Summer Fling Read online

  But Adam wasn’t with Maya, a small voice inside me chirped cheerfully. He just pretended to be. He wanted to be with you.

  “I’m sorry,” I said from the other side of the door. “Okay? There, you have it. A real apology. With the S word and everything. I’m sorry for ten years ago, and for six days ago. I’m sorry I couldn’t articulate my feelings well. I’m sorry I didn’t have the guts to go for it with you. I’m sorry I let you go,” I finished softly.

  “I’m sorry for being a dumbass at eighteen.” Adam sighed in response. I smiled to myself. I didn’t know why, but I was pretty sure he was smiling on the other side of that door, too. “That I went about it the wrong way. That I waited for you to take the first step just because I thought it’d make my life ten times easier.”

  “Were you really that scared of Val?” I chuckled.

  “He chased me with a billiard stick when I asked him, hypothetically, how he would react if I asked you out six months prior to Maya-gate,” Adam deadpanned. I burst out laughing, something warm spreading in my chest. He’d wanted to go for it. He’d wanted to ask me out.

  “Guess you got the answer to your question.”

  “And then some.”

  “I was prepared to go against Val about it…kind of,” I admitted. “I really liked you. Trouble was, I thought you liked everyone else.”

  “I never liked anyone else.” His voice was a low growl. A promise. “Not like this. Maybe not at all. So…” His voice took a mischievous edge. “You wanted me, huh?”

  “That’s the understatement of the century. My phone was a shrine full of screenshots of your pictures.”

  He laughed. “Same. I even looked for you on social media over the years. Your presence is surprisingly underwhelming.”

  “Yes.” I smiled. “I’m private, like that.”

  “Me too,” he deadpanned. He was one of the most famous people in the world. Another giggle burst out of me. And just like that, we acted like the past decade hadn’t happened. Like the night in my room hadn’t, either. It was just us. Making each other laugh and roll our eyes.

  I had to pull away. To give both of us time to digest everything. I needed a minute to savor this thing. To take a breath before things snowballed into a territory I’d never been in.

  “All right. It’s the middle of the night and I need to go through twenty pages before I send this episode that I’m writing. I’ll let you rest.” I got up reluctantly, getting ready to walk back to my room.

  “Oh, and Nik?” Adam added, making me stop in his hall.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not the same wishy-washy eighteen-year-old. Now that you’re here and I know the truth, know how you feel…all bets are off.”

  No one had ever accused me of being overly sophisticated, so there was little point in trying to adapt cultivated tactics to make Adam Mackay notice I was no longer sixteen.

  The way I saw it, we were both single (I knew he was single, because I’d spent the entire night cyber-stalking him, something I’d refrained from doing for a decade, and yes, I would like the Nobel Prize for my notable self-restraint to be mailed to my current address, please). We both liked each other and shared the same hobbies and love for movies. We made each other laugh, and if we were half as good between the sheets as we’d been at rolling on the carpet doing our so-called freestyle wrestling, fireworks would explode every time we touched each other.

  Now we’d officially graduated from clearing the air to The Seduction Game.

  The morning after Adam’s confession about faking it with Maya, I strolled out of my room in a small yellow bikini, carrying my laptop – No big deal, scriptwriters kill off and resurrect characters in soap operas in their bikinis all the time, right?—and headed straight to Adam’s balcony.

  He had a kidney-shaped pool, bracketed by palm trees for privacy. The Hollywood Hills view made me feel like I lived in a fairytale. I settled on one of the sunbeds, ignoring the fact that I couldn’t read anything on my laptop with the sun pounding on the screen, and waited for Adam to wake up.

  He dragged himself out of his room an hour later, carrying two cups of coffee. He came to the balcony shirtless, his six-pack on full display. His arms were the width of my thighs and corded with muscles. I wanted to climb him like one of the palm trees.

  He sat beside me, placing one of the coffee cups on the table between us. I murmured my thank you as he squinted at the pool. I still couldn’t believe he had a freaking private pool in his condo. I mean, he resided in the penthouse, but still.

