I’m so screwed.
Distance. Space. Time.
Those are the three things I need right now because if we head back to the coach, we’re going to end up having sex . . . but right now with our mood, with this vibe between us, with my heart blatantly worn on my sleeve where it sits right now, I won’t just be opening my legs to him. I’ll be opening my heart too.
“Umm,” I say, knowing I need to chill these thoughts of mine so I can at least pretend to myself that we can still do the casual sex thing. “I want to play another game.”
“What?” He laughs, clearly thinking we were heading back to the coach and our bed just like my body wants to be doing.
“Another game. A couple more moments where we’re not the face of SoulM8.”
He chews on the inside of his cheek as he stares at me with confusion flickering through his expression. “Okay. Whatever you want.”
“Thanks.” My voice is soft. My heart constricting in my chest.
“How about you close your eyes, spin in a circle, and whatever game you point to when you stop is the one we play.”
“You want to play spin the bottle with arcade games?”
“Only if I get the other benefits of the spin when we get back on the road,” he says with a wink.
I just shake my head and go stand in the middle of the room. With my finger pointing out and my eyes closed, I spin slowly at first and then a bit faster until I’m disoriented. When I stop, Zane’s arms are there to hold me from falling over from the dizzies and my finger is pointing at a Lover’s Lane pinball machine.
“What the heck is that?” I ask and then laugh when I notice there are two identical pinball machines side by side for a couple to play.
“It all comes back to love,” he says and chuckles disbelievingly.
But as we slide our tokens in the machines and wait for the games to dispatch their pinballs for us, something about his comment bugs me. Reminds me of that first time we met. A time that now feels like forever ago when it’s only been weeks.
“Love is a bullshit emotion,” I murmur softly and hate knowing he said that when every time I’m with him lately, my insides feel like they are turning inside out.
“What?” Zane glances over to me briefly as he pulls the plunger back and lets it fly against the ball.
“If you really feel that way, why did you even buy and revamp SoulM8 in the first place?”
“It’s a long story.” He hits the flipper buttons repeatedly as the machine talks back to him with every push.
“I want to know.”
His ball slides through his flippers’ reach and he loses his first round with a sigh. “It was a bet,” he says so very casually, while my head feels like I just suffered from mental whiplash.
“What do you mean it was a bet?” My pinball machine flashes for me to play it but I suddenly have no interest.
“A bet. Some of my friends and I made a little high stakes bet. Take a million dollars, start a company, and at the end of two years, whoever has the highest profit wins a pot we all pitched in on.”
I stand there and blink at him and try to comprehend what it is he’s telling me. A bet. A pool of money.
“But for what reason?”
“Because we’re men,” he says and chuckles, and I hate that as much as that’s not an answer, it’s a perfect one. It’s not like many men back down from a challenge. “We’re all successful—very—and we needed something to put the thrill back in business again. So . . .”
So it’s not just an ego thing . . . in reality it is, but at least it’s something that . . . God, why am I justifying it? Why do I even care?
Then something clicks. “Kostas?” I ask already knowing the answer.
“Yes.” He nods and then groans when he misses the ball with the flipper. “Son of a bitch.”
“But . . . why?”
His chuckle bugs me. It’s the first hint of condescension I’ve had from him in weeks and now all a sudden as the outside world seeps back into our little bubble, I am so very aware how different our lives are. With the luxurious coach and fancy wardrobe and first class everything, it’s been easy to forget that this isn’t playtime in a fancy dream world to him like it is in a sense to me.
The pang in my chest is so very different now than the one I felt a few minutes ago.
Why do I feel hurt that I didn’t know this?
Is it because he didn’t tell me? Is it because I feel like we’re close enough that he should have sooner?
“Part of the contest rules are that no one is supposed to know about it,” he says before I ever ask the question on my mind. “You know, the first rule about fight club and all that.”
“You could have told me.”
He glances my way, mid-battle. “I’ll refer back to fight club,” he says with a playful laugh.