Summer Fling: An Anthology by Vi Keeland

 

 

 

SIX DAYS PASSED before I saw him again.

I was writing on my laptop, perched on his white leather couch when he walked in. It was close to one in the morning, but I’d always been a night owl. Since we hadn’t exchanged phone numbers, our schedules weren’t exactly in sync. I straightened up on the sofa as he breezed inside, not sparing me a look. In the days he was filming in Mexico and I was taking care of Betsy, a half-deaf, fully-blind British Blue, I’d had time to reflect on our lackluster reunion.

Mainly, I realized that I was being a shithead. High on my anger toward Chris and still bitter about never fully recovering from Adam, I’d just acted like a brat, when all Adam had done was do me a huge favor I didn’t deserve.

“Hey there.” I smiled, putting my laptop down on the coffee table and standing up awkwardly. Adam frowned, but didn’t offer me any words. My new, schizophrenic congeniality obviously wasn’t appreciated. He ambled into the kitchen, throwing the fridge open and grabbing a beer. He popped it open and took a long draw, leaning against the stark white countertop and staring like he was contemplating what to do with me.

“So. Um, I’ve been reflecting on our reunion, and perhaps I was a little, okay—a lot—thorny, even after the apology I gave you. I wasn’t in the right headspace when I got here. Plus, I never really thought I’d see you again. I was pretty surprised you agreed to let me stay here.” I stopped, gauging his reaction. His response never came. He took another pull of his beer, watching me with those hooded, dark eyes that made me feel like I was evaporating into smoke.

“Please say something.” I winced. “Anything?”

“Thank you for your apology”—he pointed at me with the hand that held the beer—“however, I do not accept it.”

“What?” I blinked. He put his beer down on the counter and waltzed past me, his arm brushing my shoulder.

“I didn’t hear the words ‘apologize’ or ‘sorry’ in your long-ass speech. It was a cop-out explanation, which sounded more like an excuse. Just to be clear—you’ve hurt me, Nika. Not just physically—my balls still resent my dick for liking you—but also for shutting me down all those years ago. You being here is a solid for Val. Don’t mistake my generosity for sympathy, because I have none. I loved you, and you smashed my heart into dust. Nothing can change that. Definitely not a half-assed apology.”

He charged to his room. I chased him.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I put my hand on his shoulder, trying to stop him. “I never apologized for kneeing you in the balls and I never will. You fingered someone else in front of me.”

He turned around sharply, pinning me to his wall and growling in my face.

“No, I didn’t, Nika. I fucking pretended to. We did that as a joke, Maya and I. I knew you were looking and wanted you to finally snap out of your goddamn bullshit and own up to your feelings. She did me a solid.”

I felt the air leaving my lungs and my eyes widening in shock. He boxed me to the wall, his arms on each side of my head. I had nowhere to run. Not that I wanted to. For the first time since we’d met, we communicated our feelings with words and not slow grinding.

“I knew I was heading to New York the week after, and I didn’t want to leave things hanging. At that point I’d have taken anything you had to offer me. Be it a goodbye kiss or a long-distance relationship. But I wasn’t sure if you were into me. Not the way I was into you, anyway. I didn’t know if you were in love with me or with the idea of having a senior dude constantly chasing you. I wanted to make you jealous.” His eyes dropped to my mouth as he licked his own lips. “And I did. I was going to tell you the truth about Maya, if you’d have let me put a fucking word in. But no. You went for my nuts instead.”

I blinked at him in horror. “You didn’t really do it?”

If there was a stupidity contest, I wanted in. I hoped there was a cash prize. I could definitely do with a nice boost to my savings account.

Adam pushed off the wall, spinning on his heel and advancing back to his room. I tailed him. “Of course I didn’t finger her. I was half-obsessed with you.”

“What about the other half?” I asked jokingly.

“The other half knew you were going to break my heart, and damn, do I beat myself up every day for not listening to it.”

I was at his heel again, feeling like a foolish puppy, riding a dangerous high full of affirmation. There was also a sweet, dreadful ache for the time we’d lost together laced into that feeling. Before I managed to get into his room, he slammed the double doors in my face.

“Sorry, Nika,” he warned from the other side of the door. “I’m never putting myself through this again.”

“Through what?”

“Pining for you and wondering how you feel.”

“It’s been a decade. I’ve changed.”

“You greeted me with ‘I thought you were in New York’. For the record, my pathetic ass was going for a hug prior to that. We’re obviously still playing the cat and mouse thing. Spoiler alert: I’m Tom, and I’m getting hammered and injured by little cunning Jerry. No more.”

I stared at the doors, letting my head drop into my hands. He was right. He’d greeted me with a terrific smile before I’d barked at him. The truth was, I was a great communicator until it came to Adam Mackay. It felt like my pride was slipping from between my fingers whenever we were together. Like I needed to make sure he knew I wasn’t in love with him. Only I was. The entire time. Maybe I still could be… What a mess.

I heard his back sliding down one of the doors as he sat on the other side. I did the same, pressing my back against the door he leaned on. I could practically feel the heat of his body radiating through the wood. The back of his head thudded against the oak in a steady rhythm. I knew his eyes were closed, like mine.

