Page 19 of A Crazy Kind of Love
Downstairs. Help.
I laid my head down on the filthy step and hoped Zion would come quickly. A door slam echoed down the stairwell. Steps boomed closer. Zion was taking them two at a time, jumping over the last few to get to the landing. Then he was there. He picked me up and carried me up to the apartment where he laid me on the sofa. He grabbed a bottle of grape juice from the fridge, opened it, and handed it to me.
“Have you eaten anything tonight?” he scolded me.
“Yes.” I sipped on the juice, ignoring his skeptical expression. “Idideat something, but it was earlier. Then I sort of lost track of time.”
“That’s not like you.” He shook his head. “You’re lucky I was here. What were you going to do if I was out? Pass out in the stairwell?”
“I saw the light on. I knew you were here.” I swallowed the juice and closed my eyes, waiting for the dizziness to subside. “But thanks for coming to my rescue.”
He bowed deep. “Prince fucking Charming. That’s me. So how did you manage to get home like this? Did you take a cab? Should I go pay a cab?” He handed me a cold, wet cloth, and I laid it across my neck.
“No. It came on all of a sudden. And I got a ride home from Micah Sinclair.” I grinned at him and waited for him to give me the envious glare I’d hoped for.
“You bitch,” he said. But his envy quickly turned to curiosity. “Tell me everything.”
“It was an interesting night.”
“I wouldn’t mind five minutes alone with that hot man.”
“I don’t think you’re his type.”
Zion huffed. “I might be. His type is generally anything that moves.” He stepped into the kitchen.
I called over the back of the sofa. “That’s just a rumor.”
“Hey, rumors are often based in truth. You might be too new to the gossip pages to realize how often he shows up with a new girl, right on the heels of ditching the last one.”
“But I think maybe the tabloids are creating that image of him.”
He returned holding my glucose meter out to me. “Why would you think that?”
I rubbed my thumb with an alcohol wipe and pricked it. The blood beaded, and I laid the test strip against it. “On the way over, Micah told me—off the record—that he’d rather take the rap for the breakups, but it’s usually him who gets dumped when girls tire of playing with him and move up the ladder.”
The meter still read below seventy, and Zion went to the kitchen and came back with a banana. “So Micah just happened to confide that to a girl who works in the gossip business? You don’t think he’s maybe trying to clean up his image through you?”
My stomach sank. “But it was off the record.”
“Yeah, but he has to know that information will color anything you write about him in the future.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
He peeled the banana and handed it to me. “Eat this.”
I concentrated on chewing and swallowing, more worried about getting my numbers up than about Micah for the moment. As soon as the banana was gone though, another thought occurred to me. “But then why did he—”
“Why did he what?” He dropped into the chair beside me, chin on his hands. He was a worse gossip than my mom. No wonder they got along so well. No wonder he was so much better at this job than me.
My face flushed with embarrassment at how easily I’d let Micah take me in. That kiss bamboozled me, and he’d known it would. “Nothing.”
“What happened?”
I flailed my arms. “I let him kiss me, okay? Oh, Lord. I’m such an idiot.”
He sat back, his budding afro snapping into place a microsecond later. “Way to bury the lede, Josie.” His eyes closed and then opened wide. “You aren’t serious.”
“Yeah.”
