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So now you want to sponge off West? Like you’ve been doing already?
She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. She would pay him back too. Somehow. She wasn’t a mooch, even if she was doing a damn good impression of one right now.
This was her answer. If she went back to school, she could probably get a work study program too. Not that they paid much, but it would be experience in her field and she could get another shitty job for the time she wasn’t in school or studying or working at her job for credit.
That should give her approximately twenty hours a week to make minimum wage, which meant she should be able to move out of Ethan’s apartment approximately by her seventy-fifth birthday.
Or she could move back in with her parents. They’d always held out that carrot. Get back into college, come home to stay rent free. Then you can save your money for your own place.
Right. And for paying off her student loans, since the gravy train had run out from her parents when she’d gotten tossed out on her butt. As it should have. She clearly hadn’t respected her degree, so it wasn’t their responsibility to contribute toward it.
Maybe she should just write down hot mess as her occupation and leave it at that. Or lukewarm mess, since West was the only man who’d ever made her feel hot. No one had ever made her feel the way he did.
“Lo,” he said softly from the bed, and his voice rose above her mother’s endless droning on the other end of the line.
Lauren turned, sure her eyes had to be bright from the tears she refused to cry. Not over this. She’d gotten herself into this, and she’d find her way out.
“Stay with me.”
For a second, she thought she’d imagined his lips moving. Dreamed up his husky voice saying words that seemed so impossible.
Why would he want her to stay? She didn’t have a job or anything to offer him. Hell, she didn’t even know all the blowjob tricks the real groupies must know.
All she knew was that when she looked up at him as he walked toward her, everything inside her strained toward him as if he was a magnet and she’d turned into a piece of metal. Pulled inexplicably into his orbit.
“Stay with me,” he said again, running his hand down the length of her hair. “Don’t go.”
She cupped her phone into her shoulder in the vain hope her mother couldn’t hear. Though a part of her wanted her to. Ached for her mother to know someone cared about her just as she was, maybe even lo—
No. Deluding yourself isn’t the way to a better life.
“Lauren? Lauren? Are you still there?”
She wanted to ask him what that even entailed. Staying with him. Surely he meant just a few more days. What was the natural ending point? And how could she guess it would be any easier to leave then than it was right now?
Swallowing deeply, she lifted the phone to her ear. “I’m here. Thank you for pulling strings. I know that must’ve been difficult for you both to appeal to the board.”
“Yes, well, we were in a very awkward position. But everyone makes mistakes. How you fix them is what’s important. So how are you going to fix this lapse, Lauren?”
Good question.
Gripping her cell, she stared into the green eyes that already centered her faster than anything else she’d ever known. Anyone else.
“Plans here have changed, and I’m going to stay with the tour for a while longer. When do you need my answer?”
West grinned at her and wrapped her hair around his fist, drawing her closer so she could lean against him. It would be far too easy to do just that. To run from one situation to another without taking a breath for herself in between.
So why did it feel like this was truly the first time she ever had?
“What do you mean ‘staying with the tour’? You’re being ridiculous. A girl like you doesn’t belong on a tour bus. It’s infatuation, Lauren, and it will fade. But not if you get yourself in a bad way before you’re smart enough to come home—”
“When?” Lauren asked, cutting her off. Praying like hell that West hadn’t heard what her mother had just said.
Suspecting from the pinch of his brows and the tic in his jaw that he’d picked up every damn word.
“What date do you need to hear from me by?” Lauren questioned at her mother’s silence.
“Two weeks,” her mother said finally. “If you’re not home by then, you can kiss your chances of getting back into the university goodbye.”