  “Slept well?” I purred.

  “Sure. How’s my guest room treating you?”

  “It’s really nice. Thank you.”

  There was a pause. The awkwardness lingered in the air. At least it was nervous awkwardness, and not the-only-reason-I’m-not-chasing-you-with-a-steak-knife-is-the-law awkward.

  “You don’t need a bikini to seduce me. Fucking breathing does the trick. Always did.” He still looked at the pool.

  Good thing, as my face turned bright red. “I’m not trying to seduce you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then your scriptwriting skills need some fine-tuning.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, for one thing, your laptop is turned off.”

  Shit. I slammed my laptop shut, but this time around, didn’t let my pride and embarrassment get the better of me.

  “Well. This is embarrassing. Then again, I’m a little rusty in the seduction department.”

  “When in doubt, just take your clothes off?”

  I laughed. “That’s no way to talk to your best friend’s annoying baby sister. I swear, that’s how I thought you looked at me all those years.”

  “I did,” he deadpanned.

  I cocked my head, waiting for him to finish his thought.

  “Until I didn’t. Somewhere along the line, my best friend’s annoying baby sister became irresistible. I knew it would look better if you initiated whatever it was between us. If I was the prey, kissed by the girl and not vice versa. But you never budged, no matter how much dry-humping we did on your carpet or how much time we spent together. I went crazy going back home every day with blue balls and a hard-on from hell. I wrote you letters that I never sent. I fought with Val just for the sake of fighting with him, because I secretly resented him. It was pretty pathetic.”

  “But you always had someone else.” I sucked in a breath.

  “Having no one would have looked bad. Val already knew how I felt about you, and I didn’t want the invitations to your house to dry up. Besides, I was in love, not a saint.” He cocked an eyebrow. “I moved on by getting back out there. Trying to find the right girl. Guess what? She doesn’t exist.”

  I whipped my head in his direction, my mouth slacking. Had he just said the L word?

  Adam shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “I thought it was clear.”

  “Not clear enough for me, apparently. How come you’re single now?”

  It made no sense that he would be. He was the entire package. And, judging by the way he’d pressed against me when we were teenagers, he had a package to go along with the package.

  Adam turned away from the pool, still resting on the sunbed next to me, and smiled sadly.

  “It’s not that I don’t date. I do. But what it keeps boiling down to is this—I never know if they like Adam Mackay, the Broadway phenomenon slash movie star, or Adam Mackay, the guy who can burp the alphabet backwards, beat anyone at Guitar Hero, and is just a weirdo movie buff. With you, I didn’t have to wonder.”

  “For the record”—I reached across the table separating us, planting my hand on his—“not even one small part of me fell in love with you because you can burp the alphabet backwards.”

  He threw his head up and laughed, then got up, stopping just above me to plant a kiss on the crown of my head. “The L word?”

  “I thought it was pretty obvious,” I said in the same exact way he’d replied to me when my eyes asked him about it.<
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  “Huh.” He straightened his back, smirking down at me. “What are you gonna do about it, little Nik?”

  I grabbed his wrist before he turned away and left the balcony, shooting up to my feet. The floor beneath me was scorching hot, but somehow, I hardly even felt it. I rose to my toes, pressing my lips against the side of his mouth.

  “I think I’ll start by doing this,” I murmured, skimming the edge of his lips with my mouth. A current of something delicious ran through my spine, exploding at the top of my neck, sending chills along my skull.

  “Yeah?” He grinned, but didn’t make a move to kiss me back. I got it. I’d spent the night thinking about all of our small moments. There had always been a breath in which we’d almost kissed, but we never did. Adam had been starved for my kisses for years. The least I could do was do him the honor of offering him our first one.

  “I think I will also do this,” I continued, flicking my tongue between his lips. They fell open on demand, as I lazily explored the seam of his mouth, committing to memory his taste, his feel, his heat.

