Addicted to You (21 page)

Her eyes began to burn. Helena floundered,
alarmed. She tugged Leah back down onto the sofa, and Leah went
because she had no idea what to do now.

She didn’t want to have her mom’s ability to
unplug from her emotions. She didn’t want to shut everyone out
until nothing mattered anymore except for the superficial things
that couldn’t hurt her.

“Leah, you’re scaring me.” Helena dropped
her hands and gripped her shoulders instead. “Say something.”

She shook her head and gave a small,
helpless laugh. “I …” What could you say after you just had an
emotional epiphany? Only crazy people had emotional epiphanies. “I
like Will.”

For long seconds, Helena said nothing. She
stared at Leah, slack-jawed, with a line between her brows.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she
finally asked, incredulous.

“And he likes me,” Leah
said, but Helena only looked more confused. “He totally
gets
me, and I was too
busy running away to appreciate that.”

Head tilted, Helena pressed a cool palm to
Leah’s forehead. “Are you sure you’re not feeling feverish?”

Leah brushed her hand off. The burning in
her eyes had thankfully gone away, and she felt like she could
breathe again. “Helena, I’m serious.”

“Okay then,” she said, still looking
skeptical. “So what are you going to do about it?”

She had no idea.

Leah blew through campus Monday morning like
an addict going through withdrawal. After her first class, during
which she snapped at the professor for his poor spelling in his
PowerPoint slides, she made her way to the Web Development office
to work on the University multicultural website. She was behind on
updating it with the latest campus news, and the busy work would
keep her mind off the fact she still hadn't heard from Will. It
would also keep her from going to the theater to see if he happened
to be there with his friend again.

Web Dev was located in the main
administration building. The second floor office had a row of
computers for the student workstations, and her boss, a petite
older woman with a steel gray bob, sat in a smaller office just
within earshot. She waved to her boss before tossing her backpack
on the floor and sitting at her usual workstation.

As she waited for the computer to log her
in, she picked at the teal nail polish Helena had put on her the
week before and stared down at the keyboard without really seeing
it.

She was more upset than she cared to admit
that Will had yet to contact her. Since her cell phone was in her
missing purse, coming to see her in person would be the next best
way to get a hold of her. She knew Will would want to return it in
person because his charm worked best that way. It was hard to
resist the killer combination of accent and smile.

Unless … Her stomach hit the floor beneath
her chair. Unless Will had decided that she was a freak and that it
was just too much work. Maybe in a couple of days, she would get
her purse in the mail or left in front of her apartment door.

If Will didn’t show up soon, she would have
to swallow her pride and find him instead. First, because she
really did need her purse and all her identification back. And
second, because after her realization last night, she wanted to
stop avoiding him and the whole mess of things he made her
feel.

Clicking the mouse and typing with enough
force to draw the wary eye of her fellow student worker sitting a
couple workstations away, she checked her email first. She rarely
got emails to her school address other than University newsletters
and notices from professors when class was canceled, but it was
always the first thing she checked weekday mornings.

She pulled a banana out of her backpack as
her email loaded. A moment later, she dropped the half-peeled
banana in her lap where it broke and smudged her jeans. But she
didn’t even care about that because there was an email from Will
McLean in her inbox.

Steeling herself for whatever it might
contain, she clicked the email with the subject: ‘I have your
purse.’ It read:

Leah,

You left your purse at my apartment the
other night, and I’m willing to return a portion of its contents if
you are agreeable to meeting me at Vitale’s at your earliest
convenience. I hope you like Italian.

If you are open to discussion, we can then
negotiate the conditions for returning the rest of your purse’s
contents. Please note I’m not referring to sex, which I would never
attempt to bribe from you. Honest.

Will

P.S. Please forgive me. I’m so, so sorry. So
sorry.

Leah stared at it for a
solid minute.
What the hell?
She didn’t know whether to be relieved he wanted
to see her again or furious that he was actually holding her purse
ransom. The guy had guts, she’d give him that.

Confused and galled, she responded.

Will,

I hope you realize that this is blackmail
and that I could call the police.

Italian is adequate.

Seeing as I don't want to start getting tiny
pieces of my purse in the mail with threatening letters, I will
meet you tonight at Vitale’s at eight.

Leah

Since Elijah hadn’t known
Leah’s address (although he had
given Will
extremely dizzying directions from memory), Will had yet to decide
how to best approach her now. Her address had been set to private
in the student directory. Short of hanging around the campus web
development office or waiting for her to show up at her parents’
estate, Will was at a loss. Maybe he should just send that email
after all.

“Why do you look so stricken?”

Will glanced up at his boss with a sheepish
smile. “Sorry, just … figuring something out.”

“Is it about your sex addict?”

“She has a name. And I’m not asking you for
relationship advice.” When James continued to regard him, he added,
“No offense.”

James shrugged and went back to typing. He’d
been organizing Will’s notes on the sex addiction case study since
Will got in a couple of hours ago. Will had asked that his boss
remove it altogether from his book, but he had refused, saying it
wouldn’t matter since the identities of the sex addicts would
remain anonymous. For now, he was writing them in and he would
leave it up to the addicts themselves whether or not they wanted to
remain included once he reached out to them.

Still feeling discontent, Will went back to
proofreading one of James’s essays. At the bottom right of his
monitor, a notification popped up letting him know he’d received a
new email.

He froze when he saw the recipient’s
name.

Warily, he clicked the notification, which
opened up the new email from Leah Carter. After reading through it
in confusion, he scrolled down to find someone had rewritten the
email he’d drafted the other night and then sent it without his
permission.

