Indigo Nights (Nights #3)(27)

“Hey.” My stomach churned.

“My sweet, I need a reminder of this exact moment. That beautiful *, wet from giving me a blow job, those inflamed lips and your relentlessly phenomenal tits. And on top of that, you’re eating cake. You can’t expect me not to want to capture this. You’re a vision.”

“I don’t like it. Delete it. I’m not adding to your collection.” I didn’t want to be one of a hundred naked women on his phone. I’d once flipped through my ex, Louis’s, cell while he was asleep to find photo after photo of beautiful, naked women. It was as if they were his possessions. When I confronted him about them, he’d gone crazy that I’d checked his phone. He’d told me they were old photos, but if that was the case, why had he kept them? He never gave me an answer and he’d never deleted them. Every time I looked back at our relationship, I felt like an idiot. There were so many unacceptable situations that I’d just ignored.

“You’re worried I have a gallery of naked women on my phone?” Dylan handed me his phone. “Delete it. But there’s no one there but you. You can check.”

I looked at the phone in my hand and then back at Dylan. “You’re saying I can look at your phone.”

He nodded. “I have nothing to hide.”

I had to stop expecting him to disappoint me. I didn’t want to go rooting through his photos. I didn’t want to be that girl.

I shook my head. “If you show it to anyone, I’ll kill you, and then my brother will hunt you down and kill you again.”

He laughed and took another picture. “I don’t want to share you.”

My stomach flipped for the second time that evening.

“So tell me about your day. What happened?” he asked, as if we were on a date rather than enjoying a casual hookup.

I put my plate on the bedside table and stretched out on my side, propping my head up. “It was good, I think. We filmed two recipes. I thought it would be more like my YouTube stuff, but they filmed one with a moving camera and then the other with two static cameras. And of course, there were so many people watching.” I was excited to see how the final version turned out.

“Did you enjoy doing it?”

“Once I relaxed and forgot about the people and the lights and just started baking, I was fine. I think they’re going to look at it and then see if they want to use it. Who knows? I’ve lost nothing if they decide not to, and anyway I don’t know how it would work. I mean, I can’t travel from London every week.”

“You live in London?”

I nodded. “I grew up here and moved after my mother died.”

Dylan reached out and stroked my cheek with his knuckles.

“You like London?”

“Of course. It’s a beautiful city and it’s home. It’s where my family is—my brother and his wife and their daughter, and my sister-in-law’s brother and his wife and their daughter. We’ve become a unit.” As much as I’d grown up in Chicago, I’d never felt as at home anywhere as I did in London. Perhaps it was because that’s where I’d found my sobriety.

“But your father is still in Chicago?”

“Yeah but . . . it’s complicated.” I didn’t want to get into that with him. My father had remarried and had more children. It had happened quickly after my mother’s death. My father’s way of grieving was just to create a new future and it hadn’t really involved me and my brother, Jake. Things were better between us now but our relationship was forever changed.

He took a forkful of the cake he was eating. It looked like pineapple upside-down cake. “We have time.”

I shrugged and he smiled, understanding that it wasn’t something I wanted to discuss.

He discarded his plate and lay down opposite me, mirroring my position. “I looked for your YouTube stuff. I couldn’t find anything.”

“You did?” I grinned at him. “You need to search the Chicago Cake Maker.”

“I’ll do that. So, you had a long day. Were you just finished when you came back to the hotel?”

I had to think about it. “I went to a meeting after finishing at the studio, and then I saw you.”

He ran his fingers down the side of my body. “A meet—oh, an AA meeting?”

I nodded. “I found a group I like when I’m in Chicago.”

“You go every day?”

I turned over onto my stomach, lifting myself up on my elbows. “Not usually. In the beginning, yes. Now I go a couple of times a week, but usually in London.”

Outside of my London family, I didn’t usually discuss my alcoholism with anyone. Soon after getting sober, I’d made a decision to make sobriety rather than alcoholism my priority. Every alcoholic dealt with recovery differently, and I’d had to find my own path where I didn’t feel that it overtook everything I did. “The way I see it, I’m an alcoholic like some people are diabetic—it’s a chronic condition that I live with but it doesn’t stop me living my life.”

Dylan smiled at me. “And how long have you been a friend of Bill’s?”

I looked up at him, trying to understand how he knew the term. I’d never heard it used outside of AA.

“I had a friend in college in AA,” he explained, understanding my question before I asked it.