“Fancy seeing you here.”
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
Moving my gaze up from his crotch—it admittedly moved a little slowly—I finally settled my focus into the face of none other than my archnemesis.
Reed Luca, looking fresh as a fucking daisy and smirking like the devil himself. Clad in a worn leather jacket and distressed jeans, even I couldn’t deny he looked good. Like, fuckable kind of good. Hell, put a cigarette in his mouth, and he would’ve been James Dean.
God, my eyes sure did enjoy looking at him.
This is a purely look but don’t touch scenario, Lola, I reminded myself. Reed Luca might’ve been the snake offering the apple, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be Eve.
Without offering any sort of greeting, I got down to the real question at hand. “Seriously… Are you stalking me?”
It all started innocently enough.
I’d been behaving—if you can call working on an opposing column to Lola’s best oral techniques behaving.
Seems a little sketchy to me.
But I’d been alone in my apartment and occupied with something that led to a paycheck from my current employer, so it was at least flirting with responsibility. The farther I got into the column, and the more I read Lola’s—over and over—as research, the more obsessed I became with connecting to her in more than words tonight.
Knowing she was out, I’d opened up some of our old emails and started to read. And then before I knew it, even that wasn’t enough.
I didn’t have her phone number, and I knew Cam was done doing me favors of the personal information variety. That idea seemed stale before it even fully developed anyway.
I wanted a physical connection. I wanted her eyes to meet mine, and I wanted to find a reason to touch her skin.
Honestly, the topic of these columns had me goddamn buzzing, humming, practically frothing at the mouth, and with one look to her Facebook page and a quick shower, I’d ended up here—handing my ID to the bouncer and scooting past a group of giggling girls in ass-grazing dresses.
Lola was easy to find the second I stepped into Vertigo Lounge and allowed my eyes to adjust.
She had a presence that stood out from all of the other people there, trolling for love and lust and racing to lose themselves to a mind-altering substance.
Secure in herself, she didn’t need an escape like the others, and it showed.
I watched as she chatted with two other women, her focus on them and theirs on the men around them. They spoke to her with genuine affection, but Lola wasn’t their end game the way they were hers.
When they jumped from their seats and headed for the stairs without her, I moved with purpose in her direction and didn’t let the packed crowd slow me down.
I made it to her easily enough, but she was so lost in her thoughts, I stood there in front of her for a full minute without her even noticing.
“Fancy seeing you here,” I finally greeted, breaking the spell. Her head jerked up.
It didn’t take her pretty features long to turn hostile.
“Seriously… Are you stalking me?”
“Actually, I bumped into some friends from college, and we decided to come in here and throw a few back,” I lied easily.
Her eyes narrowed, bullshit meter pinned in the red with an ability no one else seemed to have around me. “Yeah. Okay.”
I smiled. Something inside of me fucking loved that she could read me.
“You’re right. That’s not true at all. I don’t have any friends from college. I didn’t even go to college.”
“Yes, you did,” she said with a snort.
“Okay,” I admitted, still fucking smiling. “I did. But I didn’t finish, and I really don’t have any friends.”
“Reed.”
“Fine. I finished, and I have friends. But they’re not here tonight.”
And that was true. I’d gone to college at University of California Santa Cruz and gotten a degree in something—sociology—that was altogether relevant to my life but meaningless to ninety-five percent of the working world. My friends majored in business, joined major corporations, found trophy wives, and quickly impregnated them with multiple babies. I hadn’t seen all that much of them since. Actually, if you asked me for my best friend now, I’d probably say San Francisco.
Or Lola, a little voice whispered in the back of my mind. No. I haven’t known her that long. My inner voice raised a pointed eyebrow.
The city never seemed to let me down, and I had people and amusement all over it. I wasn’t planning tons of dinners at my house or trips to the bar, though.
Maybe I need to have Lola over for dinner.
“There we go,” she said with a little half smirk. “Now, why are you here tonight? The truth.”