Porn Star(31)

“I feel like maybe it was unprofessional, and I don’t want to be the creepy guy hitting on you while we’re supposed to be doing a job, and if you don’t feel comfortable doing the kiss tonight or even continuing—”

“Logan.” Her voice gives me pause, it’s so grave and serious and unlike her. “Please stop. You didn’t do anything wrong, and I don’t want to leave the project.”

“Okay,” I say, heaving a relieved breath. “I still think that maybe we should wait for the kiss. I don’t want it to feel...contrived. Maybe just a goodbye for tonight?”

“Whatever you like,” she murmurs. Is that disappointment in her voice?

I know it’s disappointment I feel, even though I know it’s for the best. But this is our second aborted kiss, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep myself from kissing her.

I hit record and put the handheld on the dash, aimed so that both of us are in the frame. “Devi, I’m so glad you came out with me tonight. Do you feel like an expert in zombie movies now?”

She gives a little laugh. “I guess you could say that, although biologically I find the entire scenario a joke. Zombies are corpses and their decomposing stomachs wouldn’t be able to metabolize nutrients...and you need nutrients for muscle function. Even if something did reanimate a corpse, it wouldn’t be able to have directed, long-term movement.”

I blink at her. “Wow.”

She shrugs, like it’s no big deal that she just knows all this stuff about metabolic function and reanimation.

“You know, you didn’t mention any of this during the movie.”

“Well...during the movie, I was actually a little scared,” she admits.

“I hope that doesn’t mean I’ve scared you off of another date, though.” I look at her from under my eyelashes (I have damn good eyelashes for a man.) “I really had a good time tonight, and I’d like to see you again, if you’d let me?”

For just a moment, I try to pour everything into my gaze, to show her that I actually mean these words, that I’m not just saying them for the show. If things were different and this was our real first date...

Her eyes are gold-dark and soft as she returns my gaze. “I’d like that,” she replies shyly, and my heart leaps once before it remembers that she’s acting too.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” she says back with a smile. She breaks our gaze, reaching down to unbuckle her seatbelt. She puts her hand on the door handle and then looks back at me. The light from her porch is soft and yellow, filling parts of the Shelby with a subdued glow that burnishes her caramel skin into a dark bronze. “For what it’s worth,” she says quietly, “I would’ve still wanted to do the kiss tonight.”

And then the door opens and she’s gone, and I’m staring blankly ahead, the red record light of the camera blinking at the edge of my vision like a silent recrimination, a glaring marker of every second I let Devi walk away from my car with those as the last words spoken.

Because when she said it, she wasn’t using the jaded voice of an experienced porn model, she wasn’t using the affectionate voice of a friend. She was telling me something real, something personal.

Of course she is, you idiot. She wanted to kiss you that night at Vida’s, remember?

I bring the flat of my hand down hard on my steering wheel, frustration surging in me. I wanted to kiss her that night too, and I want to kiss her right now, and there’s no reason that I shouldn’t run after her and show her exactly how I feel, except maybe there is every reason that I shouldn’t do it—

I slam my hand against the steering wheel three more times, a low growl building in my chest. Fuck it. Fuck trying to do the right thing, because there’s only one thing I want to do right now and Devi just told me that she wants it too.

I unbuckle my seatbelt and open my car door in record time, calling Devi’s name as I close the door and walk forward. She is almost to her front porch but stops and turns to face me. “What is it?” she asks, taking a step toward me.

I take a step of my own, not sure what to say, so I just hold out my hand. She looks at it and then up to my face, which I know must be a mess—lust and hesitation and worry and raw attraction. But I see the pulse pounding in her neck, the way her lips part just from looking at me, and she comes forward and slides her hand in mine.

I use it to tug her a little closer to me, playfully, carefully, and then I say, “I’ve been wanting to kiss you all night.” And I press my lips to hers.

I feel her hand trembling in mine, feel her lips yield to my kiss, and for one perfect, suspended moment, we are kissing the chaste kind of kiss you see on PBS historical shows, the Disney Channel kind of kiss, where it’s just our lips touching, just our hands joined together. It’s pure romance, and I feel very genteel and distinguished as I pull away and she blinks up at me with a dazed smile.

“I guess I’ll be seeing you,” she says, a little breathlessly, and I rejoin with a really articulate, “Yeah,” and then she squeezes my hand and walks back to her door.

And then I’m standing there by the trunk of my car like an idiot, because my lips are still hungry for hers, my body is still clamoring for her touch, and my mind is this churning loop of our date and her amber eyes and our scene from three years ago. And that kiss wasn’t enough, it couldn’t possibly be enough. And then I’m eating up the distance to her front door in long, quick strides; she’s facing the door trying to sort through her jangling mass of keys; I grab her shoulder and spin her around, slamming her back into the door and bringing my mouth down on hers with the kind of ferocity that would terrify most women.