But I still think it might have just been a hot kiss for her and nothing more. Not the revelation it was for me.
The moment passes and then we’re walking up the old wooden stairs to the upper floor and unlocking another door there.
She flicks a light on, and a yellow CFL bulb illuminates a cozy living room lined with bookshelves and dominated by the ugliest couch I’ve ever seen in my life, a hulking thing of orange velvet. It’s either the kind of couch you find in your great-aunt’s basement or the kind of couch you pay too much money for at a place like Anthropologie.
I walk over to investigate it further, and then I hear Devi clear her throat like she’s going to speak, like it’s easier for her to speak when we’re not looking at each other. I brace myself for whatever it is she’s going to say.
“Why wouldn’t you let me blow you in the car?” she asks softly.
Dammit. The one question I would pay real, American money for her not to ask.
I turn to face her, my filmmaker brain having tiny seizures when I see how sweet and vulnerable she looks framed against her sagging, overwhelmed bookshelves. “Devi, it’s just about the show, it’s not because I don’t—”
“Bullshit.” There’s no menace or heat in her voice right now, just the matter-of-fact voice she would use to tell me about star formation.
I hesitate. She tilts her head at me.
I speak after a long moment, trying to fumble my way towards the truth without exposing how deeply, crazily, ridiculously I am caught up in her. “I didn’t want to use you, Devi. I didn’t want to cheapen what we shared in the desert.”
She raises an eyebrow, and I realize suddenly I’ve said something wrong.
“For one thing,” she says, using her fingers to tick off her words, suddenly not looking like a girl at all, but a confident—and irritated—woman, “there’s nothing cheap about my choosing to do any sexual act with you. I make the choice—I choose to use my body, either for work or for pleasure, and tonight I was choosing to go down on you, even though I knew the cameras were off. When you call that choice cheap, it makes me feel cheap.”
Shit shit shit.
“That’s not at all what I meant,” I hurry to explain. “I just meant—”
“And for another thing,” she continues, as if I haven’t spoken, “I feel like you’re holding yourself back from me, and I don’t get it at all. Logan, your body isn’t a machine, and I don’t expect it to be—I don’t expect you to turn yourself off like a switch when the camera turns off. You’re human, you’re going to keep needing and craving even after a scene ends. Of course, you don’t want to use women, and of course you aren’t the kind of guy who tries to fuck around with girls onset when the cameras aren’t rolling. It’s one of the things I like best about you.”
I don’t know what to say to this, because I’m so floored and grateful that she has noticed those things about me, but I also know that she’s not finished talking yet and that I’m still in trouble.
“But Logan—” she steps forward “—I offered. I was offering because I wanted to. I wanted to and I chose it, and you wouldn’t have been manipulating or even coaxing me into it. Please...as we move forward...please open up to me more. I’m your friend and I think I’m—” she breaks off, swallowing and glancing away. “I’m so turned on for you all the time,” she finishes, and it makes my dick ache and my heart beat hard, even as my mind recognizes that she changed course at the last moment.
She changed course...why? My heart beats harder and faster. What was she going to say? Because what if she was going to say that she is falling for me? That she has feelings for me?
What would I say back?
The answer rises to my lips immediately: Me too me too me too.
She drags my mind away from those thoughts with a soft sigh, the kind of sigh that makes me remember the noises she made on the hood of my car. Something snaps inside of me, something big.
“Sit on the couch,” I command. My voice is firm, loud and a little harsh in the small, warm space. Some distant part of me wonders if I’ve crossed a line.
But she sits.
I walk over to her. “On the edge,” I say, and she obeys, and then I kick her legs apart, so that she’s not only sitting on the edge but has her legs splayed wide. Her skirt rides up, baring her pussy.
She peers up at me with those golden eyes at the same time that I smell her scent again. My pulse thuds in my neck and wrists and groin, and it hits me.
I’m not just caught up in Devi, I’m truly, honestly falling for her. I have feelings.
Capital F Feelings.
Somehow my crush has gone from “casually obsessed with” to “move in with me,” and I have no idea what the fuck to do with that, much less what Devi would do with it if she knew. She’s obviously attracted to me, but that in no way equates romance, especially in our line of work. It’s too soon for me to feel this way, and it’s not right to drag that into the middle of a project. And if I’m being honest, I’m scared. Not a little scared, but a lot scared, because the last time I had capital F Feelings, I lost my dog, my heart, and my sobriety in one fell swoop.
But I can’t just ignore this, and clearly, I can’t hide it from Devi, nor do I want to.
There has to be a middle ground, right? Between pretending it away and proposing marriage?
I drop to my knees in between her legs, not missing her small shiver as I do.
“You’re turned on for me all the time?” I ask her. “Well, I’m worse. I’m fucking miserable with the need to touch you and taste you. I’m obsessed with it. I’m obsessed with you.” I meet her eyes. “You have to tell me if that makes you uncomfortable. Because the way I think about you, the way I crave you, it’s not just like two performers. It’s not just like two friends.” My hands find her ankles and wrap around them, more to keep myself from touching her in more interesting places while she answers. I can see her pulse hammering in her throat as she swallows.