The Dirty Series 1(165)

I nudge the photographer with my elbow. “Let’s go.”

“You don’t want more shots?”

“Do you have three good ones?”

He glances at the screen on the back of his camera and gives me a confident nod.

“We’re good. We’ll meet him outside.”

The photographer and I circle the block, and soon enough we’re back outside the Mission with two reporters who are here to cover an announcement from Christian. I prepped him earlier this afternoon. I’ve engineered this entire event to look like it’s rather spontaneous—you’d be surprised how little it matters if you call in the press—and like it comes straight from Christian’s heart.

How he was acting inside, though, has me convinced that it really is a cause that he finds important.

There is more to Christian than meets the eye.

When I picture his face as he interacted with each person in the line, how he spoke to them as if they were of the same social class, acquaintances he was happy to see, the way his muscles worked and flexed as he served the food, my heart aches and warms at the same time.

Then it pounds.

It’s way too fucking early for this. I haven’t even been able to completely disengage myself from that goddamn house in Colorado. I have the contractors texting me updates every day, and for one reason or another, things are being delayed.

I’d sell it for a loss if I had more savings, but I don’t. Derek liked to travel, so we took the risk while we were still young and free.

Turns out that he was much freer than I was. What a dick.

I swallow the rage that’s boiled up and shake my head to clear the negative thoughts. The point is, I can’t be falling for Christian.

He comes out the entrance of the Bowery and I move toward him, feeling instantly calmer now that he’s here in front of me.

It’s absurd, but I feel it.

“You were great in there,” I say with a smile, my voice low.

Christian smiles back. “It was good.”

“It was like you were a different person,” I tease, as we walk toward the photographer, toward the reporters.

Something in Christian’s face shifts abruptly. He’s still smiling, but it doesn’t look quite so real anymore. Am I imagining it, or is he shifting away from me, just slightly?

What the fuck did I say?

I reach out for his arm, arrange my face as if I’ve remembered something important at the last moment. He turns toward me, his back to the press.

“Are you all right?” I keep my voice low.

“Yes,” he says, his smile back. “I’m good.”

“Did I say something wrong?” I can’t let this thing between us affect my job, but if I don’t fix whatever this is, I don’t know how I can help him.

“Of course not,” he says, but I don’t believe him.

“I just meant that it was amazing to watch you with those people. That’s all I meant.”

His face softens, relaxes, and my heart rate slows.

“I know that’s what you meant,” he says, softly, gently, and I know that if we weren’t on the job, if there was no one around, he would lean down and kiss my cheek right now, cocky persona or not.

As he turns back toward the press, confusion zings through me. Is there something he’s not telling me?

It doesn’t matter. It can’t destroy the way my heart sings when I look at him.

The emotion is deafening.





Chapter Twenty-Two





Christian



My heart thunders in my chest as I turn away from Quinn and go to greet the press, and it continues to pound as I shake hands with the photographer and ask him about his gear. Then I chat with the reporters and mention casually that I’m making more time in my schedule to volunteer. I tell them that my mother did a lot of work while she was alive to try and lift people out of homelessness, and I want to honor her memory. At the last moment, I tack on that I’m making a rather large donation to the Bowery Mission.

The whole thing goes off without a hitch. A guy like me—like Christian Pierce—doesn’t let one moment of awkwardness throw him off his game.

But something nags at me.

I’m beginning to notice a pattern in myself that I don’t like.

The things Quinn says are innocent. She doesn’t know my secret. Intellectually, I know that, but every time she says something that brushes up against those boundaries, I react in a way that’s impossible to hide.

Well, it’s possible to hide it from other people, maybe. But I can’t hide it from her.

How does she know how to read me so well?

We just met each other last week, and already she can read me like we were born to be together. She even picks up on the subtle things that most of my other friends—even the closest ones—have never noticed, or if they did, they gave no goddamn indication of it.