  Adam grabbed my neck, cupping it in his big palm, and guided my mouth to his greedily and with a healthy amount of force.

  My heart thudded in my chest, my body tingling with excitement and desire. This. It felt like we were transported back in time. Young. In love. In our feels. Like no time had passed at all.

  The last thing he said to me before he devoured me with his tongue was, “I think it is payback time for all those lost kisses. Spoiler alert, Nik: you’ll be paying with interest.”

  We kissed for an hour. Maybe more. Just kissing, on the edge of the pool, standing on the scorching hot floor, not feeling anything other than each other. We were wrapped around each other, consumed and starving for each other. I thought we would stand there forever—at least until evening—when his phone started ringing. He pulled away, grunting in annoyance, and frowned down at his phone.

  “My agent,” he tsked. “I need to go in for some reshoots. Don’t go anywhere.” He kissed me again. “This is not over.”

  It wasn’t.

  I knew it wasn’t.

  I smiled through swollen lips. So wide and big I couldn’t feel my face.

  I SPENT THE next day moving my things out of Chris’ apartment into storage.

  Chris decided to keep our Sherman Oak place. I rented a U-Haul, packed my little belongings, and spent the day carrying heavy boxes to and fro. Chris wanted to “clear the air” while I was there, but I told him I’d rather pack my stuff in peace. Adam didn’t know my whereabouts. I figured it wasn’t his mess to sort out. Besides, I was born into the #GirlPower era. There was nothing I couldn’t do, including moving half an apartment on my own.

  The entire day, Val sent me encouraging text messages, and by ‘encouraging’, I mean passive-aggressive to the extreme.

  Val: Tell Chris if he gives you trouble, I will punch his face in.

  Val: How are things at Adam’s? Hope he is treating you well.

  Val: While you’re at it warning Chris, tell Adam I will punch his face, too, if he touches you.

  Val: Never mind, I’ll tell him myself.

  Val: Think his face is insured? Like J-Lo’s ass and Elle Macpherson’s legs? He is kind of a big deal.

  I shook my head, laughing. I knew my brother was doing this to make me feel better. Honestly? It kind of worked. But I still wished he would let me make my own decisions. By the time I dragged myself back into Adam’s apartment, I was limp with exhaustion. My thighs quivered as I fiddled with the digital pad of his entrance door, getting the code wrong twice before finally stopping my fingers from trembling.

  When I walked in, Adam was there on the couch, watching something on TV I couldn’t see from that angle.

  “Long day?” He smiled.

  “Yup. But it’s over, and all my stuff is out of the apartment.”

  “You moved out today?” He frowned, pausing the movie he was watching. I nodded, still standing by the door.

  “You should’ve told me. I’d have helped, work be damned. Or told my assistant to do it.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I needed the time to marinate on everything that’s happened lately.”

  He scowled. He didn’t like the idea of my overthinking things. But that wasn’t what I meant. I rolled my eyes and laughed.

  “Not about us. I’m happy that we kissed.”

  In fact, I was pretty bummed we hadn’t gone all the way. Adam went straight to his agent after that pool kiss, and we’d missed and didn’t see each other since then.

  I didn’t want to elaborate on Chris because, A. As much as I disliked Chris for what he did, I still didn’t want to out him and Johnny, and B. Because life with Chris felt like it was eons away. It was scary how easily I’d picked back up my obsession with Adam Mackay. Like it was never gone. Maybe it really hadn’t been.

  Adam sat up, patting the spot next to him. “Betsy warmed it up for you.”

  I loitered by the door. I really needed to take a shower. I was sweaty, my hair was a mess, and I was pretty sure two damp circles adorned my shirt around my armpits.

  “Let me just hop into the shower. Do you want me to cook anything? I can make pasta.” I breezed into the hallway.

  Adam pounced from the couch with feline grace, stalking my steps. “Pasta’s fine. Sure you’re okay?”“Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know, maybe because you just packed up four years’ worth of a relationship into cardboard boxes and moved in with your brother’s best friend?”

