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“Is everything okay?” I asked, even though I could see that it wasn’t.
When Erica sat down with me again, she looked pissed off. “I’m sorry about that. I’m pretty sure you could hear the whole thing.”
I shook my head. “Only your side,” I admitted. I didn’t want to tell her that I hadn’t heard anything at all.
Erica seethed. She reached for the packet of biscuits we had opened and angrily ate two of them in succession. If she wasn’t so upset, I would have thought her outburst was cute. Everything about her intrigued me. But I wanted to make sure she was in a better mood. I wanted to take care of her.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
Erica shook her head. “I just get so upset with her sometimes,” she said anyway. “She had the key to my apartment. I’ve tried to get it back once or twice, but she’s holding onto it because it’s a part of my life she can still get into.”
“You can change the locks,” I suggested.
Erica chuckled. “Somehow, changing the locks on my mom seems a little ridiculous. It’s not that I mind her being in my life, I just hate that she’s trying to control me.”
“What did she do?” I asked.
“She went to my apartment, and now she’s upset that I’m not there.”
“And she doesn’t think that maybe you just need to get out?”
Erica shook her head. “She noticed my overnight bag was gone. She misses nothing. She called me now to tell me she thinks I’m with you.”
I didn’t respond to that. Erica’s mom wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t the point.
“I think you’re handling it right,” I said, instead. “Putting your foot down and insisting that it’s your life is the only way you can go about it.”
Erica nodded and hugged her knees to her chest. “It’s just not always as easy as it seems.”
I nodded. I knew how difficult it could be to reach out on your own. When I had started Loomis Industries, my parents hadn’t believed I could do it. They had thought Shane was a bad bet, and they had told me I was flushing the bit of savings I had down the drain. Now that I was successful, they had nothing to say to me. I knew all about breaking away from family. I only regretted that everything that had happened between Erica and me was causing her to break away from her family too. From what I could tell, she had grown up very close to her mother, and it had been the two of them against the world. Even though I understood that she needed to break away and be her own person, it seemed wrong that a relationship was being compromised because of the mistake we’d made.
As we had agreed, I didn’t apologize for it again, even though I wanted to. Instead, to erase everything we were worried about, I pulled Erica closer to me and kissed her. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to handle the situation considering where we were, but I couldn’t resist her any longer. The tension between us grew in no time at all, and I realized how close my desire was to the surface. Judging by the way Erica kissed me back, she felt exactly the same way.
Chapter 18
Erica
I wanted him. I always wanted him. No matter how many times we were together talking about trivial things, getting to know each other, when that little spark happened between us, it was like kerosene igniting and we had a roaring furnace instead.
It was incredible. I had never felt like this about anyone, and I wanted to explore what Brett and I had. After he had invited me to the hotel in Jersey, taking the chance to see me despite everything that had gone wrong, I was starting to think he felt a lot more for me than he had let on.
And I was okay with that.
When Brett kissed me, I forgot about everything that had gone wrong, and I focused only on the feeling between us. We were perfect together in so many ways. I wanted him to fuck me, but I didn’t want to do it here in the bed. I didn’t want to do what we had already done. We had gone out of our way for each other, and I wanted it to be different, to be special.
“Take a shower with me,” I said when I broke the kiss.
“Now?” Brett asked.
I nodded and sucked my lower lip into my mouth. I wasn’t asking him to shower with me because I wanted to clean up. In fact, I wanted to get down and dirty.
