Page 77 of Fan Favorite

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When Edie woke up, Peter was gone.

In his place, a note:

BACK TO WORK. TALK SOON.

—P

A topless and wild-haired Edie shot up in bed, clutching the sheet to her chest in a mostly symbolic display of modesty considering she was, once again, alone. She snatched the hotel stationery off the pillow where Peter’s head should’ve been. Edie considered the five staccato words over and over again before finally letting her fingers go limp. She watched as the note fluttered back down to the bed where just last night Peter had touched every inch of her body. Oh god. Edie covered her face with her hands. Her cheeks were hot with an old, unknowable shame, this thrumming, subterranean knowledge that there was something fundamentally wrong with her. And that Peter had seen it and then left.

Edie looked at the note once more, praying the words had shifted into something more optimistic, likeWent for coffee, back soon, let’s get married! Love love love love love, Peter.But the note—a fucking note!—kept screaming at her in all caps—of course Peter was the sort of deranged person who wrote in all caps!—that he had, once again, disappeared.

Peter Kennedy had gone BACK TO WORK.

Edie collapsed on the bed, holding the note to her chest in the exact same spot where just hours ago she’d held Peter. After they’d thoroughly exhausted themselves pawing at each other like teenagers—well, like teenagers who were good at sex—Peter had sat up and nuzzled into Edie’s chest in a way that made her feel almost maternal toward him, like he was some precious thing she wanted to love and protect. She’d run her fingers through his hair, and his arms had been wrapped tightly around her waist. He had an adorable spray of freckles across his shoulders. Peter was frecklier than she imagined, Edie remembered, smiling at the thought, because wasn’t intimacy astonishing? Back at the bar, Peter had just been Peter. Grumpy, aloof, arrogant Peter, who half the time Edie was sure she hated. But now she knew the sounds he made when he came. It turned her on so much—Peter exposed like that, Peter’s grip on the universe relaxed like that, Peter’s hands digging into her ass like that—that she’d finishedtwice. The memory now felt so embarrassing that her eyes stung, and she rubbed them until her cheeks bloomed with last night’s mascara.

Another memory, a teensy, tiny, little nothing of a moment she’d planned to ignore, came to her now. She’d had her lips pressed to his shoulder, to those freckles she’d never seen before but were all of a suddenhers, when out of nowhere, she sensed that something had changed. His shoulders had tensed. He took a sharp inhale. And then he stopped breathing entirely.

She’d held her breath, too, waiting for what came next.

When they were on the elevator and Peter had said he was falling in love with her, instantly it’d felt like this sharp, inevitable truth. But then also like some dreamy fantasy untethered from real life, where Edie was a contestant onThe Keyand Peter was some Hollywood hotshot on the brink of his most dramatic season ever. But then, everything with Peter was like that. One second Edie thought he was too serious and cold and that it was pointless to even try to be friends with him. They’d never understand each other—she was messy and impulsive and out there, and he was judgmental and shut down and dated models. But then he could also be warm and playful and sweet, and say incisive things like “Maybe love isn’t just this thing we stumble into one day. Maybe you have to wait for it. And maybe that’s what makes it special,” with his green eyes boring into her like everything she’d ever wanted was right there in front of her because the only person who truly understood her was him.

And then, once again, she was left trying to reconcile her shifting ideas about Peter.

He was almost aggressively cynical. And his entire supercilious nature was extremely annoying, not to mention manipulative in the way that it activated her need to please. He had this particular way of watching everything around him, his face blank and withholding, that Edie sort of resented, or at the very least thought was borderline rude. But when Edie said something that caught him by surprise, that tickled him just right, his smile would break across his face, totally unguarded and almost sheepish at his own delight, and Edie found that there was nothing she loved more than making Peter smile. It felt like they were sharing a secret, like she was the only one who could reach him like that.

So she’d believed him when he said he was “falling in love” with her. Honestly, at first those words didn’t sound like him—too cheesy, too juvenile. But now it made sense. Falling in love included an escape hatch. It was some murky pre-love stagethat prompted hope for the future but allowed for backpedaling. It expressed an interest, a desire, without certainty.

Except what Edie wanted at this point in her life was certainty—she wanted the whole thing.

Still, there was no time to think critically when his hands were in her hair, when his lips were on hers. The heat of his body, the smell of him—it was like some wonderful drug she’d wanted to inject directly into her veins. The unbridled way that he’d kissed her, like he wasn’t this tightly wound neurotic at all, but this solid man full of passion and mystery. Of course, throughout her life, Edie’d had all sorts of daydreams about what she wanted sex to be like that rarely came true. But with Peter, every moment had felt like exactly what she wanted. Exciting, but also tender and sweet, the power between them constantly shifting. One moment he was in control, channeling his Peterish intensity into making her come, and then she was, touching and licking him slowly until all that cold bravado was stripped away and he was at her mercy. Edie thought perhaps this negotiation surprised them both, except clearly that was the only way it could be between them. She’d loved the assured way he’d handled her body, both confident but also listening and watching for her responses. And she’d loved when she was on top of him, how he wasn’t like intense Peter at all, but this soft, open version, looking at her like he was in awe.

After, when her lips were pressed against those freckles, when Peter’s breathing had stopped and everything became still between them, Edie knew two things for sure.

One: Edie Pepper did not love Bennett CharlesorCharlie Bennett. Frankly, as soon as Peter looked at her with those plaintive green eyes and slid one finger slowly down her arm, Bennett Charles had evaporated from Edie’s consciousness as quickly as he’d arrived two months ago. It was clear that whatever feelings she thought she had for Charlie were just aproduct of the past or fanciful dreams of the future, neither of which had much to do with the present or who Edie was at this moment, which was a thirty-five-year-old woman who, sure, was impulsive and perhaps a little needy, but who was also—and this was becoming clearer to herself every day—smart, capable, good-natured, loving, and very much deserving of love.

Two: Cracking the door open to the reality of what Peter and Edie had done would bury them in a landslide of problems. Any initial thoughts Edie had about if and how and when they would escapeThe Keywithout Peter getting fired, without hurting Charlie, or without becoming media spectacles themselves were instantly complicated and overwhelming and not romantic at all. And who wanted to deal with that? Especially when Edie was still dreamy under the dawning reality that not only was Peter Kennedy falling in love with her, but that maybe she was also falling in love with Peter Kennedy. That for all his complications and arrogance, it was his arms she wanted around her, his kiss on her lips, his words in her ear.

So instead of asking Peter what was wrong, or acknowledging that things weren’t simple, Edie had made a joke.

“Do you need a guided meditation to calm down?”

And he’d laughed. And then he’d squeezed her once more before shifting her off of him and walking into the bathroom. And when he returned, he held her just like he was supposed to, but it seemed sort of stiff and disconnected, like some part of him was lost to her, like they were strangers all over again. Eventually his breathing got deeper and he’d rolled over, leaving her to stare at those freckles, no longer a sweet symbol of intimacy because, somehow, Edie knew that if she ran her fingers across them, he would flinch.

Falling in love.

All the years Edie had watchedThe Key,falling in loveseemed like such a valid declaration. A pit stop on the way to everything she’d ever wanted.

But now she understood it for what it was.

Bullshit.

Then, a knock at the door.

He was back!

Edie sprang from the bed, wrapping the white duvet around her body like a sarong. She was just steps from the door when the duvet, still tucked tightly under one corner of the mattress, jerked back, and Edie stumbled to the floor.

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