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“You were scared, Syd. Just admit it. Seriously. It was right. It felt right. We felt right. That scared you. You never dated anyone seriously. You were never in a relationship long enough for it to mean anything. By all accounts, you still haven’t been, and now you’re thirty-two years old and this isn’t some cry for help. It’s you giving in to what you’ve always wanted, even if it was your subconscious and your drunken fingers doing the work for you.”
“Stop it! You think you know me! You might have known me when we were younger, I’ll give you that, but you know less than nothing about me now. I’ve changed. And I’ve had some meaningful relationships, thank you very much. They just didn’t work out. It doesn’t mean I was scared of being hurt.”
“Yeah fucking right.” Jesse’s eyes narrowed.
He’d never been overly athletic, though his new body belied the fact, but he’d been a fierce competitor on the debate team, at chess, and any other mental exercise he put his mind to. He was smart. Clearly. Smart enough to start his own freaking company and make a difference in the world. Smart enough to make a whole pile of money doing it. Smart enough to still stay the same, at heart, because it was obvious he had.
“I don’t believe you.”
He dug in his back pocket, and god help her, she thought about his ass in those pants, tight and toned and perfectly squeezable, which made her think about knocking him down and licking him all over. Which was not at all appropriate. Obviously. It was her brain. Her swollen, drunk addled, hungover, traitorous brain betraying her all over again. As if the drunk message to him wasn’t bad enough.
He produced a phone and held it out in front of him. She watched him, breath baited.
“What do you say that we call your mom and ask her about all these meaningful relationships? She sounded pretty relieved that you were here with me and that you were engaged. She wasn’t at all worried about you being fake kidnapped. I think she’s so freaking happy that you’ve finally found someone and settled down that she’s doing a happy dance. Should we call her? Ask her to send us a video of it? I’m sure she would. Your mom was always fun. Always game for anything. I think she’ll set the record straight, don’t you?”
Sydney knew she was screwed. He’d called her bluff. Of course he did, he knew her better than pretty much anyone else on the planet. Which was a good reason to stay friends and friends only, which they couldn’t do because even though she was drunk, she remembered how good it felt being with him. How right it had been giving him her virginity.
He was the first guy who ever got her off. He might be the only guy who’d ever got her off at all. Sure, she faked it, but she hated that he was right, and he knew it.
That made him dangerous.
His not so average sized pokey stick made him dangerous.
The fact that it had been a decade and she still remembered exactly how right it felt, just like he said, when they were together, made him really dangerous.
And then, on top of it all, he’d gone and morphed into some god-like being who clearly had the ass now to be an ass model. If such things existed. And they probably did.
“I’m done here. I’m too hungover for this.”
Really, she just needed to escape. Sydney didn’t care if she had to walk the entire way back to San Francisco. She was getting the hell out of Philly, away from all the craziness and the one man on the planet who had always been far too dangerous for her heart. The one man on the planet who had the capability to break it, break her, ruin her for anyone else.
Oh wait. He pretty much already had. Jesus effing picklebeans.
Sydney stalked to the door, head pounding, chest aching, her body an odd mix of frustrated beyond belief, sore and tired from being hungover, and traitorously excited for something that was never going to happen. To top it all off, her stupid lips were still buzzing from that kiss.
Right before she reached the door, she turned around and shot Jesse the double bird. Yeah. Eat that, mothereffer.
She was done. Done with all of it. Just freaking done.
Sydney closed her hand over the ornate handle at the front door, nearly ready to let out a triumphant yell at her escape. She pushed down her nagging inner voice whispering poisonous words about never being able to escape because she couldn’t escape herself or really lie to herself. She flung the door open wide.
And froze in her tracks as an entire horde of reporters rushed across the lawn, scrambling over each other in their haste to get to her.
