Quirks & Kinks (11 page)

Intrigued, his head tilted to the side in question. “What do you mean ‘mockery of a show’?”

Sensitive to his tone, I tried to defend myself and my meaning. “It’s a show about people’s fetishes and idiosyncrasies. It exploits people’s quirks as a means to entertain the masses.”

“Huh,” Anderson hummed thoughtfully, pursing his lips and nodding to himself.

“Huh? What are you huh-ing?”

“Nothing.”

“No, not nothing, that huh meant something,” I demanded, poking a finger in the direction of his chest.

“Fine,” he chuckled, raising his hands in surrender. “I was just surprised to hear you harboring such a judgmental point of view is all.”

“Judgmental?” I shrieked, alerting all of the stray cats in the neighborhood that a party was about to commence. “How on earth is what I said judgmental?”

A smirk settled onto his face as he spoke, but I couldn’t see it. All I could hear were his words. “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.”

Christ.

Unable to resist mocking him, I patted my crotch explicitly, rooting around and searching for something I knew I wouldn’t actually find.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his eyes drawn unavoidably to my hands.

“Checking to see if I have a penis,” I explained.

His eyes squinted with amusement and his chin jerked back.

“What?”

“I thought we’d pulled a Freaky Friday moment back there with your extreme chick logic. If you were so obviously inhabiting a female body, I figured I must have become a man.”

Rolling his eyes, he stepped toward me dramatically, grabbing my hand and squeezing.

And officially touching me for the very first time.

Okayyy, holy shit. There was a moment happening, people. Sparks were definitely involved.

“We should hug,” he blurted out, completely changing the subject and staring at me in a way that scrambled my mind.

No, no we shouldn’t. My mind was an absolute minefield of muck, but I knew one thing with absolute certainty. Hugging was one of the last things we should be doing.

Of course, I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I asked, “We should?” and mentally slapped myself as I felt my eyes going all doe-like with female stupidity.

He gave me a self-assured nod, hypnotizing me even further with his eyes and good looks and gentle voice and generally comforting disposition. Damn him. “Definitely.”

“Okay.”

He stepped toward me even closer, imposing chest and arms closing in on me steadily, ready to commence, when my anxiety spoke up again. “Um, just as a, like, reminder and stuff, why is it that we should hug again?”

He smiled a sexy smile, the edge of his top teeth cutting minutely into his plump bottom lip, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

“We’re going to be in a lot of intimate situations today. Don’t you think it’d be better to get acquainted with touching one another now rather than on camera in front of hundreds of thousands of people?”

Were that many people actually watching this show?

“Right, right, good idea,” I pretended. “I remember now.”

Logical as his reasoning was, it meant nothing to me. Right then, in that moment, with his minty, sweet, musky smell enveloping me and threatening to never let go—and influence potentially stupid actions—I thought hugging was a monumentally
bad
idea.

But
I’d built most of my life on bad ideas, and I wasn’t about to stop now.

Lifting up onto my toes and raising my arms in time, I wrapped myself up around his shoulders, settling my nose into his neck like it was meant to go there. He was tall to my short, but his strong arms wrapped comfortably around the low line of my waist and lifted, pulling my already straining toes off the ground and seating the front of my body firmly against his.

It wasn’t vulgar or explicit in any of the usual ways, but I felt every inch of his body that lined mine as if it were a piece of snug, knit clothing. It didn’t smother or suffocate, but instead supported and hugged all of the places that most desired it.

I wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed or how many gulps of Anderson filled air I’d sucked into my lungs when he finally set me on my own feet and untwined his limbs from around me.

Refusing to believe that a bereft longing in his absence was the cause of my resulting shiver, I focused on the temperature.

There was a fucking draft in this room. Surely that was the reason I now felt all cold and trembly.

“Right. Yes. Okay. Good hugging,” he stuttered as he backed slowly toward the door. “See you out there.”

I managed only a nod and awkward salute before slumping down and free-falling into the chair behind me.

Orrrr . . . sprawling ass over face on the floor.

Fuck!
Ow.
I could have sworn there was a chair behind me.

This was not good. One hug and I was in serious danger of injuring myself.

Shallowly, I prayed, asking God to give Anderson some kind of abnormality or imperfection. I’d take anything, but for some reason, all I could picture was a third nipple.

GETTING DRESSED DIDN’T TAKE
long and makeup didn’t take much longer. Which was good. I had enough anxiety in my body to fill an entire day’s worth of time. That didn’t leave much time for anything else.

The script sat unread in my lap, words blurring together from one into the other, none of it actually registering in my hormone addled brain. Honestly, I was a little mad at myself for reacting so strongly to a stupid hug, but I hadn’t had sex in years. Apparently, all that deprivation had heightened my sensitivity.

Deprivation
and
sexy, green-eyed men.

“Hah!” I laughed out loud, scaring the people around me with the transition of my one woman conversation from internal to external. “Well, that makes perfect sense. Kryptonite is fucking green.”

And on that note, it was cigarette time.

Jumping from my chair in the makeup room, I jogged toward my dressing room until I got tired and then succumbed to a slow walk. It was an agonizing twenty step journey.

One, lonely cigarette sat waiting in my pack when I found it in my purse, but it was all I needed for the time being.

Grabbing my lighter, I headed back in the direction I had just come, out the door, back down the hall past the makeup room and toward the exit. Ashley turned the corner from the set, opened her mouth to ask me where I was going, and then noticed the contents of my hand.

“Don’t be long,” she instructed instead of questioning me. “Howie wants everyone on set in fifteen minutes.”

“No problem,” I agreed, lengthening my stride to avoid running into anyone else before I found the solace of the outdoors.

