Page 39 of Love Out Loud

Chapter 15

Lark

Over the next week, we quickly fall into a routine. Lennon, to my complete surprise, is awake every morning before me and has a mug of tea and a bagel waiting on the counter as soon as I emerge from my bedroom. He never once mentions our antics on the beach, so I don’t either. By midweek, it’s as if it never happened, and it fully verifies my assumption that it was simply our proximity that had me all hot and bothered when I first got here. Now we can get back to being best friends.

On Friday morning, Lennon eyes me over his coffee. I am, of course, conveniently taking a giant bite of my bagel when I notice him watching me. I try to make it a smaller bite at the last minute, which only has the effect of causing a bit of cream cheese to plop onto my plate.

Good thing Lennon isn’t under any pretense of me being cool.

“Let’s go out tonight,” he says softly, his voice full of amusement.

I try to scoop up the cream cheese with another piece of my bagel. It keeps falling off and back onto the plate. “It’s a wonder you want to take me anywhere, what with all this grace and coordination.” I give up and wipe the cream cheese with my finger to re-deposit it onto my bagel.

He shakes his head slightly and places his mug carefully on the counter. “You don’t even know how gorgeous you are, Songbird.” His hazel eyes stay trained on his mug as he says it, but it doesn’t matter. The words move through me and lodge themselves in my heart all the same.

My gaze lingers on his sharp jawline, his pre-shave stubble catching the overhead light above the counter. There are grays hidden in there that I hadn’t seen before, but it only makes him more attractive. Distinguished, in a way. Confident. Not for the first time since I arrived, I’m struck by how kind the years he’s spent in the Los Angeles sunshine have been to him. I’m so happy he has found a place where he feels like he belongs. It was always something I worried about with him. When he chose USC for his undergrad, it felt like he was running from something and that he’d be doomed to roam the Earth forever. But he didn’t. He loved it here so much that he stayed, and the rest is history.

One side of his mouth lifts as he watches me watching him. With anyone else, this moment would be awkward, but it’s Lennon. We’ve watched each other for years. Decades, even.

“What?” he asks.

“Just thinking that you’re not so bad to look at yourself,” I tease.

He runs a hand through his hair in a mock-sultry move. “If you think this is nice, wait until we go out tonight. I’ll dress pretty just for you.”

“There’s that ego,” I mumble into my mug. He kicks me lightly under the counter, and I laugh. “Fine. Let’s take our old asses out somewhere cool and celebrate the last weekend of my thirties.”

“If you’re going to get old, you might as well have fun doing it.” He winks at me, and it makes my insides flip over themselves.

Proximity. That’s all it is.

I stand to deposit my now-empty mug into the sink and move away from him to get ready for the day.

***

Recording is going really well. Noah keeps telling me I’m a natural after listening to the raw recordings, and I keep reminding him that I have spent a long time studying—and teaching—acting technique. But it’s nice to hear, considering how little faith my department chair, Carl, had in me last we spoke.

Silas and I have an undeniable chemistry, too. Even I can feel it. Voicing this book with him feels electric, like something long dormant inside me is waking up and stretching its under-used muscles. It’s so fun to banter back and forth in the voices of these characters, even if it is taking longer than we anticipated to get takes we are both happy with.

So, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when we leave our booths on Friday afternoon and he asks me to hang back. Noah’s brown eyes bounce between the two of us for a second before he excuses himself to upload the audio files to the server for Lennon to get started on this weekend.

The air between Silas and me goes still as he bites his lip with a shyness that doesn’t seem like him at all. It’s not disingenuous, exactly, but it doesn’t feel characteristic of him, either.

And that’s about when I understand what’s going on here. If only I picked up on it a beat earlier, because I would have made some excuse about why I couldn’t stay and saved him from what comes out of his mouth.

“I’d really love to take you out to dinner, if you’re available.”

Hannah wasn’t wrong when she said Silas is hot. He is incredibly good-looking in a dark, suave, put-together way. And he’s very kind, or at least, he has been to me as he patiently walks me through a lot of the recording process that a more seasoned narrator would already be familiar with.

And even though it has been ages since I’ve been on a proper date—or gotten properly laid, for that matter—I can’t help but feel that it’s not a great idea. At the very least, Lennon hasn’t brought anyone home since I’ve been here, so I can return the favor.

“Oh,” I say as I take a deep breath. “That’s so nice. But this summer is just a temporary thing. I have a kid, and she just went to college, and… I’m not really here to date, you know?” I want to crawl into a hole and sleep for fifteen years after bumbling through that. Could I be any more awkward?

Silas, to his credit, smiles softly. “Fair enough.” He shrugs. “You’re just so captivating, Lark. I had to shoot my shot.” He doesn’t say it like he’s trying to persuade me. They’re just facts: I’m captivating. He had to try.

Now I feel bad for some inexplicable reason. “Well, I mean…Lennon and I are going out tonight? It’s the last weekend before my birthday—”

“Happy birthday,” he says, his voice deep and raspy. Sexy, but it doesn’t give me goose bumps like Lennon’s suggestive murmur as he talked about how he’d coax a woman to open her thighs…