Page 23 of For the Cameras

“I’ll leave you to it,” Adam said as he slung his laptop bag over his shoulder, heading toward the door. He looked at me from under his lashes, giving me an adorable, shy smile. “Feeling okay this morning, Chase?”

Fuck me, his smile almost did more for me than his private Adam Dix messages did. I really was screwed.

“I’m feeling a lot better now,” I told him. My filter was good enough to not blurt out that I’d seen his videos, but I certainly couldn’t keep to myself how much I enjoyed seeing him in person. “You look good as hell, by the way.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding genuinely shocked. “I just tossed this on. I was worried I looked too boring.”

“You could never be boring, Adam,” I said.

The faintest pink appeared on his cheekbones again.

God, I felt like a monster with my secret. I had to find a way to tell him the truth.

“Thanks, Chase. Have a good day.”

Real-life Adam was so sweet, sopureseeming, almost. Guilt pooled inside me as I watched him walk off toward his car in the driveway, completely unaware that he had been exchanging messages with me online.

I couldn’t live like this. I was too honest of a person, and I knew I couldn’t keep this up.

I knew I had to tell him.

In person. As soon as I got the chance.

8

ADAM

I walked into my office building feeling like I was gliding on a cloud. Sunlight poured through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the research center offices, with sweeping views of Denver and the Rocky Mountains on the other side.

“I love this office building,” I said as I passed by Robert, a guy who had a tendency to yell and usually intimated the hell out of me.

He glanced up at me, and even his typical glaring look didn’t bug me. “Ain’t bad being on the fifteenth floor,” he said.

I found myself smiling at him and willingly making small talk about the weather before heading on toward my office. My usual social dread was nowhere to be found, and instead I almost felt like I had something keeping me lit up from the inside as I strode past my coworkers and through the halls.

Was all of this just because I’d had fun at trivia last night?

Or because seeing Chase’s face this morning had given me a rush of adrenaline that had stayed with me all the way to the office? Ever since he’d complimented my outfit, I felt like I had my own little source of confidence, radiating out from inside.

It felt good.

Way more good than I was used to.

Outside my office door, a junior researcher named Claire was hunched over her computer, her brow furrowed as she looked at a graph.

“How’s it going, Claire?” I asked as I walked past, stopping at the edge of her desk.

She looked up and did a double take.

“Adam, wow,” she said, her eyes going wide. “Didn’t expect you’d be in today.”

“Construction at my house,” I said, feeling myself smiling ather, too. Where was this sunny, social butterfly inside me coming from? “You need help with that data?”

She glanced back down at it. “I just can’t get the code to make the graph include my second data set,” she explained. “It keeps pulling from the first one.”

“Easy,” I said. “Can I show you?”

She looked surprised all over again. “Sure.”