The Devil You Know (The Devils #3)(48)

I’m being considerate, but Ben doesn’t appear to think so when he walks into the bathroom a few minutes later.

“You weren’t planning to shower and sneak off to work, were you?” he asks as he slides the glass door open. His eyes travel over me. I hold the loofah in the center of my chest, as if it’s a shield. I have no idea how to play this now that he’s shot my plan to shit.

“I was just trying to let you rest,” I reply, which is a fucking lie and we both know it. I was avoiding him, plain and simple.

He decides not to argue with me as he steps into the shower. “You said my name in your sleep. I was going down on you, and you weren’t even awake yet and you said, ‘Ben’, all breathy.”

“I probably would have said ‘oh, Chris Hemsworth’ but it’s such a mouthful,” I reply, pouring body gel on the loofah.

“Is it so hard to admit you sort of like me?” He runs a hand over my hip, asking me to pay attention.

“Do you really need me to admit it when we just had sex repeatedly?”

“Yeah,” he says softly. “I sort of do.”

I can’t entirely meet his eye. I’ve been here before, with someone asking me to open up, to be vulnerable. It was hard then, but it’s harder now. Every time you gamble and lose, it gets a little scarier to try again.

He steps closer. Every bone in my body wants to make a joke right now, keep this light. But then maybe I’ll be the one wounding him, and I don’t want that either.

“On Mondays and Wednesdays, you go to the taco truck,” I tell him, staring at the floor as I speak, divulging what feels like a shameful secret. “On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you get a wrap from the gym.”

I can’t tell him about driving past his house, or all the time I’ve spent on Drew Bailey’s feed looking for photos of him. I feel exposed enough already. Too exposed. I swear to God if he makes fun of me for this it’s over and I’ll never speak to him again.

His hand comes up, curving around the corner of my jaw, pulling my gaze to his, our mouths inches apart. “You drink two cups of coffee every morning, always with milk, not cream, and a ridiculous amount of sugar. You’ll eat an acai bowl at any hour of the day, and you’re the only person alive who prefers strawberries to donuts, which is why I’ve been buying them for staff meetings for the past year.”

I stare at him, asking myself how he knows all this, how long he’s been watching me this carefully, and realizing the answer almost at the same time:

Always. He’s always watched me, always documented my every move. I assumed it was for nefarious purposes, that he was looking for a crack in my armor or a moment of weakness, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he watched me for the same reason I watched him.

Because he enjoyed it.

He leans forward and his hand curves around my neck as he presses his lips to mine.

It could be a really sweet moment, or it could be a story I later see was full of red flags.

The problem is you never really know for sure.





27





The therapist I began seeing at Kyle’s urging—twice a month, three-hundred dollars a session, and dumped on a credit card I couldn’t pay off—had a lot of good advice.

“It’s okay to tell Kyle you’re disappointed,” she said, when I told her Josie had grown increasingly unreliable.

She’d helped me understand how scared I was of being destroyed the way my mother had been, and how scared I was that if I let Kyle see the mess in my head, he’d run the other way.

So, the next time our plans got ruined by Josie—drinking too much, as always—I told him I was tired of leading separate lives, of not knowing his colleagues, his friends, his family. That I was scared nothing was going to come of this and he’d end up staying with her.

“Fuck it, then,” he said. “Let’s just go public. I’m as tired of it as you are, and I want you to really know where things stand.”

For a moment my heart leapt. I’d be able to come to him on the weekends Josie flaked out, I’d finally meet his kids and tell Meg and Kirsten the truth.

Except Kyle was no longer working out of the LA office, so it would probably be obvious to everyone that we’d been violating the firm’s rules.

“You don’t think Stadler would rescind my offer?” I asked. I needed the job. God knew with the amount I was putting on credit cards now and days of work I was missing, I really needed the job.

“Fuck,” he sighed. “They might.”

So we were back to keeping it to ourselves, but now it was my fault.

The next time he came to LA, though, he drove to Sherman Oaks—quiet and tree-lined—and asked which house I’d want. I pointed at one, then changed my mind and pointed to another. We passed a sale sign and suddenly he was calling the realtor, grinning at me as he did it: My fiancée and I are interested in your listing. It was his way of letting me know that the end of all the lying and hiding was coming, and when it did, he wanted everything with me. Fifteen minutes later she was showing us a house we couldn’t dream of affording, not when he’d soon be giving Josie half his income.

But as Kyle started mentioning a nursery, his fingers slipping through mine, I decided to let myself believe him. The therapist had told me, after all, that I’d never love someone deeply if I couldn’t let myself be vulnerable.