“Fuck,” he hissed, laughing humorlessly. “I did this to pacify your brother, but one look at you, and I’m back to square one. I don’t suppose you’d be open to the idea of staying at the Chateau Marmont until you figure your living situation out? My treat.”

“Um.” I fought a slow-spreading grin, something warm and fuzzy nestling behind my ribcage. He cared. He felt. He liked me back, even after all those years. “I’ve never been to the Chateau.”

“It’s great. Designed like a brothel, but great.”

“Been to a lot of brothels, Mackay?” I quirked an eyebrow.

“Absolutely not.” There was a comedic pause. “Just a couple.”

I laughed. “What about Betsy?”

“My assistant can take care of her.”

“What about us?”

“There is no us. You made it pretty clear a decade ago. And again this week.”

Adam Mackay liked me.

No, more than that, he liked me enough to make a stupid mistake when he was a teenager in a bid to make me jealous. His plan had worked. Too well, in fact.

Now that I knew his motives, it changed everything.

Was it awful that it (mostly) made me forget all about Chris? It wasn’t that I didn’t care for my ex. I did. And I knew I would never, in a million years, cheat on him while we were together. But Chris didn’t truly love me, and if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t truly love him, either. The only reason we chose each other was because we were the safe option for one another. I knew I was never capable of getting hurt by Chris as I had with Adam. Case in point—I’d caught Chris cheating, and it still didn’t rip my heart out of my chest the way seeing Adam with Maya had.

But Adam wasn’t with Maya, a small voice inside me chirped cheerfully. He just pretended to be. He wanted to be with you.

“I’m sorry,” I said from the other side of the door. “Okay? There, you have it. A real apology. With the S word and everything. I’m sorry for ten years ago, and for six days ago. I’m sorry I couldn’t articulate my feelings well. I’m sorry I didn’t have the guts to go for it with you. I’m sorry I let you go,” I finished softly.

“I’m sorry for being a dumbass at eighteen.” Adam sighed in response. I smiled to myself. I didn’t know why, but I was pretty sure he was smiling on the other side of that door, too. “That I went about it the wrong way. That I waited for you to take the first step just because I thought it’d make my life ten times easier.”

“Were you really that scared of Val?” I chuckled.

“He chased me with a billiard stick when I asked him, hypothetically, how he would react if I asked you out six months prior to Maya-gate,” Adam deadpanned. I burst out laughing, something warm spreading in my chest. He’d wanted to go for it. He’d wanted to ask me out.

“Guess you got the answer to your question.”

“And then some.”

“I was prepared to go against Val about it…kind of,” I admitted. “I really liked you. Trouble was, I thought you liked everyone else.”

“I never liked anyone else.” His voice was a low growl. A promise. “Not like this. Maybe not at all. So…” His voice took a mischievous edge. “You wanted me, huh?”

“That’s the understatement of the century. My phone was a shrine full of screenshots of your pictures.”

He laughed. “Same. I even looked for you on social media over the years. Your presence is surprisingly underwhelming.”

“Yes.” I smiled. “I’m private, like that.”

“Me too,” he deadpanned. He was one of the most famous people in the world. Another giggle burst out of me. And just like that, we acted like the past decade hadn’t happened. Like the night in my room hadn’t, either. It was just us. Making each other laugh and roll our eyes.

I had to pull away. To give both of us time to digest everything. I needed a minute to savor this thing. To take a breath before things snowballed into a territory I’d never been in.

“All right. It’s the middle of the night and I need to go through twenty pages before I send this episode that I’m writing. I’ll let you rest.” I got up reluctantly, getting ready to walk back to my room.

“Oh, and Nik?” Adam added, making me stop in his hall.

“Yeah?”

“I’m not the same wishy-washy eighteen-year-old. Now that you’re here and I know the truth, know how you feel…all bets are off.”

No one had ever accused me of being overly sophisticated, so there was little point in trying to adapt cultivated tactics to make Adam Mackay notice I was no longer sixteen.

The way I saw it, we were both single (I knew he was single, because I’d spent the entire night cyber-stalking him, something I’d refrained from doing for a decade, and yes, I would like the Nobel Prize for my notable self-restraint to be mailed to my current address, please). We both liked each other and shared the same hobbies and love for movies. We made each other laugh, and if we were half as good between the sheets as we’d been at rolling on the carpet doing our so-called freestyle wrestling, fireworks would explode every time we touched each other.

Now we’d officially graduated from clearing the air to The Seduction Game.

The morning after Adam’s confession about faking it with Maya, I strolled out of my room in a small yellow bikini, carrying my laptop – No big deal, scriptwriters kill off and resurrect characters in soap operas in their bikinis all the time, right?—and headed straight to Adam’s balcony.

He had a kidney-shaped pool, bracketed by palm trees for privacy. The Hollywood Hills view made me feel like I lived in a fairytale. I settled on one of the sunbeds, ignoring the fact that I couldn’t read anything on my laptop with the sun pounding on the screen, and waited for Adam to wake up.

