Page 77 of Bad at Love
“God you guys are slow,” Jane says as we approach. Her eyes trail down to our hands entwined together. I can almost feel the pulse in Marina’s palm ticking against mine in preparation for whatever Jane is going to say.
“Holding hands?” Jane notes, slurring her words a bit. She tries to raise a brow but ends up frowning instead.
“It’s New York City, Jane,” I tell her. “You never know who might try and snatch me up on these mean streets.”
They all start laughing and we head out into the night.
I don’t let go of Marina’s hand. Not for a second.
She’s not pulling away either. When we walk back to the hotel, the air thick with humidity we just don’t feel in LA, she’s right by me, leaning in, her shoulder against my arm.
We don’t say anything. Everything is so electrically charged already, I don’t think words need to be said. “Open your eyes,” Naomi had said. But my eyes are open. Maybe not always, but they are now.
I’m not ending this night alone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MARINA
“CORRUPT”
Laz is holding my hand.
He’s been holding my hand for the last thirty minutes.
I don’t know what’s going on.
But I think my hand is sweating a bit too much for my liking and I want to pull it away and wipe it off. I’m just afraid that if I do, he won’t hold it again.
It’s like I’m five years old again with my crush on Billy Drixol who lived down the street, when Billy held my hand for our entire walk to the playground. That was my first crush. That hand-holding meant the whole world to me.
Now, it’s with Laz. Tall, lean, muscled, tatted, wonderfully talented Laz with the sexiest accent in the world. This man is holding my hand and it feels like the most natural thing, despite the fact that I’m burning hotter than the sun with every step we take.
We’re not saying a word to each other. We’re not strangers to silence but this silence is different. It’s saying things that haven’t been said. I just don’t know what he’s saying to me.
“You guys aresoslooooow,” Jane yells at us from the street corner.
It’s been so nice to see her and be with Naomi and let our hair down a bit but honestly, at the same time, I just want to keep walking past them and head to somewhere dark and quiet with Laz. I want to tell him all the things I wasn’t able to say when we shared a bed.
That was two weeks ago. I was spooked. I was scared. And it was my own doing, feeling that vulnerable. In those two weeks I did what I could to stay away from him, to stay busy, to put both of us back into that friendship box. It seemed to work at the time. The less I saw Laz, the less I talked to him, the less I thought about him. And I managed to get a lot of work done for the business too.
But the moment I saw him yesterday, all of that friendship shit was thrown out the window.
This man is no longer just my friend. He’s no longer my Laz in that sense. He’s a man that I’m giving my heart over to, whether he knows it or not, whether I want to or not. There’s no reasoning, no deciding. It’s done.
He’s a man who’s going to ruin me.
And for once, I just want to be ruined.
Ravaged.
Claimed.
My body has never belonged to anyone before but I want it to belong to him.
In his hands, his capable hands, I trust.
I want to feel him again, taste him again, hold him again. I want to see what he can do when we’re both free of restraints, free of the lines we’ve drawn up around each other but never dared to cross.
