Page 38 of Edged
“You’re such an arrogant piece of shit.”
I flipped the phone onto speaker and set it on the floor between my feet. My hands were sweaty and shaking, the adrenaline from the conversation nearly unbearable. Between my legs, my cock pushed a little too forcefully at the fly of my jeans and I had half a mind to rip it off myself for being such a traitor.
But this is what I’d wanted, wasn’t it?
This is what I knew would happen if I called him back.
Archer didn’t want to stay in touch to talk about paychecks and the weather, and if life had proved anything, it was that he sure as shit didn’t care about Mandy. There was no love lost between us. The days of our friendship were far in the past. The only thing between Archer and me was chemistry.
Scorching and all-consuming chemistry.
“You’re right.” Archer’s voice was softer then, like he’d realized we were both getting too riled up at the direction of the conversation. “I am arrogant, but I would send a plane for you, Owen, and I could get you off over the phone.”
I barked out a laugh that reverberated off the ancient wood beams that he and I had spent that one summer constructing. My laugh turned into our laugh, a daydream of what life with him used to be like before we crashed together in my basement and ruined it all.
“Tell me that you’ll come,” he whispered.
“I’m not having phone sex with you,” I said, the fight long gone.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
I swallowed, shaking my head even though he couldn’t see me.
“Goodbye, Archer.”
I leaned over and scooped my phone off the floor, poking the disconnect button before setting the device down on my lap. My heart was so loud I could hear it in my ears and my fingers drummed a staccato beat against my thigh, even though I wasn’t trying to move. My breathing hadn’t even returned to normal when my phone pinged with a text message.
I knew without looking what it was, but I checked the screen just the same to confirm.
The text from Archer was short and to the point, and attached to it was an itinerary with a flight that left Brixton tomorrow afternoon, non-stop to Los Angeles.
CHAPTER11
ARCHIE
Just because Icould charter a jet didn’t mean that I often chartered jets. And I realized, buckled into an oversized and dangerously comfortable leather seat, that the offer to Owen might have come off sounding a little ostentatious. Maybe it had been, but I wanted him to know I was serious about the invitation, that the things I said to him when we were together were honest and true.
My past with Owen wasn’t a good one, but having him back in my present narrowed everything down to a new perspective. Like our lives were a snow globe that his arrival in California had shaken up, and only then, thirty-seven thousand feet above the ground, had the flakes began to settle and fall.
“I’m still in love with him,”I’d finally admitted to Flynn, who pursed his lips and swallowed thickly, looking at me like I’d sprouted another head or five.
The confession felt like the truest words that had ever left my mouth, and I’d saida lotof things in my life that I’d meant in the moment. I’d told men they were the best fuck I’d ever had, and maybe when I was balls deep inside of them my brain had tricked me into thinking that, but I knew now it hadn’t been true.
Time had dulled the memory of how good it felt to bury myself in the tight heat of Owen’s body, and I was thankful for that. If my body and heart had remembered for even a millisecond how perfect and good and whole it had felt to be with him, I would’ve had to join the clergy because there’d have been no point in fucking anyone else for the whole of time if he wouldn’t have me.
Fortunately for me, the other thing time had done was show me the importance of being goal-oriented and focused. That was how I’d made my money, how I’d met my friends, and that was also how I was going to convince Owen to give me a second chance.
I hadn’t told Owen I was coming, just that I would send a plane for him, and I wasn’t sure how my presence would be received, but if he was coming to California to see me, tobewith me, even if temporarily, then it really couldn’t be a bad thing. At least, that’s what I hoped as the plane made a smooth landing on the runway and taxied over to the private hangar.
After the engines were powered off, I unbuckled and waited for the steward to open the door. Fresh air was always welcome, even if it was the humid East Coast air I’d fled from a decade before. The hangar was air conditioned, and I was getting ready to take a lap and check my messages when the messy tuft of Owen’s bleached hair caught my eye.
Tucked against the far wall of the hangar sat a cluster of black leather couches, and he sat on the edge of one, alone and nervous. His shoulders hunched, his lips were pulled into a tight line that looked like it wanted to be a frown even if it wasn’t sure how to make it the rest of the way down. But when my shoes hit the polished concrete floor and echoed around the empty space, his head snapped up and his posture and expression completely changed.
He didn’t want me to know he was uncomfortable, and that was fair because I wasn’t ready to show my hand either. I wanted Owen to think I had things under control, that I wasn’t drowning in my feelings for him after all this time. That would have been very uncool and not-put-together of me.
I watched him slowly, coolly, try to give off the air thathewas put together. He stood, shoulders and back straight, even with a bag slung over one shoulder. He shoved his hair out of his face, even though the blond curls fell right back toward his eye. The roots were a few inches long, dark like mine.
Dark like I remembered.
