“Yeah, well, I would actually have to want to have sex with him in order to breed anything and it just isn’t happening—vanilla or otherwise. I just couldn’t string him along anymore.”
She popped me on the shoulder with her tiny fist and gave me a huge grin. “Good. Now you can stop pretending that you don’t want to get all kinds of naked and horizontal with Jet.”
I snapped my head around and stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “You’re the second person today who has told me I should just go ahead and sleep with him.”
She shrugged and tossed the blanket to the floor. “Shaw and I talk about it all the time. Jet is sexy, like it-hurts-to-look-at-him sexy, so we totally get it. What we don’t get is why you so obviously struggle to keep him at arm’s length. I see you stare at him day in and day out, and when he’s onstage, Ayd, you should see the way you look at him.”
I fidgeted nervously, again unaware that I was being so transparent about what he did to me and the struggle I had with myself to keep my hands off.
“Everyone watches him like that when he’s onstage. He’s amazing and talented.”
She got to her feet and stretched her arms above her head. She patted me on top of my head with the tattooed arm on her way out of the room, calling over her shoulder, “Yeah, that’s true, but you’re the only one he ever looks into the crowd for. You’re the only one he makes sure is watching if he knows you’re there.”
That made my breath catch in my throat and my pulse slip and slide. I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that Jet and I shared a pretty potent amount of attraction, but I was also smart enough to know that after turning me down last winter, he hadn’t had an empty bed or a serious relationship since.
A relationship needed more than fire and flames to make it work. Plus, he didn’t know the real me, and the me he did know, he had deemed too clean to mess up. Having someone else tell me that he might be looking at me, realizing all the forbidden things I wanted to do to him and seeing through the perfect image I tried to project, really made me nervous. I struggled around him now, and if he had an inkling as to what I really wanted, I didn’t know that I would be able to keep my hands to myself and out of his pants any longer .
Grumbling to myself I picked my stuff up off the floor and wandered back to my room. I scowled at his closed door and settled in to do some homework and brood. I didn’t want to go to dinner with Adam, and now with Cora’s startling revelation, I didn’t really want to go to the show afterward, either. Maybe when I packed up and left Kentucky, I should have looked into becoming a nun. Right now, that seemed like it would be a whole lot easier to handle.
With my dark hair and odd-colored eyes I looked good in red and since it was Valentine’s Day, I thought that my dress with its flared skirt and off-the-shoulder boatneck in lipstick red was a perfect choice. My hair was too short to do much with so I curled it around the front of my face, and pinned the long bangs back with a bobby pin that had a big rhinestone heart on it. I had been to enough of Jet’s shows to know that heels weren’t exactly the best choice in footwear, but I didn’t have anything else that would fit with the dress, so I settled on a pair of black patent leather Mary Janes.
When I looked in the mirror I had to acknowledge that I looked way too good to simply be having dinner with my ex-sorta-boyfriend, and that I was dressing for someone else entirely. And that wasn’t smart, but I didn’t care or change my outfit.
Adam arrived right on time in his very sensible Subaru, and drove us downtown. The conversation in the car was stiff and strained, even though he told me I looked lovely and was being perfectly polite. We devolved into talking about school and chemistry. By the time we got seated at the restaurant, it was all I could do not to check my phone every five minutes to see the time. I was antsy and still a little concerned about his comment that he felt like I was two different people. That was something I battled with on a regular basis and had thought I’d figured out how to keep the old me totally locked down tight.
I would be the first to admit that I was probably the worst Valentine’s date in the history of the holiday. When he ordered a bottle of wine to have with dinner, I wanted to groan because that just seemed too datelike, but I owed it to him to at least try to be pleasant. I let him pour me a glass and forced a smile.
“Thanks, Adam.”
“I’m glad you came. I really wish you would reconsider and think about trying to work this out between us. I really do like you, Ayden. You’re smart, funny, and beautiful. Plus, we have so much in common.”
What was wrong with me? This guy was nice, cute, and clearly thought I was awesome. He was like the dream guy most girls wanted, but for some reason, the more he extolled all my virtues, the more turned off I got. I pushed the glass of wine away and picked up a glass of water.
“Adam, I don’t think you really know me. For instance, I hate wine. I usually drink tequila, a lot of it, and then hate myself in the morning. We have our chemistry majors and school in common, but beyond that, not much. I really don’t like the ballet or the opera, and I’m more of a line dancing, rodeo kind of girl. I thought that it would do me some good to try to date a guy like you, because you’re just so thoughtful and nice, but all it did was show me that trying to force something to happen just won’t work.”
He cleared his throat and set his wine down as well. “You could have told me all of that months ago, Ayd. You never even gave me a chance to get to know you. You already decided, before we even began, which version of you that I was going to date, without considering that I might like both of them enough to stick around. Maybe I like to line dance as well.”
He was absolutely right and that just made me feel even worse.
I spent the rest of the dinner sulking, and to his credit Adam still offered to pay for the entire bill. I couldn’t let him do that, so I paid for my half and for the tip, to make up for being such a jerk. He drove me to the Fillmore and I had every intention of jumping out of the car and dashing inside, but for some reason when he caught sight of the crowd waiting out front decked out in a whole lot of denim and spikes, he decided that he had to park and walk me in.
I wanted to tell him that it was unnecessary. I had been to plenty of these shows over the past year, and while my fancy dress might garner a few weird looks, most of these guys could care less about me. They were here for the music. But I had already rained on his parade enough for one day, so I let Adam guide me up to the front doors. I didn’t miss the scowl on his face when I told the girl taking tickets I was on the list.
She double-checked my name and wrapped a bracelet around my wrist that said I was over twenty-one. She looked questioningly at Adam, who just shrugged and paid for a ticket. He stood out like a sore thumb amid all the other miscreants milling around, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was going to be even worse when we got inside. We had to wait in a little bit of a line to get to the front doors, and I tried to tell him I was fine, but he kept insisting on at least getting me to my waiting friends. Since Enmity was the headlining band, I knew that Jet would have arranged for them to have one of the VIP tiers up in the balcony by the bar. It took a little work, and a lot of waiting for Adam to stop gaping at barely clothed girls and guys who looked like they ate glass and metal for breakfast, to get to the rest of the group.
Shaw was pressed up against Rule and looked cute in a black dress with pink polka-dot hearts scattered all across it. Rule’s nod to the holiday was to have dyed the front of his dark hair a shocking hot pink. Only a guy like Rule could rock pink hair and not have to give a second thought to getting his ass kicked.