Page 27 of Thank you, Next
He ignored the look the hygienist gave him, like he was some sort of hero out of a romance novel instead of someone who couldn’t seem to get rid of a splinter.
•••
Alex didn’t know where she was when she woke up, and that hadn’t happened since college. But, unlike when she was in college, she wasn’t sleeping on a mattress on the floor that had at best dirty sheets and at worst just stains.
No. She spread her hand out and felt the touch of linen. And when she took in a deep breath, she knew where she was immediately. The smell of Will’s room hadn’t changed all that much, in part due to the fact that he’d never tried to avoid actual showers by using Axe body spray as a teen.
No, after his unfortunate Drakkar Noir period, he’d always smelled like lemongrass soap and sage aftershave. His sheets smelled like him, but with the awesome scent of sheets hung out to dry on a clothesline. This was always what she hoped a man’s bed smelled like. And she was often disappointed. Some of the men she’d dated—ones in their thirties—thought that it was too girly to care about their surroundings. So, they lived like college boys, on mattresses on the floor, until they got married so that a woman could take care of that.
That thought made her remember that she was in Will’s bed, and Will had been married. If she hadn’t known that Will had always been fastidious about his room, she would have assumed that April had introduced him to the pleasures of fine home linens and bed frames. But she hated to give April that much credit and was glad she didn’t have to.
She didn’t want to think about April at all, because she needed to figure out how she came to be in Will’s bed. The last thing she remembered was asking Lyle for stronger drugs. And then she’d passed out.
Her mind had raced back to the day she’d gotten her wisdom teeth pulled. She’d freaked out from the moment her dentist had said that an oral surgeon had to do it, but not to worry because she’d be given a light sedative. Alex had always hated blood and pain, but the idea of having surgery done on her mouth with only a light sedative had terrified her more than she could express.
It was the summer before she’d headed off to college, and her mother hadn’t been back from her trip to Cambodia yet. Her mother had been working to assist a UN commission, so it wasn’t as though Alex could call her back from that to take care of her and her ouchie toothies. And her sister had been on a summer trip to Italy with her crappy boyfriend, who’d later turned into her crappy husband.
So, Alex had taken it upon herself to take a taxi to the dentist and have one of her friends’ moms pretend to be her mom in order to pick her up. She’d made sure that she wasn’t an inconvenience to anyone else and gotten things done.
Lying there, still groggy from whatever excellent drugs that Lyle had put her out with, Alex was mortified. Because she had certainly been an inconvenience to Will today. And even though they had little in common that wasn’t the great Lexi Turner, neither of them liked to rely on other people. It was probably why they’d always repelled each other. Neither of them wanted to seem weak by having needs that they couldn’t meet on their own, so they never opened up to each other in a meaningful way.
But still, because neither of them wanted to need the other one, they understood each other. And they knew that beneath the entirely self-sufficient exterior was an endless void of need. Because Alex knew that her mortification at having to rely on Will that afternoon was prompted by the fact that it was a dent in her shield. She didn’t know if Will was keeping score—she only knew that she would be keeping score if the positions were reversed—but he’d patched up her scraped knee and picked her up from the dentist. He had two points up on her.
Alex strained her ears to figure out whether she was alone in Will’s loft or not. She’d never been there before; she only knew that it was somewhere that had recently seen some development. She would never tell him, but she loved this place and had been happy for him when he’d purchased it after April bought him out of their house. It helped that April hated it—said it was like living in a garage—but it was so totally cool. It was in a building downtown—Alex winced again thinking about how long that drive had to have been even though it was shorter than bringing her back to her house. The building had been a laundry back in the late nineteenth century, so the ceilings were incredibly high and secured by sturdy metal beams that had withstood loads of earthquakes.
The walls were all exposed brick, and she could see to the other end of the space from the bed. The flat was totally filled with light from the huge windows, whose glass had been replaced with energy-efficient glass when they’d renovated the building.
Predictably, Will had upgraded everything in his kitchen, which she could also see from the bed. That made her think of what it would be like if she was with Will and had the right to wake up in his bed. But the apartment was empty, and Will was not poaching an egg for her while shirtless.
It was disturbing how quickly she was slipping away from her previous “Will Harkness is an irredeemable asshole” stance. Maybe because she’d spent so much time thinking about her history with men who wouldn’t have picked her up from the dentist while they were dating because she didn’t look pretty enough with half her face swollen.
Plus, she was sure that blow jobs were a no-no for at least a few days, and that would have been a dealbreaker for most of her exes. But thinking about that made her think about the fact that she’d never seen Will’s dick. And that felt like it was too close to fantasizing about him the same way she had as a teen. There were only bad things on that route, and she would not go there. Having a crush on Will Harkness was like taking the 405 in heavy traffic. It seemed like a good idea before you saw that you were never going to get where you wanted to go, and it would take you years to even get to an exit.
She had to go to the bathroom, so she moved very slowly and gingerly. Her mouth was dry and the right side of her face throbbed every time she moved, so she knew it would be painful to rectify her thirst problem.
Although she knew that Will would never undress her while she was unconscious, she checked to make sure that she hadn’t stripped in front of him and blacked it out like a sorority girl right after rush week. That would make this whole scenario even more embarrassing. Like, it would never cross his mind with any woman, but it especially wouldn’t cross his mind with her.
She used his bathroom—the only closed space in the loft—and washed her hands. She ignored the urge to riffle through his clothes. He had a large metal file cabinet thing that he used as a dresser and a rack fashioned out of metal pipes. All his clothes were so neat that he’d know if she moved one shirt even a millimeter.
His kitchen was similarly ordered, with a kind of precision one did not usually find in a busy person. Not for the first time, she wondered where his neatness had come from. He had never shared much with her about his mother, and Alex hadn’t taken the time to learn much about his dad. Lexi had gone through husbands really quickly in her fifties and sixties. She said that going through menopause had made her tire of their bullshit more easily.
And that made sense. Alex wasn’t planning on contacting a couple of ex-boyfriends because she was convinced that she’d only been attracted to them in the first place because she’d been ovulating when they’d met. Once she’d had PMS, they started to get a whole lot more annoying.
Alex poured herself a glass of water from the tap and had to fight not to drop the glass when the liquid hit the back of her mouth. But at that moment, the pain was worth the reward. She would have gritted her teeth to get through it if the thought of gritting her teeth didn’t cause a wave of pain all on its own.
She must have had a pained look on her face when Will walked through the door. His brow furrowed and he grunted at her. “What are you doing up?”
“I’m sorry.” She knew she sounded pathetic, but she was always pathetic when she was in pain. “I’ll get out of here as soon as I can.”
Will just grunted at her again and put a grocery bag down on his stainless steel counter.
“Thank you for picking me up. I thought I told them to call Lexi. She could have just sent a car.”
“Lexi was on set.”
Alex felt stupid again. They both tried to keep up with Lexi’s schedule because they lived with the acute knowledge that she was getting older and something might happen to her. It was one of the reasons that Alex had never considered leaving LA after law school. Lexi had been there for her, and she owed it to her grandmother to return the favor. Lexi had so many points for just opening her home to Alex that she knew she would never even the score, but she had to try.
“She could have just sent a car.”