Page 23

One deep swig of my salted caramel mocha ice-blended coffee, and I almost felt like myself again. I finished my math homework in record time and moved on to English, then science, and lastly, history.
After that nightmare was over, I took out my second notebook and flipped it open. I read over my notes on screenwriting before opening up Final Draft on my laptop, a program my mother had recently bought me without her knowledge. (Funny, she did that a lot. Could she really blame me, though, when she didn’t pay enough attention to care what I did or didn’t do with her credit card? Nope. Not at all.)
So, technically, I didn’t know shit about screenwriting—yes—but as it turned out, the stories in my notebooks weren’t so far off from a typical screenplay. My goal by the end of the year? To flip a few of my favorites into some fully thought-out, genuine screenplays.
And then? I didn’t know. It just seemed like a fun thing to do, and a step in the right direction.
“What are you working on?” Neil’s words were a vise around my heart, strangling my heartbeats and scaring the absolute shit out of me.
“Jesus,” I breathed. I knew I’d come off slightly irritated, butChrist.Warn a bitch with a clearing of the throat first or something.
Neil winced as I looked up at him. Whether it was because of my obvious irritation—I won’t lie, I was more irritated with myself than anything—or if it was because I’d just spit out the wordJesuslike it was a filthy curse word, I wasn’t sure. It was entirely lost on me.
I sort of felt bad, though, so I backpedaled a step or three. “My bad. I didn’t expect you to be here tonight.”
“Oh, yeah.” He slid his hands into his front pockets, which left me no other option than to steal a glance at the space between them.
Okay. Wow.I dragged my eyes back up to his.
“I come in later on Mondays. After Bible study,” he explained, and I was clearly going straight to hell. Not that I hadn’t already known that, but lusting after Neil’s crotch as he talked about Bible study had to be a new level of sin I was currently waltzing myself into.
But…
Spoiler alert: there was a pretty impressive bulge happening between his legs right now. And my eyes had somehow become a foreign entity from my brain, traveling down for another look despite my inner dialogue screaming at them not to. They took a mini-vacation there… before I shut that shit down and closed my eyes.
Being attracted to Neil was proving to be all shades of messed up.
My thoughts started colliding together again as I sat there. The seemingly familiar traffic jam that kept happening in his presence, leaving my thoughts in splintered fragments.
I didn’t know what to do with them.
What I did know, though—in that moment of record-scratching clarity—was that I was over it. So over it. This was not me. Not even close. I didn’t falter in the face of a challenge, I didn’t lose sight of what I wanted, ever, and I never gave up.
Okay, that last one was a lie. But I sure as hell did notcower.Not to anyone. Who was this bullshit version of Olivia masquerading around as me?
“So what is it that you’re working on?” Neil asked again. He sat down across from me with a warm smile, and I decided right then and there to throw everything else out the proverbial window.
Just like that.
Becausethis. This was where I was hitting the reset button. On everything I thought I knew about love, and attraction, and lust, and relationships. On everything that lured me into idiotic bad boys and repelled me from the good ones like Neil. On everything I thoughtI knew about who Neil Summers was.
I didn’t see the harm in finding some of these things out for myself. And at the moment, he felt like a safe place to look.
A very safe place.
I blew out a breath and freed myself from the shackles of my own doubts and preconceived notions. I didn’t care if it was insane.
It certainly didn’tfeelinsane as I slid my notebook toward him and he picked it up in his hands, eyes skimming over my latest story. It felt harmless. Easy. Right.
I finished my coffee and hot Cheetos before he was done, and while patience was not my best virtue, I familiarized myself with it as Neil kept reading, eyes now carefully moving over my words. I noticed them brighten and darken, his mouth twitching at the corners few times, too, but I couldn’t decide what any of it meant.
And then he finished—finally—and looked over at me, slowly closing and sliding my notebook across the table and back over to me with an amused smile twisting his lips.
“Well?” I asked. I’d run out of patience, clearly. But my heart was beating way too fast in anticipation of his thoughts.
You don’t care what he thinks. You don’t care what he thinks,I lied to myself again and again.
“I think that only you, Liv, could make vampire nuns seem appealing. It’s really funny, though,” he said, and that wasnota relieved breath I’d just taken. Nope. Not at all. “What are you going to do with it?”