Sunlight poured into my brain with the snap of a door handle, and my free hand came up palm out to shield my extra-sensitive eyes.

Not expecting to run into anyone out there, I didn’t check my surroundings before turning to the building to look away from the sun and lighting up my waiting cigarette.

“Ahh!” I screamed at the feel of a foreign hand on my shoulder, jumping and turning and very nearly dropping my one and only smoke on the dirty ass ground.

“Jesus Christopher!” I screamed at the sun-shadowed figure in front of me. “I almost fucking dropped it!”

“Good!” Anderson snapped, turning me around so that he was facing the sun. Now that the sun wasn’t in my eyes I could see every single one of his angry features. Aviator sunglasses sat perched atop his cute nose, and a single bead of sweat was starting to form at the apex of his hairline.

“What’s your deal? If you don’t like my smoking, go somewhere else!”

Aggravation tightened the circumference of my veins, forcing my muscles to tense in reaction. Jesus. Maybe swooning over him wasn’t going to be a problem. I couldn’t take it if he tried to nag me every day of my life.

Clenching his eyes tight, he seemed to reboot.

“You’re right. God, I’m sorry. You just caught me out here . . .” he started to apologize, fading out inexplicably mid-sentence.

I tried to figure out the answer on my own, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t seem to find him sporting any contraband.

“I caught you out here what?” I asked, but he waved me off with a shake of his head.

When he didn’t answer, I started guessing. “I caught you out here . . . playing with barbie dolls?”

He smiled. “No.”

“Jerking off?”

“Hah!” he laughed. “No.”

“Torturing kittens?”

With a shake of his head, he rejected that too.

“Well, you’re gonna have to help me out here. I’ve plum run out of guesses.”

He bit into his bottom lip, let his head roll back on his shoulders. Roughed up his perfectly styled hair enough to piss off the hair people. “Thinking. I was thinking . . . God,” he struggled to admit. “I was remembering.”

“Remembering what?” I dug, tilting my head to the side.

“College,” he answered with a self-deprecating snort. “I was remembering what it was like to be in college.”

“Okayyyy,” I replied, drawing out my word for a lack of anything else to say. College didn’t seem like some excruciatingly painful experience, but I wouldn’t really know.

Backing up against the building with my cigarette at my side to keep the smoke out of his eyes, I admitted, “I never went to college.”

“No?” Anderson asked with relief, turning and leaning against the building next to me.

“Nope,” I confirmed with a shake of my head, looking down at the ground to hide my slight blush of embarrassment.

“Hey,” he called, bringing my eyes from the ground to his with one word. “College isn’t for everyone, you know?”

“Ha,” I laughed without humor. “Try telling that to my parents.”

“They wanted you to go I guess.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Seems like they
really
wanted you to go.”

“They did. They
do,
” I corrected myself.

“They still want you to go?”

“Yeah,” I nodded, too busy talking to smoke. Instead, I watched as the paper slowly turned to ash, embers and heat eating it away. “They keep telling me it’s never too late.”

“It isn’t.”

“Yeah, I know. Except I don’t
want
to go. This is it for me, you know?” I lifted my eyes and turned my head to the side to look directly at him. “I know I don’t have a lot of fame, or even a lot of success, but doing this, even struggling like I am, it feels right. Do you know what I mean?”

Slowly, he nodded, the line of his throat seeming to bob with emotion. “Even if all you do is this right here, it’ll be worth the effort.”

“Exactly,” I agreed, feeling an indescribable warmth claw its way up my throat with the knowledge that he got it.

“This . . . difference of opinion. Has it hurt your relationship with your parents?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it hasn’t changed my opinion of them or their opinion of me, if that’s what you mean. But they’re disappointed. I guess they didn’t really see it coming.”

He pitched his head to the side in question, studied me closer. I buckled pretty easily under the pressure.

“They had me really young. There was a lot of pressure to raise me right, give me all of the opportunities they never had. That kind of thing. I worked pretty hard to be everything they wanted me to be.”

“Until,” he surmised with a raise of his brows.

“Yep,” I nodded. “Until. Total dirty word in the Reynolds family. Everything was great
until
they got pregnant with me at sixteen. I was the perfect daughter
until
I told them I didn’t want to go to college. They still had one chance to raise one kid right
until
Ashley told them she wanted to come work for me.”

“That’s a lot of ‘untils’.”

“It sure is,” I agreed, looking down again and catching a glimpse of the time on his watch. “Oh shit.”

I dropped my unsmoked cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out.

“What?”

“We’ve gotta go now if we don’t want to hear an earful. We’re supposed to be on set in two minutes.”

Putting both of his palms to the bricks he pushed to stand up, only to snap right back.

“What the hell?”

Trying again, he was served the same result.

“Hold on,” I instructed, leaning around him to look at the wall.

Aha.

“Your shirt is stuck to the bricks.”

Back and forth, back and forth, his head went from side to side trying to find a way to see his back. It wasn’t happening.

“We’re just going to have to take it off. It’ll be a hell of a lot easier to get it detached.”

Not thinking, and certainly not protecting myself, I reached for his buttons, working them out of their holes until I’d gotten all six of them. Sliding my hands inside, I officially lost my mind.

I was undressing him.

When I opened his shirt, all my twisted dreams came true, the tight peak of a misplaced nipple winking slyly at me from the center of his chest.

I rubbed my eye with the heal of my hand and blinked rapidly, trying to bring my wandering imagination back to reality.

No matter what I did, it wouldn’t disappear.

Reaching out as though of a mind of its own, my thumb tweaked it, just barely scraping over the top edge. “You really have a third nipple,” I murmured more to myself than to him.