He wants me to stay in his hotel room with him. Would that be insane? I’m already hungry for every second I can get with him, but watching him like this makes me feel like a greedy monster, plotting how I can sneak behind the table and drag his chair behind the BBC-Netflix curtain to put my hands all over him.
Just as I have this thought, a voice rises up from beside me. “This trip is a novelty for him.”
I look over, surprised to find Yael standing not two feet away. “I’m sorry?”
“Alexander.” She lifts her chin, indicating the man himself now welcoming the first group of fans at the signing table. “This trip isn’t how things usually are,” she says. “The time he has with you?” She looks at me, brows raised as if I might not know what she means. “He doesn’t generally have time for relationships.”
I rarely go mentally blank, but right now I have no idea what I’m supposed to say to this. “I’m sure he’s really busy.”
“He is.” She pauses and then delivers her thesis: “I don’t want you to have expectations, Georgia.”
Still at a loss for words, I can only give her a little nod so that she knows I’ve heard her. Expectations? I don’t know what that means. He just invited me to stay in his hotel with him for the rest of his trip. Maybe her first conversation should be with him, not me.
Yael walks away, leaving me staring at Alec as he leans in to hear a teenage fan better. He ducks down to her level, making eye contact. I know exactly what she feels right now with those warm brown eyes fixed right on hers: that teenager feels like the only person in this entire room. But for me, the room spins. Alec invited me here. Asked me to stay with him in his suite, and his assistant is telling me I should leave him alone. Of course I want to be near him, but I also want to do what’s best for him.
“Am I supposed to pretend I didn’t hear that?” Eden asks from my other side.
“No.”
She sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Ouch.”
“I don’t think I’ve done anything to indicate that I think this is going anywhere.”
“I think,” Eden says, “that she’s trying to tell you she’s worried Alexander Kim wants it to go somewhere.”
Digesting this, I watch him accept a handmade gift from a fan. A handler tries to take it, to put it in a box, but Alec shakes his head, wanting it with him on the table. “He asked me to come stay at the hotel with him.”
“Seriously?”
I nod.
“Are you going to?”
“I want to, but I think that’s the equivalent of sticking a hot skewer in my own heart in nine days.”
“God, you are dramatic.”
I look at her. “You’d do it?”
“You know the answer to that. But I’d probably also take the job of Alexander Kim Belt Polisher if it was offered.”
I chew my lip, staring at the view of his long neck as he leans over the table to shake the hand of a fan in a wheelchair. I can so easily imagine his sweet, attentive expression, the deep pull of his dimples when he smiles and thanks her for coming.
But also I can imagine the sound he’ll make when he kicks off his shoes later. When he falls into satisfied exhaustion onto the sofa in his suite. I can imagine how he would pull me onto his lap and unleash a happy little growl into my neck.
Maybe we’d order room service for dinner. He’d offer me a bite of his food, nodding happily when he sees I like it. He would ask what I want to watch on TV. He would distract me anyway, with his hands and mouth. We’d give up and make love instead.
My brain shorts out at the phrase. Make love.
That isn’t what we’re doing, but even if it were… I want it. Even for just a handful of days, I want it.
OK, I text him from the Batphone, and try to ignore the way my stomach tightens when I imagine Yael’s reaction to the rest of it. I’ll stay in your suite.
Twelve
I knew it was coming today, but when Billy texts me at three thirty that my story is going up online in advance of the print edition in the morning, I am consumed with the jittery nausea I’ve only felt a handful of times before. I’m in an Uber, headed to the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills, with a key to room 1001 burning like a lit match in my pocket, and my first big story at the LA Times is going live in a half hour.
Alec will probably be at the signing for at least two more hours. I couldn’t follow all of the specifics—blue, green, and red wristbands, VIP fan packages—but when they took a break while switching wristband groups, he found me, pressed a key into my palm, and told me to head over whenever I wanted and he would meet me here later. For a handful of seconds, I thought about telling him that Yael wouldn’t be thrilled, that in Yael-speak she’d asked me to chill the fuck out, and that essentially moving in together is the opposite of chill. But he’s known her for nearly fifteen years. Without question, he’d already have to know where Yael landed with all of this.