“She said she loved me,” David confessed.
They both looked as confused as he’d felt for the last week. If he’d known that might happen, he would never have gone along with Lexi’s scheme to hook up. She had made a convincing argument. Instead of him romantically linking up with another actor on set in stereotypical Hollywood fashion, she would fulfill his sexual needs.
Lexi had sold it as a way to prevent any friction on the set if things went south. She’d reminded David of what happened in the romantic comedy he’d been in, Love Letters. The two leads, Halle James and Ben Cowley, had gotten interested in each other. Halle was one of David’s best friends, and he’d warned her that Ben was also dating Isabel Alexandra, the smoking-hot actress of Baywatch fame. It turned out that he was right and that Ben had never intended to leave Isabel. The results were not good when Halle had finally realized Ben wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had.
There were many other instances where such relationships had caused problems, so David had relented. It didn’t hurt that Lexi was his type: athletic with model-quality looks. He also knew that sex with her was more than satisfactory, and that was selling it short. Between the sheets, they clicked.
The final reason David had accepted was that Lexi and he had a history. When they’d first met, he’d been convinced she was the typical ‘mean girl.’ David had had numerous people who’d met her warn him to be careful. Even when David first hired Lexi, he’d been cautious.
Then she’d made it her mission to prove him wrong. They’d had a few rough patches, but all in all, she’d done an excellent job as his PA. David had come to think of Lexi as an integral part of his team. Sort of his Girl Friday, who just happened to be there for him in more ways than was probably appropriate.
When Lexi said she loved him after the last time they’d made love ... David had panicked. He was of two minds. David once had a girlfriend explain to him that if you said you loved someone within 24 hours of sex, it didn’t count. A good orgasm wasn’t much of a foundation for love, so it was possible she didn’t mean it.
There was another possibility, though, which was why he’d sent Lexi home: she really might have meant it. The honest-to-God truth was he’d never made the cognitive leap to even entertain the possibility. He’d instantly realized that if two people worked together as closely as they had, day in and day out, for seven months, feelings could develop.
What made him even more skittish around Lexi was yet a third possibility, something his Uncle John had explained to him. It concerned what was called ‘grooming,’ which was a process that was done in stages to tie a person to someone else. In its most insidious form, it was used by predators to lure underage children.
The stages include: targeting the victim, then building trust; filling a need or finding something missing in the target’s life and providing it; creating a ‘special’ relationship; introducing sex; and finally, reinforcing the connection. The same steps could be applied to dating, but the difference was the intent.
David could see that Lexi had accomplished each of those steps. If so many people hadn’t warned him about her, he would probably have never doubted her actions. In the back of his mind, though, he knew Lexi was smart enough to con him. David had already seen her fake-cry on demand to get her way.
If it had been anyone else, he’d have taken the declaration at face value. In the light of day, he’d connected the dots that they were about to wrap up filming, Lexi was going back to LA, and he would be going to college. Was her announcement of love a way to bind them closer together?
David had almost instantly decided that if he had those kinds of doubts, then he didn’t want her as a distraction on set. David still had work to do, and with her there, he would have been focused on trying to figure out if she really meant it or not, rather than on making a quality film.
The big question now was ... what if she did? What if she really loved him?
“That is an epic bad idea,” Tim said.
“Almost as bad as when you thought you could sleep with an entire women’s volleyball team,” Wolf reminded Tim.
That brought David out of his Lexi funk. A volleyball team had stayed at one of the hotels the guys had been at. The first night, Tim had gotten lucky and brought one home. His lucky streak had lasted three nights, with a different girl each night. There was a lot of alcohol involved, and sound judgment had gone out the window.
On the fourth night, each of the three girls figured out about the other two. Wolf had sent David a video of them going at each other in a pub. Tim made his next big mistake when he decided he should be the peacemaker.
The three girls’ focus had turned from each other to Tim. He’d ended up with a pitcher of beer on his head, several lumps, and a cut over his eye. Then the girls had thoroughly and loudly listed his shortcomings as a man for all to hear.
Back in their hotel room, after Wolf and David had done what they could for Tim’s bruises and abrasions, the guys had time to reflect on what happened. The three of them had concluded that if something like that ever occurred again, it was better to just leave.
“Why do you think I sent Lexi home? I don’t have time for girls right now.”
“Says the man who has a hot stripper waiting for him when he gets to school,” Tim rejoined.
David sometimes wondered why he had friends.
On their recruiting trip to Oklahoma, the university’s then-starting quarterback, Hayden Walsh, had been their guide, and he’d taken the three boys to a gentlemen’s club. They’d witnessed a live work of art named Tawny Greenwalt, aka Mercedes.
After the club, the group had gone to a party at Hayden’s apartment, and David had learned that the goddess lived upstairs from Hayden. Tawny and David had bailed on the party and had gone to her place to talk. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to spend some quality time with her; it was more that he’d found a friend. His best relationships had started that way. If something happened between them, he didn’t want it to be just a one-night stand.
“I haven’t really talked to her since that night,” David explained.
“But you’ll be looking her up,” Tim said.
“Yeah, I might,” David admitted.
“That’s my boy. Get Lexi out of your head. If she got her claws into you, we would never see you again,” Wolf predicted.
Lexi had said on more than one occasion that the two of them were terrible influences on David. He could see her putting her foot down if he came home with glitter on his face from some stripper’s boobs. It would, of course, be all their fault if that happened.
“So, are we set on the plan for today?” David asked to get them off of their Lexi rant.
“We might want to get Lexi back just to organize him,” Wolf teased.
David flipped him off.
“Sign our financial aid docs, get our class schedules, and then we go to our dorm room and see what it needs,” Tim listed off.
“I already know that we need a giant flat-screen TV,” Wolf said to make his priorities clear early.
Tim and David rolled their eyes because he’d been politicking for that for the last several weeks. They’d both come up with reasons why they didn’t want one. Of course, they were just pulling his leg.
“We’ll have to see if there’s room for one,” David said.
“I’m not sure we need the distraction,” Tim added.
Wolf gave them a determined look but let it go.
“Do we really have to have cameras in our unit?” Wolf asked.
“It’s either that, or my mom will insist that a security guy sleeps on the couch. Besides, there won’t be any in your bedrooms. Only I have to carry that burden,” David said.
The downside of fame and money was that a person having both had to protect themselves. On more than one occasion, David had been happy that there was always a camera on him, be it a bodycam or cameras where he lived. It helped eliminate he said/she said situations. More than one celebrity had been shaken down that way. The easiest method was to say that sex was nonconsensual after the fact. Nine times out of ten, people believed the accuser.