  “We’re not technically roommates. It’s just a pit stop.” I smiled, but inside, I was oddly sad about having to leave here soon. Which was crazy, because Adam was supposed to be a virtual stranger to me at this point.

  “Whatever makes you sleep better at night, Nik.”

  I walked into my en-suite. He joined me. I stopped.

  “May I have my privacy now?”

  “Sure.” Adam turned around, but stayed in my bathroom. Unbelievable. But I kind of liked having him there. It was nice to have someone to talk to at the end of the day. Especially this kind of day. It wasn’t that I was extremely upset, but I still felt hurt and humiliated.

  “What are you doing?” I picked up my brush and ran it through my hair.

  “Offering you company. A shoulder to cry on.”

  “Is it sad that I’m not even that heartbroken over it?” I asked.

  He shook his head, looking relieved, his shoulders loosening.

  “Love comes in very different ways and forms. You can’t pick and choose how it hits you.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. That was why my feelings for him were so strong still. Adam hit me like a semitrailer. Chris…like a scooter accident, maybe.

  I put the brush down. “Okay. I’m getting into the shower now.”

  “Have fun.”

  “Are you going to just…stay?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  I knew if I told him to leave, this time he’d go. But I wanted him to stay. “Fine. No peeking,” I warned, peeling my damp clothes off and dumping them on the floor.

  “Pinky promise.”

  I could see him through the mirror, squeezing his eyes shut in an exaggerated way that wasn’t going to win him any Oscars.

  “So, have you slept with a lot of starlets?” I stepped into the shower, turning the water on. Adam was still squinting.

  “I’m not a virgin anymore, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “It’s not what I’m asking. You lost your virginity sophomore year to Tina McNelis.”

  I’d eavesdropped on Val every time he’d talked to Adam when we were teenagers. The walls in our house were thin and my appetite for all things Adam was insatiable.

  “Damn.” Adam laughed. “Your talents are needed at the CIA.”

  “I’ll be sure to send them my résumé if the scriptwriting gig doesn’t pan out.”

  “It will pan out. You’re the most talented girl I’ve ever me
t,” he said, serious as a heart attack. “To answer your question—no, I haven’t slept with many actresses. Three, to be exact. I had a girlfriend the entire time I was at Juilliard, and after I graduated, it was pretty much work nonstop. What about you? Other than this Chris guy, did you have a lot of boyfriends?”

  The hot water felt good on my body, washing the day away.

  “Nothing to write home about,” I answered.

  “Me neither.”

  “No serious boyfriends?” I joked.

  Adam licked his lips, his back still to me. “Nope. Just casual dick.”

  I actually snort-laughed, my mind drifting to Chris. It felt weird not telling Adam about what happened. I used to tell him everything. Then again, it wasn’t my place to drag Chris and Johnny out of the closet.

  There was silence as I lathered myself with soap, watching the muscular ridges of Adam’s triangle back in his soft white V-neck. I’d watched a GIF of him taking his shirt off in a rom-com for half an hour last night, managing by some miracle not to pleasure myself in the process. But now that he was here, in the flesh, the temptation was overwhelming.

  “Hey, you won’t open your eyes or turn your back, right?” I asked teasingly.

  “Trust issues much?”

  “A ton, actually. Part of the reason why I broke up with Chris.”

  He let out a manly growl. “I’m not Chris.”

  I snuck a hand between my thighs, washing myself there, sans the soap. My cheeks heated as I checked through the mirror to see if his eyes were still closed. They were. I let mine drop shut, too, imagining him inside the shower with me.

  “What are you thinking about?” Adam asked, his voice thick and faraway. I licked my lips. I wanted to touch myself so bad. To touch him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Try again.” His voice darkened, becoming smoky and low.

  My eyes were still closed. “I’m thinking about that night,” I admitted. “How jealous I was of Maya.”

  “I hated that you were sixteen, that you were my best friend’s sister, that you were the only girl off limits in our entire goddamn town, and yet exactly who I wanted.”