. There was no way I was going to let him forget the email he sent, even if I had to eat crow for a moment over that morning. Then there was the fact that he so clearly knew he'd been a total jackass to me in the past and yet pretended like it had slipped his mind.
Anna raises one eyebrow, a trooper fighting the Botox on her forehead. "You want to have sex with him now?"
I spit my coffee right out across the table and start coughing, my face growing red, tears welling. Anna calmly hands me a roll of paper towel.
"You can admit it, I won't tell," she says.
I shake my head furiously, tearing off the paper towel and wiping coffee off the table and my chin. "No!" I finally get out. "That's the last thing I want."
"But the first thing you need," Anna sits down beside me, palming her mug. Now her nails are white with flamingos painted on them. I have to wonder when she has the time to get them done and if she ever pokes a classmate's eye out. I know she's come dangerously close to me and that was before she was wearing the gel talons.
I give her my deadliest glare but it doesn't do anything to her. At least with Harry I saw him flinch a few times and I was using it on him a lot. "No one is having sex. He's still a pig. Maybe even worse than before." I pause and in some ways wish I had nothing more to say. "But he's not as stupid as he seems. At least, he's good at ideas and plotting. And realistic characters. We'll see if he can actually write."
"I thought you've heard his stuff in class, no?"
"I wasn't paying attention," I tell her truthfully. "I assumed it would be crap and turned off my ears."
"See that's why I had to leave my husband," Anna says joyfully. "I couldn't turn off my ears to this blah blah blah." She makes a talking motion with her hand. "And I couldn't turn off my ears to his ooooh, oooh, OOOOH!" And she's now making loud, high-pitched orgasm sounds that only an animal could hear. She gives me a wry look when she's done. "You know, because he was screwing our neighbor."
I've heard the story a million times before. It explains so much about Anna , yet I know if I were in her shoes, I'd have trouble mustering half the joy and energy that she has.
"Anyway," I tell her, "I don't think it will be the end of the world. If I can just focus on the story and not him, then we'll be okay."
"Because you want to have sex with him."
"Drop it," I warn her, getting out of my chair. "Just because a guy is good-looking doesn't mean that he's my type."
"Who is your type, then?"
That makes me pause. Danny's face flashes into my head. Memories of us in California, staying at romantic vineyard hotels, us laughing, drunk as hell, going swimming past pool hours. It's funny how every memory of us laughing and having fun and doing something exciting – dare I say sexual – are the ones that pop up the most, the ones I hold on to. And yet they only represent five per cent of the relationship. Even Disneyland was completely for me, he always went along willingly, having a fraction of the fun. That time I suggested having sex backstage of It's a Small World, like Ross Gellar did? Not only did he not get the Friends reference, but he flat-out turned me down.
Then a new memory bursts into frame, the one of Harry last night in the library, taking off his jacket, the way his biceps popped beneath his t-shirt, how his forearms seemed so massive, almost rough, in the library's austere environment. Like he knew how take charge of something, anything....me.
