Chapter 8
Davis
I take a bite of my bagel as we round the first landing, chewing as I watch her walk up the stairs. I should look away, but her legs are an unfair advantage: strong, shapely, and impossibly long. Too bad they’re covered in tights. But then, I reason, as we round another flight, perhaps that barrier is a good thing.
“How’s your coaching going?”
She turns around briefly, casting me a curious look as she keeps walking. The sound of her boots hitting each of the concrete steps echoes. “How did you know I was a running coach?”
“Because I looked you up before I called you in,” I say, with a–matter–of–fact tone. “The Internet is a wonderful thing. I research all actors I’m seriously considering casting.”
“Oh,” she says, and there’s the faintest note of being let down in her voice, as if she wanted me to have looked her up just for her. “Coaching is good,” she continues. “I scaled back a bit when I got the part, but I’m still working with a core group of women who are training for a breast cancer awareness run to raise funds for research.”
“That’s great. Takes a lot of discipline to do that, to run every day. I imagine it takes even more discipline to have run five marathons.”
“Yes. I am immensely disciplined,” she says and there’s something veiled in her answer, so I can’t help but wonder what other areas she is equally disciplined about. “In fact, I’ve learned all the lines already.”
Oh, so that’s what she meant. My mind was drifting off to tawdrier shores.
She stops briefly on the landing to the fourth floor. I stop, too. She turns and wheels on me, and a look of frustration mingled with a hopeless sort of desperation crosses her gorgeous face. “You can’t just do this. You can’t keep coming in and out of my life,” she says, her voice nearly breaking.
I step closer to her, worry pounding through me. “I’m sorry,” I say, but I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. “Are you okay?”
She smiles, the kind you flash when you’ve pulled something off. “It’s from the show. Act II, Scene Five. Near the end.”
“Damn,” I breathe out, shaking my head, and matching her grin. “You had me. You were so convincing that it didn’t even occur to me you were giving me a line. Because I know them all too.” Though I’m not an actor and would never want to be one, I shift into Paolo seamlessly with one tilt of the head, one cocky stare. “But I’m in your life. I’m in it, Ava,” I say, emphatically. We’re no longer in the stairwell. We’re in an art gallery, where this scene takes place and Ava is angry with Paolo because he’s shown up when she didn’t expect him.
With every word crisply enunciated, because Ava is through with all their ups and downs, she commands, “Then be in it.”
“I will if you’ll stop pushing me out.” I step closer to her.
“I never did that and you know it,” she says, fixing me a tough stare, but she doesn’t back away.
I pause. Breathe. Let go of the anger. “Ava, I can’t stand this fighting anymore.”
She raises her eyebrows playfully. “Let’s do something other than fight then.” Then, her eyes soften. She reaches for my face with tentative fingers. “You have something on your…”
I frown, puzzled by the words that don’t fit. “That’s not the next line. The next line is I have something in mind—”
She cuts me off. “No, I was going to say you have a sesame seed right here.” She taps her chin lightly to demonstrate.
“Oh.” I swipe once to wipe it off.
“You missed,” she says softly, and now we’re done with lines. It’s just us. “Davis,” she adds, and it’s halfway to an invitation because she’s talking to me now, not Paolo, and she’s still got that seductive tone in her voice. I want to hear her say Davis in other ways. I want her to say my name because she can’t not. Because she’s reaching for me, and pulling me deeper, and because I’m doing things to her that drive her so wild she says my name in a breathless, fevered way.
I want her to say my name to ask for it, to plead for it, to beg for it.
She sweeps her thumb across my chin gently. I hitch in a breath as she touches me. “I got it,” she whispers, flicking the errant sesame seed quickly to the floor. I don’t know if she’s Jill or Ava anymore, but I don’t care because now she’s running her thumb across my jawline, and the barest touch from her makes me hard.
“Did you find any more?” I ask, in a low, hoarse voice.
She shakes her head, her hair moving with the slightest swoosh, enough that I catch a faint scent of her pineapple shampoo that already is her scent to me. The one that will always make me think of her. Now she’s running her index finger across my lower lip, and that’s it. That’s all I can take.
“Jill,” I warn.
“What?”
“If you keep doing that…” I let my voice trail off.
She keeps doing it, tracing my lips with her finger, obliterating all my willpower. I place my coffee and bagel on the stairs then grab her wrists, walk her two steps backward. She’s up against the concrete wall. Her lips are parted and her eyes are full of lust. I hold tight to her wrists as I capture her mouth with mine.
