“And for another thing,” she continues, as if I haven’t spoken, “I feel like you’re holding yourself back from me, and I don’t get it at all. Logan, your body isn’t a machine, and I don’t expect it to be—I don’t expect you to turn yourself off like a switch when the camera turns off. You’re human, you’re going to keep needing and craving even after a scene ends. Of course, you don’t want to use women, and of course you aren’t the kind of guy who tries to fuck around with girls onset when the cameras aren’t rolling. It’s one of the things I like best about you.”
I don’t know what to say to this, because I’m so floored and grateful that she has noticed those things about me, but I also know that she’s not finished talking yet and that I’m still in trouble.
“But Logan—” she steps forward “—I offered. I was offering because I wanted to. I wanted to and I chose it, and you wouldn’t have been manipulating or even coaxing me into it. Please...as we move forward...please open up to me more. I’m your friend and I think I’m—” she breaks off, swallowing and glancing away. “I’m so turned on for you all the time,” she finishes, and it makes my dick ache and my heart beat hard, even as my mind recognizes that she changed course at the last moment.
She changed course...why? My heart beats harder and faster. What was she going to say? Because what if she was going to say that she is falling for me? That she has feelings for me?
What would I say back?
The answer rises to my lips immediately: Me too me too me too.
She drags my mind away from those thoughts with a soft sigh, the kind of sigh that makes me remember the noises she made on the hood of my car. Something snaps inside of me, something big.
“Sit on the couch,” I command. My voice is firm, loud and a little harsh in the small, warm space. Some distant part of me wonders if I’ve crossed a line.
But she sits.
I walk over to her. “On the edge,” I say, and she obeys, and then I kick her legs apart, so that she’s not only sitting on the edge but has her legs splayed wide. Her skirt rides up, baring her *.
She peers up at me with those golden eyes at the same time that I smell her scent again. My pulse thuds in my neck and wrists and groin, and it hits me.
I’m not just caught up in Devi, I’m truly, honestly falling for her. I have feelings.
Capital F Feelings.
Somehow my crush has gone from “casually obsessed with” to “move in with me,” and I have no idea what the fuck to do with that, much less what Devi would do with it if she knew. She’s obviously attracted to me, but that in no way equates romance, especially in our line of work. It’s too soon for me to feel this way, and it’s not right to drag that into the middle of a project. And if I’m being honest, I’m scared. Not a little scared, but a lot scared, because the last time I had capital F Feelings, I lost my dog, my heart, and my sobriety in one fell swoop.
But I can’t just ignore this, and clearly, I can’t hide it from Devi, nor do I want to.
There has to be a middle ground, right? Between pretending it away and proposing marriage?
I drop to my knees in between her legs, not missing her small shiver as I do.
“You’re turned on for me all the time?” I ask her. “Well, I’m worse. I’m fucking miserable with the need to touch you and taste you. I’m obsessed with it. I’m obsessed with you.” I meet her eyes. “You have to tell me if that makes you uncomfortable. Because the way I think about you, the way I crave you, it’s not just like two performers. It’s not just like two friends.” My hands find her ankles and wrap around them, more to keep myself from touching her in more interesting places while she answers. I can see her pulse hammering in her throat as she swallows.
“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” I ask tentatively.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“And are you okay with it?”
A pause. And then a nod.
Well, it’s not the most enthusiastic response I could have hoped for, but what did I expect? Even holding back from going full Romeo on her, it’s still a lot to lay on a girl, that I think about her all the time, and not in a friends-only way. I start to get up from my kneeling position, but she stops me with a hand on my shoulder. It drifts over to my throat, where her thumb caresses lightly across my Adam’s apple.
It’s my turn to shiver.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, “you just took me by surprise. What I mean to say is that it’s more than okay with me. I’m...I’m a little obsessed with you, too.”
I feel like my chest is going to explode. “Really?”
She smiles. “Really.”
“But you also understand why I want to bottle up some of...whatever this is...and use it for the show, right?”
She nods, but the smile fades. “I understand. We want it to feel real.”
“Because it is real. The heat between us, it’s special, Cass, and if we play our cards right, everyone who watches us will feel it.”
“I get it.”
But something is off in her voice, and I don’t know how to fix it. Except to do what I planned on doing originally when I made her sit: lean down and bury my face between her legs.