He offered me a taste, but I demurred.
“Shouldn’t we start the staff meeting?” I asked.
“Totally. It begins with thumb fellatio. I already did yours, so it’s your turn.”
I snorted, but he held his thumb out to me in a very flirty manner.
I snorted again. “You’re messing with me. Why can’t you just be normal? Why do you have to look things up on your phone and not tell me? Why the teasing?”
“Anticipation is the best part. When I was a real estate—“ he grinned “—mogul… the most fun I had on any project was the startup. Pushing hard to get a piece of land rezoned. Tearing the architectural drawings in half and telling the team we could do better.” His blue eyes glinted with a ferocity I’d never seen before.
“You sound excited.”
“I used to get so keyed up, I couldn’t sleep. I was like a degenerate gambler, except the socially acceptable kind.”
“What the hell are you doing here, working entry-level part-time jobs?”
“I could ask you the same thing. You were the smartest girl in school, and you would have been valedictorian, if Brie Harrison hadn’t… you know.”
“Know what?” My heart started to race. Even after five years, it still nauseated me to think of Brie Harrison smugly taking the stage for the valedictorian address. She gave a terrible speech, too. She started off by quoting lyrics from a Britney Spears song. I think she meant to be ironic, but it was just insincere.
Adrian explained, “Well, you do know her dad paid off some people with a generous donation to the school’s expansion fund, right?”
I gasped. “No!”
“Anywhere there’s power and money, there’s corruption.”
“How do you know this?”
“I have no hard evidence, but most of the students actually voted for you. Samples don’t lie.”
“I didn’t think people liked me that much.”
He grinned. “People liked you a lot more than you thought, but more importantly, they knew you were the smartest girl—or boy—in the class.”
“I’m reeling, Adrian. I’m totally sober, but the restaurant is spinning around me. I’m literally reeling from this information! I should have been the valedictorian.” I patted my cheeks with both hands, making a light slapping sound. “My whole life could have been different.”
“As shitty as it seems, she may have done you a favor. Brie went off to New York with all these expectations hanging over her. I bet every time she stumbled, she got that Impostor Syndrome thing. Where you feel like a fraud, and they’re going to catch on to you.”
Our pasta hadn’t arrived yet, but the bread had. Adrian unfolded the burgundy cloth and set a warm bun on my plate without asking, before serving himself.
“Did you have that Impostor Syndrome?” I asked.
“Nope. I guess that makes me an ass**le, because I thought I deserved every bit of success.”
“Was there a girlfriend? You said you had a big house and you felt lonely.”
He looked away. “There was one or two. Mainly one.”
“And?”
“There’s nothing fun about getting your heart ripped out, and it’s not that special of a story. You’ve heard it before. Boy meets girl, boy becomes successful man, girl likes shopping, man goes broke and gets dumped.”
“Any girl who dumped you over money isn’t worth having. I mean, you do have terrible taste in music, but you have other great qualities.”
He laughed. “I never did convert you to being a Led Zeppelin fan, did I?”
“I tried to like the bands from your shirts. Boy, that sounds really immature now that I hear myself saying it.”
He finished gobbling down his first bun and reached for another for each of us. He certainly wasn’t afraid of carbohydrates, though his lean frame would say otherwise.
“Why Led Zeppelin?” I asked.
He laughed. “Honestly, I listened to the same music as everyone else, you know? I mostly wore those shirts because nobody else did, and I thought it made me seem interesting. The shirts and the lip ring were a disguise. A kid’s gotta do something to distract everyone and distance himself from his dad, the cop. My plan didn’t work that well, though.”
“I never thought of you as a cop’s kid. You were just Adrian. With your spider legs and your floppy hair, always reading Stephen King books at lunch.”
“Ouch.”
“You were cute.”
He nodded, smiling at the memory. “The up side to being a loner is you don’t get much peer pressure. I never even smoked so much as a cigarette, let alone anything more interesting. A lot of cop’s kids are way more rebellious.”
“Do you think people expected you’d snitch to your dad?”
He smirked. “The irony is that thanks to my dad, I knew who all the dealers were and where the bootleggers operated. I had it all, but didn’t know what to do with it.”
“You could have been the most popular guy in school.”
He nodded, his expression wistful. “And you could have been valedictorian, except for some bribe money.”
As I let these revelations wash over me, Adrian flicked at his lower lip with his tongue, which took me back in time, to watching him flick that piercing he used to wear in his lower lip.
“When did you take the lip ring out?” I asked.
“The first day I started working after school. I arrived in Seattle, by bus, and saw a bunch of skinny kids with piercings hanging out on the sidewalk outside the bus station. When I walked by, they nodded at me like I was one of them.”
“Street kids?”
“Yes. But I wasn’t one of them, because I had an internship and an apartment lined up. I slipped the lip ring out about two blocks later.”
“Did the hole completely close up?”
He took a drink of his root beer using the straw, then said, “I’m not dribbling, am I?” He patted his chin, pretending he wasn’t sure himself. “It closed up after two weeks.”
“I wish I could have kissed you back when you had the piercing.” I gave him a flirty look. “Just to satisfy my curiosity.”
He squared up his shoulders and gave me a smoldering look, his blue eyes blazing with interest. “We’re adults now, Peaches. You don’t need an excuse like curiosity. If you want to kiss me, just kiss me. No labels, no restrictions.”