She lets out the tiniest little whimper at the first touch of my lips. I want to kiss her hard and hungry, because she makes me feel that way. But I want her to know I’m in control, that I’m leading now, not her. Without breaking my hold on her wrists, I trace her lips with the tip of my tongue, slowly, torturously. She tries to deepen the kiss, grappling at me with her sinfully delicious mouth but I take my time, tormenting her with my tongue, leaving her no room to think of anything else but how she’d feel if I were doing this to her in other places.
I move to her jawline, kissing her there, then teasing my way to her earlobe, flicking my tongue against her skin. “Is that what you wanted me to do?” I whisper.
“Yes,” she pants.
“Is that why you touched me?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been thinking about me since that day in my office?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
She inhales sharply, then whispers in a ragged voice. “Yes.”
I let go of her wrists, and they fall to her sides. I untie the belt of her jacket looped at her waist, then undo each button on her coat, letting the fabric fall open. “I hate winter,” I say. “Too many layers.” Then I pull back to look at her. She’s wearing a V-neck sweater that makes her breasts look fantastic. Her nipples harden under my gaze. I finger the bottom of her sweater, careful not to take this too far, but dying to know what her skin feels like. I lift the fabric, and run my fingers across the soft skin of her stomach.
She shivers, practically vibrating with sexuality. It’s as if her body is on a low hum, waiting for the right person to turn her all the way up, all the way on. So I give her what she wants, slanting my mouth against hers and kissing her hard and rough, so she’ll still be able feel me later when she’s all alone. She responds instantly, grabbing my hair, pulling me closer, tangling her tongue with mine. It’s a hungry kiss, as I explore her mouth, tasting her lipstick until I nearly lose my mind with the need to know more of her body.
Every inch of her.
Her hands drop to my waist and she tugs harder, as if she’s trying to erase any distance between us. I follow her cues, giving her what she wants, rolling my hips against her. Her hands are on my ass in a second, grappling and yanking me against her. She pushes back, thrusting her body against mine, and it takes all my self-control not to hike up her skirt, to touch her under those tights, to learn exactly how much more she wants.
Instead we kiss like that, frenzied and fast, bodies smashed together, but never quite going too far. At some point we pull apart for air. She’s breathing heavily but she’s smiling too, and everything about her is starting to lower my defenses, from the sweet curve of her lips, to the glow in her blue eyes, to her talent and the way she was meant to play this role. It’s eating me alive not to ask her to have dinner with me. To start something with her. To take her out, and romance her, the way I want to. I let that sweetness she has work its way through me, and I tell her something I shouldn’t be saying.
“I wanted to cast you as Ava. I wanted you over Alexis.”
Her eyes widen. “You did?”
“Yes,” I say and more words pour out because I want her to know what I see in her. I want her to know that she’s my discovery. I found her, I called her in, I chose her. “You were my first choice, Jill. The producers insisted on Alexis because of her credits,” I add, taking a chance that she won’t think me weak for not having the final say. But I risk it. “But I wanted you and only you as Ava.” I leave a quick kiss on her neck that makes her shudder before I speak again. “You can play her, and you will play her. Hell, you are her. I can feel her pain in you. Her secrets. Her sadness. How wounded she is. Most of all, I can feel her hope.”
She bites her lip and breathes out on the last word. I think her cheeks might be turning red. Slowly, as if she’s enchanted, she brings her hand to her heart. “Really?”
I nod. “You’re going to be such a big f*cking star, Jill. I want the world to know I discovered you.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I’m so happy to have this chance so early in my career to work with you.”
Her eyes are filled with such genuine happiness, and it’s a look I immediately recognize, one that sends me back in time right along with her words. So early in my career. I can picture Madeline, how thrilled she was when I called her in for an audition after seeing her in a tiny little workshop production, how over the moon she was to be cast in one of her first shows, how hopelessly we fell in love as we worked together on World Enough and Time three years ago in San Diego.
It breaks me, the way Jill looks at me now the way Madeline did then. I know the ending. I can’t go there again, because she is all my weaknesses.
I shake my head. “F*ck. Rehearsal is about to start. I can’t be late. And we can’t keep doing this.”
“Right,” she says in a shaky voice.
“We just can’t,” I repeat, because I’m the one who needs convincing.
“I know,” she says, with resignation now. “This has to stop. The show is too important.”
She thinks it’s because of the show. But it’s more than that. “Jill. I don’t date actresses,” I say in a firm, harsh voice that’s more for me than for her. It comes out more cruelly than I intended.
She rearranges her features, erasing the happiness, erasing the aftereffects of what we just did. “Well, that’s fine with me. Because I’m in love with someone else anyway.”
She adjusts her coat, pulling it closed and walks up the stairs.
“Then you really shouldn’t kiss me like that,” I call out to her, and this time I intend it to sound harsh.
She gives me one sharp cold stare before she pushes open the door to the stairwell. “You’re right. I shouldn’t.”