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Adam looked back at me sweetly, kissing me some more. When I stopped his hand from inching further up my thigh however, he paused.
“C’mon,” I pleaded, this time addressing Dante as well. “I know virtually nothing about you guys. Give me something.”
They looked at each other with shrug-like expressions, then sat up a little straighter on the couch. Dante poured more wine, into my glass as well as his.
“Alright,” said Adam. “What do you want to know?”
“The normal stuff first,” I said innocently. “Where you work. What you do. That sort of thing.”
I stretched out between them, listening, letting them go back and forth. Hearing their answers to the more mundane background questions — the pre-game as I called it — before I finally got to the good stuff.
Adam worked construction, a general contractor for his father’s company. It explained his sun-bronzed skin and his amazing physique. The more he talked though, the more I got the sense that something was wrong. That either the company wasn’t doing that well, or maybe his father wasn’t. Or both.
“I’m trying to revitalize things,” he explained awkwardly, “but it’s hard. My father’s old. Set in his ways. And there’s a lot of competition out there, now. Younger companies, doing younger-company things to gain an edge over us.”
Dante’s family lived far away, and I learned he’d come here to go to school at Ithaca. He was the sharpest of his siblings, or at least, the most ambitious. Somehow his parents had scraped up enough to send him away, and his business degree was a source of intense pride for them.
“I miss them a lot,” he said, of his parents and brothers and sisters, “but I can always go visit. The job I have now… it’s too good. I’ve worked too hard in the company, making my way up to CFO.” He smiled, playing with my hair as I lay in his lap. “Besides, I love the weather here. I never had snow before. I never had cold.”
“You like the cold?” I laughed up at him. “Really?”
“It’s cool and different, having a change of seasons,” he shrugged. “In San Diego we have one season: summer. Virtually all year round.”
He looked so sexy staring down at me, with his chiseled face and dark features. And he was dressed so casually, too. So totally unlike the shirt and tie he’d worn on our first date, having come from an office where that sort of thing was standard. It was hot to think of him both ways, almost like a Clark Kent and Superman. All business at work. All play at home.
“What about you?” Adam asked abruptly. “We don’t know much about you at all.”
He was rubbing my feet. Almost putting me to sleep with his two strong hands, the balls of his thumbs digging deliciously into my arches.
But now, all of a sudden… I sat up.
“Me?” I laughed nervously. “Oh, I’m boring. Trust me.”
They both chuckled. “I doubt that very much,” said Dante. “C’mon. Let’s hear it. Tell us all about Hannah.”
The name suddenly seemed so foreign. Totally alien to me. Up until this moment I’d been wearing it so comfortably. But now…
All about Hannah…
Now it seemed like I was… like I was…
Lying?
I tried to push the guilt away. It was a little white lie, really. Wasn’t it? I mean it was just a name.
But shouldn’t you feel bad, Brooke? Lying to them?
The truth was nagging at me. Chewing away at the happy little scenario I’d created, in the back of my mind.
“Okay,” I said, eager to change the subject. “Tell me more about dating me. Tell me more about how this whole thing would work, and how it’s worked in the past for you, and what a relationship like this would look like in the long term.”
Dante sniffed, draining his wine glass. Adam chuckled. “Man, that’s a whole lot of questions.”
“Yeah, well it’s a complicated situation,” I countered. “And I’ve never done this before.”
“That is a lot of questions,” Dante agreed. “What are you, writing up a report or something?”
My expression was a big wide smile, but inside, my whole body ran cold.
