Page 21 of Not You Again
He nods, a smile still on his face. “Did it occur to you that I meant for you to catch me?”
Another round of goose bumps tingles across my skin. Kit’s hands slow on mine, and his thumb rests across the pulse point on my wrist. It feels like time stops in this moment. We’re alone and the world is ours.
But we’ve been quiet too long again. Cassidy pipes up from the corner of the room, “Do you feel like you’ve changed since then?”
Kit clears his throat and shifts on the bed. “She’s still stubborn as ever.”
“And he’s still an arrogant ass.”
“I still have to make sure she eats, or she gets mean.”
“He still thinks I can’t function without his help.”
His eyes meet mine, and he drops his teasing tone. “You’ve always been like this.”
I narrow my eyes. “Like what?”
“A force of nature.” He drops my hands and wipes his hands off on one of the towels.
I bite my tongue, afraid to say something I’ll regret. He’s talking like he still has feelings for me. That’s a dangerous game to play, especially when he knows why I’m here. I clear my throat and say, “We’ve both changed. It’s been a long time.”
“It has,” he agrees. His chest rises and falls with a deep breath, then his lips part to say more. I’m afraid of what will come out of his mouth. It will be too honest, I know it.
He leans forward, bringing our faces closer together. I hold my breath. If he touches me now, I don’t know that I have the strength to say no. Just as he lifts his hand from the comforter, a shrill ringtone starts up in the corner of the room.
We flinch apart.
Steve mumbles an apology as he lowers the camera from his shoulder and digs in his pocket for his phone, avoiding Cassidy’s glare all the while.
Kit closes his eyes and slowly shakes his head, as if he’s coming out of a trance. My heart rattles in my rib cage like I’d just completed the hundred-meter dash. I suck in a breath and don’t miss the way Kit opens his eyes in time to see the rise and fall of my chest.
Cassidy curses under her breath. “That’s enough for tonight. I think we got what we needed.”
My shoulders sag with relief. We’re silent as we unclip our mics to hand them off to Steve and receive our missive for morning filming from Cassidy.
Kit follows them to the door and deadbolts it behind them. He flicks off the lamps on the way back to the bed. I lean against the headboard while he tidies up. After returning the supplies to the bathroom, he picks my wedding ring up off the comforter.
He holds it between us. “You did well today. For a virgin, I mean.”
I snatch the ring from his fingers with a scowl. As I examine it in the lamplight, I tell him, “I think maybe we should stick to the present from now on. We don’t need to rehash the past.”
He climbs back into bed and leans against the headboard too. “What if I want to?”
“What difference will it make?” I frown at the ring in my hand. “What’s done is done. Ancient history, right?”
“Practically strangers anymore.” He echoes what I said yesterday, though his tone is flat. He turns away from me, clicking off the lamp on his bedside table. “Goodnight, Andie.”
I don’t reply, choosing to set my wedding ring on the nightstand. I pick up a pen and hotel paper and begin to sketch a new dress.
CHAPTER TENANDIE
“Andie,” Cassidy says, stirring me from my sketchbook on our hotel room balcony. I’ve been trying to get the lines on this dress right for the last hour, and trying to not think about how if I can’t present something unique at Fashion Week, I may have to start working as a seamstress again.
“Yeah?” I reply, tapping the tip of my pencil on the sketch paper, as if beating it into submission will help the lines flow better. After Kit’s attention to my hands last night, the design came pouring out. I had to capture it before I fell asleep. But ten hours without a touch that intimate, and my muse left the building. There’s no way I’m going to ask him to do it again—how humiliating would that be?
“You’ve got to go join the group by the pool,” she tells me firmly, like my mom may have told me to finish my homework before hanging out with my friends. If my mom ever did that sort of thing.
I sigh. I thought the cameras would just follow us around as we did things, but it seems I get told where to go and when.