“Are you sure you want to go home?” Talent asks, slipping into the seat beside me. We buckle our seat belts simultaneously. He looks at his wristwatch and says, “I can reschedule my day if you want to stay.”
Regretfully, I shake my head. “I need to get back.”
The sun is up, and we’ve run out of time.
Not only that, but I’m also supposed to meet with Inez for dinner, and Camilla has her first date with a client tonight. Inez thought it would be a good idea to send her on a traditional date with a client before moving on to a schedule like mine. I’d like to be home when she returns.
The first time is never easy.
Talent’s jaw muscles tense, like he can’t accept my answer and might argue. Instead, he dips the car into gear and accelerates out of the parking garage. The only cars I commute in are SUVs, town cars, and the occasional limousine. This is a rush, and laughter bubbles in my throat before we’ve hit the street.
Are we even on the road? Because this feels like we’re sailing through the air.
“Faster,” I demand. I sit straight and tighten the strap across my chest. Unsure of where to hold on to, I grip the seat and giggle.
I fucking giggle.
Gray eyes drink me in, and the smirk that bends the right side of his mouth swallows me whole. A rush of excitement jets through my veins, and I’d probably clap like a kid on Christmas morning if I didn’t have a death grip on the seat.
“Hold on tight, baby,” Talent says, dropping his foot on the gas.
Anticipation feels like the slow click, click, click to the top of a roller coaster right before the drop. In the second between when Talent guns the accelerator and when the car jets forward, we float in time, weightless and freed. My heart seizes, air catches in my lungs, and I’m released from everything but dopamine dropped on my brain like a bomb.
If I felt like we were sailing through the air before, this feels like a torpedo propelling toward a target across the world. The Lamborghini races down the street, leaving my heart, lungs, and rationality behind to catch up.
Talent disrespects traffic laws, maneuvering between other cars on the road with ease, shooting through yellow lights before they turn red, and narrowly missing a city bus that turns onto the road without checking its mirrors.
“Want to drive?” Talent asks. He slows the car as we approach a busy intersection, but ultimately decides he can make it through safely and whooshes past the other cars like a speeding train.
Laughter erupts from me, and I admit, “Only if you want to die. I don’t know how to drive.”
Zigzagging between traffic, Talent takes a sharp right turn onto my street and says, “We can fix that. I’ll teach you how to drive.”
Talent pulls along the curb in front of my apartment building and turns the car off. Dizzy with adrenaline, my hands tremble and I can’t wipe the smile from my face. “That was the most incredible thing I’ve done in a long time. Maybe ever.”
He lets out a short breath and says, “I don’t get to drive it too often. There’s no fucking way I’m not getting a speeding ticket in the mail.”
“The fact that you drive anything else when you own a Lamborghini is a shame, Ridge.” I unbuckle the seat belt with shaky fingers and say, “But does that mean I was right about the unpaid traffic tickets?”
His smirk somersaults from charming to devious. “You’ll wish all it was is unpaid tickets, Lydia.”
Do I kiss him goodbye? Thank him for the memorable night? How do I say goodbye to someone who brought so much raw emotion out of me and go on to live my life like it never happened?
I start by reaching over and cupping his face with my hand. He turns slightly to kiss the inside of my palm, never taking his eyes off of me. The car is suddenly crammed with the things left unsaid, incomplete and muddled, and I don’t have it in me to piece the words together to form coherent sentences.
“Quit trying to say goodbye to me, Lydia,” Talent says. He covers my hand with his. “It’s too late for that now.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” I whisper.
He lowers my hand from his face to his heart, where it beats as heavily as mine. “The only thing I’m asking for is you. The rest will fall into place, or it won’t. I don’t care. Nothing else matters to me.”
Talent walks behind me with his hands in his pockets, dressed in a casual pair of shorts and a plain black T-shirt—a far cry from the tailored suits he wears normally. If his face wasn’t so recognizable, he may have blended in with those of us who don’t live in the most luxurious apartments in town. We’re far from slumming it, but we’re double level only, and we can’t see the ocean from here.
A mom following behind her son on his bike, a man flipping through a stack of mail as he walks back to his building from the mailroom, and, of course, our very own neighborhood watch coordinator, Dog Mom, have no shame and gawk at the infamous Talent Ridge as we follow the sidewalk to my front door.
Talent’s oblivious, shrouding his face between my neck and the curve of my shoulder as I strain to get my key in the door. I drop my set of keys twice.
“I can’t wait to see your room,” he teases. “I never made it that far.”
The front door opens with a crack, and I notice right away that my apartment isn’t the same place I left yesterday. Camilla’s candles have spilled out to the living room, flickering on the coffee table and the kitchen counters. She’s thrown a sheer scarf over the floor lamp beside the couch and has covered every flat surface with a potted plant.
“Oh, you’re home,” Camilla mumbles over the nails she’s holding between her teeth. She spits them into her hand once she realizes Talent’s following me in and sets the hammer down on the coffee table. “What do you think so far?”
I recognize the art Gary has given me over the years on the walls right away. They’re one-of-a-kind reminders of every time I stepped into his office and knelt on the marble floor to be at his service. I don’t accept gifts from clients, and these paintings shouldn’t have been the exception. Their beauty hypnotized me, but now it feels like I’m surrounded by my indiscretions.
“I found these beautiful paintings in the hallway closet.” Camilla holds up the contemporary piece she was in the process of hanging when we barged in. “I can’t believe you had all of this hidden away.”
It’s all I can do not to rip the paintings off the walls and tear them to shreds with my bare hands. No one but me knows the personal cost of owning such coveted pieces of art. I’ve put forth an exorbitant amount of effort to taper who I am deep down—brutal, calculated, and hardhearted—to guide Camilla without scaring her and to show Talent I can be more than a slut. But at what point do I start to keep it real?
Noticing my discomfort, Camilla rubs the back of her neck and asks, “Should I take them down? I was going to ask before I put them up, but you smashed your phone and I didn’t have a new number—”
“I like the plants,” I admit before she spills more about the phone I destroyed with the same seven-dollar hammer she’s hanging hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of art with.
Enthusiasm returns to her expression, and she smiles. “I took a taxi to the nursery after you left yesterday. They’re drought tolerable, so we don’t have to worry about watering them too often. Just make sure you keep them off the ground because Dog ate one already. Like, he literally ate it. The dirt and everything.”