She headed that way. The first door opened into a bathroom…with a shower room. Not a shower stall. A showerroom. Plus a soaking tub.
“I hate you, Mason,” she called over her shoulder. “Just for the record.”
Her apartment bathroom had what was supposed to be a shower stall but was more like a shower booth, without enough room to even turn around. It’d been over a year since she’d had a bath.
With a sigh, she shut the door to bathing nirvana and moved to the next one, opening it into what looked like a bedroom. She flicked on a light and…
And she was staring at a motorcycle. In the middle of a room bigger than her apartment bedroom. That was the only thing in there. His damned motorcycle.
“Hate you, Mason,” she called over her shoulder. “Hate. You.”
One more door, which had to be the bedroom. She flicked on the light to be sure. Yep, definitely the bedroom. It was twice the size of the motorcycle room and held a bed that had to be bigger than a king. The bed was unmade, crisp white sheets folded and crumpled, as if he’d just rolled out of them.
She scowled over her shoulder in Mason’s general direction. What the hell was he thinking, leaving his bed unmade like that? He could have a perfectly innocent houseguest, who’d only tried to help his drunk ass home, open this door, see that bed, and be powerless against the images rising from it, of Mason, sprawled naked—
She gave her head a quick shake.
Damn him. Someone had to teach the guy to make his bed. This just wasn’t playing fair.
She was joking—kind of—but she was pretty sure most womenwho saw this bed also got to see sprawled-naked Mason, so it wasn’t a tease. Just a preview of things to come.
Things that were not for the likes of Gemma.
There’d been a moment tonight, walking up to the restaurant, cameras flashing, Mason’s hand on her back, when she’d felt like his date. As if someone seeing those photos could believe she’d really been there with Mason Moretti, Gemma in her sexy dress and heels, her on-point makeup, and her hair just so.
Now she pictured Camille, and she could laugh at her delusion.
Her mind drifted, and the dimly lit bedroom swirled into a high school hall that smelled of Axe body spray and BO. Locker doors clanging. Someone whooping. Gemma striding to her locker, navigating upstream through the crowd.
A voice whispered as it passed, “Meet me behind the school.”
She looked up sharply to see Mason still moving, turning back to say, “I’ve got something to show you.”
She arched her brows at him, but he’d already disappeared, the flow dovetailing to carry him along, lest he strain himself with effort before the next game.
The “next game” would be field hockey finals tonight. It was only three days before exams. Only three days before high school passed into the rearview mirror of Gemma’s life.
And how did she feel about that?
She wasn’t one of those kids for whom high school would be the best years of her life. It hadn’t been the worst years either. For Gemma, high school simply existed. Much like grade school. Bigger and better things lay ahead, and she couldn’t wait to get to them, starting with her acceptance to UBC’s English program.
Gemma dreamed of an MFA, but from what she knew of theUBC program, they wouldn’t exactly welcome her genre of choice. Maybe she could tough it out and write CanLit for a year to glean whatever knowledge the professors could impart. Or maybe she’d skip the MFA and stick to a master’s in English, with a minor in creative writing. Then it would be on to her PhD and a career as an English prof writing romance on the side.
She swapped out her textbooks for the ones she needed to take home, and then she chatted with friends before heading to the rear doors. There was never any question ofnotmeeting Mason. While she felt perfectly fine telling him no—a social transgression that would put most of her classmates into a state of cardiac arrest—if she didn’t plan to meet him, she’d have said so. Gemma didn’t play games, and she was past the stage of thwarting Mason for the sake of proving she wasn’t one of his sycophants. He’d gotten that message months ago.
She headed out back to find him leaning against the wall, oh so casual. She rolled her eyes. Such a freaking poseur, even when she was the only one around to appreciate it.
“This is the second time a guy summoned me behind the school to show me something,” she said as she walked over. “The first time was in third grade.”
“Yeah, that was me, too.”
She laughed and shook her head. It took a moment for him to laugh, almost as if…
Wait. That hadn’t been Mason, had it?
In grade school, she’d been his reading buddy and they’d talked sometimes. A lot of times, if she thought about it, that memory faded as if by yet more edits. Yes, they’d talked quite a bit, at least until they reached the age where girls and boys started noticingeach other for different reasons. Someone—had it been Ashley?—had snarked at Gemma for “chasing” Mason—and even though it’d almost always been Mason seeking Gemma out, Gemma had started avoiding him, not wanting to be one of the many girls already fawning over him.
But back to third grade… There’d been a “kissing bug” going around at school, where kids were asking others behind the school and then kissing them.
