Page 80 of No Interest in Love

She smiles wide at me and shrugs, pulling her shirt back down.

“Yeah, you’re cut off.” I push the cart away with my foot. “All that food’s gonna bark at you in the morning.”

“Worth it.” She sighs and relaxes into the pillow under the small of her back. My hand twitches next to hers, and I want to take her palm, tangle our fingers, kiss her knuckles…

“I’m serious, though,” she says, and I glance up at her eyes behind her bright red frames.

“Huh?”

“Is that the only reason you’re here?” She looks down at our almost-touching hands. “Because…I thought for sure you’d be in Carletta’s room tonight.”

“Hmm.” It’s not really an answer. I’ve never done this before—tell a woman she’s End Game. Or at least, I want her to be. Shay’s eyes flick back up to mine and like a coward I look at the ceiling.

“Hey, so, hypothetically—”

“You know, when people say ‘hypothetically’ they usually mean ‘literally.’ ”

I shake my head. “Okay then…literally…if I told Carletta I wasn’t going to sleep with her, do you think I still have a shot at the part?”

She sits up. “You did what now?”

“Shit. You think I botched it, huh?”

“What, no. No, I’m just…” She pulls her ponytail over her shoulder, dragging her nails through the damp black strands. “Isn’t she…I mean…Isn’tthatthe opportunity you wanted?”

“Can you answer my question first?”

Her shoulders relax and she lets out a tiny laugh. “Um, yes. I think you’ve got the part. They’d be idiots not to cast you.”

And my heart, which I thought had been ripped to shreds with her words from last night, fuses back together in my chest, making me sit up to get my face closer to hers.

“Can you answer my question now?” she asks, and it’s not her typical demanding tone that I find equal parts comical and sexy but a small, whispered request, as if she’s unsure if she really wants to hear the answer. I’m not sure if I want to hear her reaction. I suppose that if she rejected me it would be karmically balanced for all the shit I’ve done. But that doesn’t make it any less nerve-racking.

“I don’t want that opportunity anymore.”

“Why not?” Her voice has lowered. Her eyes are narrowing. I scoot back a little and shrug, and she points a finger at me. “No. Not this.” She does a dorky impression of my shrug, pulling a chortle out of me. “Tell me what changed from between now and three days ago.”

“Yeah, I think we both know what happened.” I wasn’t alone in the ice room.

“Do you feel guilty or obligated or something?” She waves her hand around my face. “There, you are pardoned from all guilt.”

And when she softly laughs, my eyes fall from hers. She has cookie crumbs all over her lips. Chocolate tucked in the corner of her mouth.

“I’m so into you,” I blurt out. Her laughter gets chased away by her confusion.

“Huh?”

I grab her suspended hand and pull it down, shaking my head at our fingers, which I’ve finally twined together. “I’m pretty sure you heard me,” I say with a lift of my eyebrow.

“Why?”she says, eyes incredulous. “We fightall the time.Even during our ‘nonarguing week’ we fought.”

“Because you bite that pinkie nail. Because you wears those insane glasses. Because wedofight, but I have fun fighting with you. I’m happy around you, and I wasn’t sure what happy felt like before. Because you keep a to-do list in an actual notebook. Because you still carry a pen in a world of smartphones. Because you look good in mud, in my shirt, and you can make my heart race even when you smell like shit. Because you can manage to eat your weight in chicken wings and still turn me on my head.”

I throw my arm out at the room service cart, gesture at the cookie crumbs on her face, which she furiously starts wiping away. I can’t help but grab her hand back, shaking my head with a grin on my face.

“Because you’readorable as hell.” My thumb runs over that gnawed-up nail, which I can tell she wants to bring to her mouth. So she chews on her lip instead. “Shay…You know practically everything about me. Even the stuff I don’t want people to know. And I…I don’t mind you knowing. Ilikethat you know.”

Her eyes flick up and meet mine. The silence around us eats at me. I thought she’d have some witty comeback, since she’s never been one to let me have the last word. And more of the embarrassing speech starts playing in my head, even though I swore to myself I’d never let a woman get deep enough under my skin to make mewantto give an embarrassing speech. I’m about to blurt out every last sentence of it. Maybe get up and spout off a sonnet. If I could play an instrument I would. Romance isn’t my forte, obviously. I gotta watch more Nicholas Sparks.

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