He dragged himself out of his room an hour later, carrying two cups of coffee. He came to the balcony shirtless, his six-pack on full display. His arms were the width of my thighs and corded with muscles. I wanted to climb him like one of the palm trees.

He sat beside me, placing one of the coffee cups on the table between us. I murmured my thank you as he squinted at the pool. I still couldn’t believe he had a freaking private pool in his condo. I mean, he resided in the penthouse, but still.

“Slept well?” I purred.

“Sure. How’s my guest room treating you?”

“It’s really nice. Thank you.”

There was a pause. The awkwardness lingered in the air. At least it was nervous awkwardness, and not the-only-reason-I’m-not-chasing-you-with-a-steak-knife-is-the-law awkward.

“You don’t need a bikini to seduce me. Fucking breathing does the trick. Always did.” He still looked at the pool.

Good thing, as my face turned bright red. “I’m not trying to seduce you.”

“Oh, yeah? Then your scriptwriting skills need some fine-tuning.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, for one thing, your laptop is turned off.”

Shit. I slammed my laptop shut, but this time around, didn’t let my pride and embarrassment get the better of me.

“Well. This is embarrassing. Then again, I’m a little rusty in the seduction department.”

“When in doubt, just take your clothes off?”

I laughed. “That’s no way to talk to your best friend’s annoying baby sister. I swear, that’s how I thought you looked at me all those years.”

“I did,” he deadpanned.

I cocked my head, waiting for him to finish his thought.

“Until I didn’t. Somewhere along the line, my best friend’s annoying baby sister became irresistible. I knew it would look better if you initiated whatever it was between us. If I was the prey, kissed by the girl and not vice versa. But you never budged, no matter how much dry-humping we did on your carpet or how much time we spent together. I went crazy going back home every day with blue balls and a hard-on from hell. I wrote you letters that I never sent. I fought with Val just for the sake of fighting with him, because I secretly resented him. It was pretty pathetic.”

“But you always had someone else.” I sucked in a breath.

“Having no one would have looked bad. Val already knew how I felt about you, and I didn’t want the invitations to your house to dry up. Besides, I was in love, not a saint.” He cocked an eyebrow. “I moved on by getting back out there. Trying to find the right girl. Guess what? She doesn’t exist.”

I whipped my head in his direction, my mouth slacking. Had he just said the L word?

Adam shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “I thought it was clear.”

“Not clear enough for me, apparently. How come you’re single now?”

It made no sense that he would be. He was the entire package. And, judging by the way he’d pressed against me when we were teenagers, he had a package to go along with the package.

Adam turned away from the pool, still resting on the sunbed next to me, and smiled sadly.

“It’s not that I don’t date. I do. But what it keeps boiling down to is this—I never know if they like Adam Mackay, the Broadway phenomenon slash movie star, or Adam Mackay, the guy who can burp the alphabet backwards, beat anyone at Guitar Hero, and is just a weirdo movie buff. With you, I didn’t have to wonder.”

“For the record”—I reached across the table separating us, planting my hand on his—“not even one small part of me fell in love with you because you can burp the alphabet backwards.”

He threw his head up and laughed, then got up, stopping just above me to plant a kiss on the crown of my head. “The L word?”

“I thought it was pretty obvious,” I said in the same exact way he’d replied to me when my eyes asked him about it.

“Huh.” He straightened his back, smirking down at me. “What are you gonna do about it, little Nik?”

I grabbed his wrist before he turned away and left the balcony, shooting up to my feet. The floor beneath me was scorching hot, but somehow, I hardly even felt it. I rose to my toes, pressing my lips against the side of his mouth.

“I think I’ll start by doing this,” I murmured, skimming the edge of his lips with my mouth. A current of something delicious ran through my spine, exploding at the top of my neck, sending chills along my skull.

“Yeah?” He grinned, but didn’t make a move to kiss me back. I got it. I’d spent the night thinking about all of our small moments. There had always been a breath in which we’d almost kissed, but we never did. Adam had been starved for my kisses for years. The least I could do was do him the honor of offering him our first one.

“I think I will also do this,” I continued, flicking my tongue between his lips. They fell open on demand, as I lazily explored the seam of his mouth, committing to memory his taste, his feel, his heat.

Adam grabbed my neck, cupping it in his big palm, and guided my mouth to his greedily and with a healthy amount of force.

My heart thudded in my chest, my body tingling with excitement and desire. This. It felt like we were transported back in time. Young. In love. In our feels. Like no time had passed at all.

The last thing he said to me before he devoured me with his tongue was, “I think it is payback time for all those lost kisses. Spoiler alert, Nik: you’ll be paying with interest.”

We kissed for an hour. Maybe more. Just kissing, on the edge of the pool, standing on the scorching hot floor, not feeling anything other than each other. We were wrapped around each other, consumed and starving for each other. I thought we would stand there forever—at least until evening—when his phone started ringing. He pulled away, grunting in annoyance, and frowned down at his phone.

“My agent,” he tsked. “I need to go in for some reshoots. Don’t go anywhere.” He kissed me again. “This is not over.”

It wasn’t.

I knew it wasn’t.

I smiled through swollen lips. So wide and big I couldn’t feel my face.