He was going to kill Finn. Finn must have
done it while Will was in the bathroom.

Mentally plotting revenge, he went back to
reread Leah’s response and finally seemed to register that she had
agreed to meet him. Tonight.

He switched from wanting
to kill Finn to wanting to kiss him. Sure, Finn’s changes to his
email were exactly what he
hadn’t
wanted to say, but there was nothing for it now.
And Leah hadn’t told him to take her purse and choke on it, so he
figured he should just accept the positive turn of events and deal
with Finn’s meddling later.

“I dislike the way you’re smiling now.”

He rolled his eyes at his boss. “How am I
smiling?”

“Like Hannibal right before he eats someone.
I’m planning on how to defend myself with my stapler.”

“You’re being melodramatic.”

“A little bit.”

Will wiped the smile from his face.
“Better?”

“More stoic. I approve.”

“I’m glad. Excuse me for a minute.” Will
retreated into the hall and pulled out his phone. He dialed Finn’s
number.

“Did she answer?” Finn’s voice greeted him
without the least bit of shame.

“Aye. We’re meeting tonight at
Vitale’s.”

Finn laughed. “I’m amazing.”

“I’ll have to repay you for this. I might
just drop by the theater sometime this week to chat with Kat.”

“No, you won’t!” Finn shouted. Will had to
hold the phone away from his ear. “She’ll think I’m a loser who
needs his friends to get me a date.”

Will opened his mouth, closed it, and then
opened it again, talking through clenched teeth. “But you just did
that to me with Leah.”

“Yeah, but you’re foreign,” he said. Will
could picture him waving it off like it wasn’t a big deal. “Girls
forgive guys with accents almost anything.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever
heard.”

“Well you better hope it’s true when you
meet Leah tonight.”

He had a point.

In the restaurant, Leah was already having
second thoughts (although by then, it was more like seventieth
thoughts). It had taken Helena shoving her out the door with a
threat to paint her room in neon purple stars to get her here,
because even though she wanted to see him again, the anxiousness
was making her sick.

What if things got out of hand again and she
had sex with Will and ruined it all? What if Will realized she was
as emotionally developed as a turnip and ran off screaming? What if
one of her past one-nighters happened to be here, recognized her,
and came over saying, ‘Hey! I know you! Didn't we do it up against
a wall behind the library?’

“You like him,” Helena had
said. “He likes you. You said it yourself. He
gets
you. Now stop being chicken
shit and go see him.”

Leah had resented her word choice, but she
supposed it was still true.

However, the longer she sat, the less brave
she felt. Just as she was getting up to leave, Will walked in.

Warmth flooded her stomach
and filled her chest. She sank helplessly back into the
chair.
Glare at him, damn you!
It was the only way to stop herself from
instantly forgiving him the moment he turned those baby blues on
her.

Now she was annoyed at the both of them all
over again. She wasn’t a pushover, and she didn’t forgive easily.
She wanted this to work out—needed this to work out—but she also
had to know for sure if Will was sincere because if he was, if he
wanted the same thing …

She would be entering new territory.
Dangerous territory. But she was willing to do it if it was with
him.

Will strolled through the restaurant toward
her, looking unfairly attractive in dark jeans and an untucked,
black button-up shirt. His sleeves were folded back, and there was
something intensely hot about the bare skin of his forearms. To top
it all off, his enormous smile trained solely on her took her
breath away. In fact, she was pretty sure she just heard half the
restaurant gasp and shield their eyes from the radiance. The other
half were giving him wrinkled brows and confused smiles at the
purse in his hand.

“You came,” he said as he sat, sounding as
breathless as Leah felt.

She fixed a scowl on her face to avoid
gawking and retorted quite loudly, “You blackmailed me.”

A few people at the neighboring table
shifted noticeably away from them.

Will winced and rubbed the back of his neck.
“Right, um, sorry about that. Actually, Finn wrote that and sent it
to you without my knowing.”

She absorbed this knowledge with a growing
pit in her stomach. “So you didn’t actually mean to contact
me.”

Apparently sensing the dark aura rising out
of her, Will quickly clarified. “No,” he said, shaking his head.
And then winced again and said, “I mean, aye, I meant to contact
you, but just not in that way. I stopped by your parents’ house
yesterday because I thought you lived there.”

She stopped fiddling with the edge of the
table cloth and looked at him in surprise. “What? How do you even
know where they live?”

He looked apologetic. “I had to look at your
driver’s license to find your full name.”

“My driver’s … Crap.” She
slapped her palm to her forehead. She’d completely forgotten that
the address on her license was outdated.
Idiot.
This whole time, she’d been
anticipating he might drop by her apartment when he didn’t have a
clue where she even lived.

“I wanted to see you in person since I
wasn’t sure how well an email would be received. You were pretty
angry last week.”

She dropped her hand and resumed glaring.
“And why would that be? You’ve only been lying to me since we
met.”

“I know, I’m an arse. I promise I'll make it
up to you,” he said, looking for all the world like her forgiveness
meant everything to him.

She sighed and called the waiter over. She
ordered an appetizer, some fancy pasta she couldn’t pronounce, and
a bottle of wine. Alcohol might dull the desperate ache in her
stomach. She wouldn't overdo it though or she might end up ignoring
her better judgment and attempting to get into Will's pants, which
wasn't the way she wanted things to go. Not yet anyway.

As it turned out it, Will might be the one
who needed to moderate himself. He knocked back two glasses in
quick succession before their appetizers even arrived. She decided
he must be nervous. It actually put her at ease knowing he was as
anxious about this as she was, even though the quiet resolve in his
face hadn’t wavered once.