Page 91 of Devil in Disguise
“Yeah,” he said, “because a B minus in your first quarter of college, inElectromagnetism,sucks so bad. They’ll probably throw you out. Academic probation, at least.”
“You don’t get it. I was doing so good! I was pulling itout.”
“Yep. And then you ran into the kind of ambush that you weren’t prepared for, because you’ve never done this before, this celebrity deal. And you saw pictures of your father for the first time, too, in a way you never expected, knowing that everybody else was seeing the same thing. Nothing worse than a sack from your blind side. And you know what? I’m pretty offended.”
“Well,obviously.Since I said I was using you for sex!”
He laughed. She stared at him, but finally, she laughed, too. “Nah,” he said. “That was funny. And, yeah, my teammates thought it was funny, too, the ones who heard about it. You trolled her good. But why aren’t you mad atmefor dragging you into all this? If I’d kept my hands off you like I probably should’ve, none of this would’ve ever come out. You’d be up there having a normal freshman year, screwing up your classes and then figuring out how not to screw them up, making friends, and nobody’d be putting you on TV. Instead, you’re dragged through the mud, and all that crappy backstory of yours and your mom’s is out there for everybody to judge, and it’s all because of me. So why aren’t you showing up here today and saying, ‘Owen, you better be good to me. What are you planning to do to make this right?’”
“Uh … because youaregood to me? Because you watched that whole horrible thing with me and were so sweet about it? Because you’re amazing?”
“And, see?” he said. “So are you. You know what my grandpa would say?”
“No. Because I haven’t met him. I’ve only met your parents. Who I’m sure arereallyimpressed. By the way—I cried on yourmom.Why didn’t you tell me they were coming?”
“Because I didn’t want you to stress about it. I wanted you to meet them, though, since I won’t make it to the ranch until after the postseason. And don’t worry. My mom got it. No, my grandpa would say, ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’ Only to another guy, of course. You don’t swear in front of women. Code of the West.”
He grinned at her, and finally, she laughed.
After that? Well, they were sitting on the bed, and he’d wanted to be with her ever since this happened. So he kissed her, and when she gave a kind of sigh and moved in closer, it felt like coming home.
Hands and mouths and murmured words. Dyma’s cornsilk hair between his fingers, Dyma’s fingers unbuttoning his shirt. Pulling her into his lap, then, and kissing her forehead, her cheeks, keeping it gentle, keeping it tender. Kissing each of her dimples in turn, trying to show her that she might have gotten them from her father, but now, they belonged to her. That she was her own person, unique and beautiful, and he loved her. And, finally, kissing her mouth. Trying to let her know, to make her see, everything he wanted to be for her.
This time, he wasn’t ripping anything off. He laid her down like she was precious. He kissed her until she was sighing, and after that, he pulled off her dress and loved her. On a white bed with the last rays of the midwinter sun slanting into an anonymous high-rise hotel room like all the hundreds of hotel rooms he’d been in on all the thousands of nights of his adult life, and nothing like any of them. Because in this room, in this shaft of sunlight, lying back on this white bed, was Dyma. The same young, strong body, the same eager heart, wounded now, and hurting. And all he wanted to do was to stitch up that wound with his hands and his body and his love.
You couldn’t fix somebody. You could hold them tight, though, and you could help them through. And as he did it for her, as she rose into him and he heard her soft cries and felt her hands running down his back like she’d needed him, and now, he was finally here?
She did it for him, too.
39
Wherever You Go
She didn’t getto spend the night with Owen. She didn’t even get to fall asleep with him after they made love, because he had to head back upstairs to join the team. Before he left, though, he kissed her goodbye, the two of them twisted up in crisp white sheets with the daylight nearly gone. After that, he got up and put on his clothes while she lay back and watched him, one arm flung up over her head, the chaos within her stilled for the first time all week. He saw her watching, smiled at her in the way that melted her heart, and sat on the edge of the bed to kiss her a little bit more while she twined her arms around his neck and enjoyed holding on.
“You’ll make me late,” he said against her mouth. “Got to go do the thing.”
“Yeah,” she said with a sleepy sigh. “You go do the thing. I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“Yep. Soon as practice is over. We’ll go be tourists.”
One more kiss, and the sound of the door closing. The next thing she heard was thedingof a text, which had her sitting up in bed and grabbing the phone.
Annabelle.We’re in the lobby ready to go to dinner. You coming?
She screamed a little and threw on her clothes, which took some doing, since they were scattered all over the bed and floor, and she never did find her underwear. Instead, she opened her suitcase and tossed everything around looking for it, realized that her few clean pairs were probably in her duffel, swore, and left the room without it, doing her best to finger-comb her hair into order again in the inadequate reflection of the brushed-steel elevator doors..
When she got to the lobby, they were all waiting by the entrance. She said, “Right. Present. Sorry I’m late.” Pretty breathlessly. Without herunderwear.
“No problem,” Waylon said. He didn’t move, though. He looked at Joan instead.
What? They couldn’t know about the underwear. It wasn’t like she was wearing asign.
“Honey,” Joan said, “I think your dress is on inside out.”
“Oh. I’ll just …” A dash to the ladies’ room, where she ripped off her dress and reversed it, looked at her reflection with horror, and said aloud, “Could you do this any worse? I cannotbelievethis.”
A flush, and a woman came out of a stall. Young, with long, slim arms and legs of the spectacular variety, and wearing a red dress that turned up the wattage on her creamy-brown skin, she turned on the water and asked, “You OK?”
