Free Playing With Her Heart by Lauren Blakely

looked her up just for her. “Coaching is good,”
she continues. “I scaled back a bit when I got the part, but I’m
still working with a core group of women who are training for a
breast cancer awareness run to raise funds for research.”
    “That’s great.
Takes a lot of discipline to do that, to run every day. I imagine it
takes even more discipline to have run five marathons.”
    “Yes. I am immensely
disciplined,” she says and there’s something veiled in her
answer, so I can’t help but wonder what other areas she is equally
disciplined about. “In fact, I’ve learned all the lines already.”
    Oh, so that’s what
she meant. My mind was drifting off to tawdrier shores.
    She stops briefly on
the landing to the fourth floor. I stop, too. She turns and wheels on
me, and a look of frustration mingled with a hopeless sort of
desperation crosses her gorgeous face. “You can’t just do this.
You can’t keep coming in and out of my life,” she says, her voice
nearly breaking.
    I step closer to her,
worry pounding through me. “I’m sorry,” I say, but I don’t
know what I’ve done wrong. “Are you okay?”
    She smiles, the kind
you flash when you’ve pulled something off. “It’s from the
show. Act II, Scene Five. Near the end.”
    “Damn,” I breathe
out, shaking my head, and matching her grin. “You had me. You were
so convincing that it didn’t even occur to me you were giving me a
line. Because I know them all too.” Though I’m not an actor and
would never want to be one, I shift into Paolo seamlessly with one
tilt of the head, one cocky stare. “But I’m in your life. I’m
in it, Ava,” I say, emphatically. We’re no longer in the
stairwell. We’re in an art gallery, where this scene takes place
and Ava is angry with Paolo because he’s shown up when she didn’t
expect him.
    With every word crisply
enunciated, because Ava is through with all their ups and downs, she
commands, “Then be in it.”
    “I will if you’ll
stop pushing me out.” I step closer to her.
    “I never did that and
you know it,” she says, fixing me a tough stare, but she doesn’t
back away.
    I pause. Breathe. Let
go of the anger. “Ava, I can’t stand this fighting anymore.”
    She raises her eyebrows
playfully. “Let’s do something other than fight then.” Then,
her eyes soften. She reaches for my face with tentative fingers. “You
have something on your…”
    I frown, puzzled by the
words that don’t fit. “That’s not the next line. The next line
is I have something in mind —”
    She cuts me off. “No,
I was going to say you have a sesame seed right here.” She taps her
chin lightly to demonstrate.
    “Oh.” I swipe once
to wipe it off.
    “You missed,” she
says softly, and now we’re done with lines. It’s just us.
“Davis,” she adds, and it’s halfway to an invitation because
she’s talking to me now, not Paolo, and she’s still got
that seductive tone in her voice. I want to hear her say Davis in
other ways. I want her to say my name because she can’t not.
Because she’s reaching for me, and pulling me deeper, and because
I’m doing things to her that drive her so wild she says my name in
a breathless, fevered way.
    I want her to say my
name to ask for it, to plead for it, to beg for it.
    She sweeps her thumb
across my chin gently. I hitch in a breath as she touches me. “I
got it,” she whispers, flicking the errant sesame seed quickly to
the floor. I don’t know if she’s Jill or Ava anymore, but I don’t
care because now she’s running her thumb across my jawline, and the
barest touch from her makes me hard.
    “Did you find any
more?” I ask, in a low, hoarse voice.
    She shakes her head,
her hair moving with the slightest swoosh, enough that I catch a
faint scent of her pineapple shampoo that already is her scent
to me. The one that will always make me think of her. Now she’s
running her index finger across my lower lip, and that’s it. That’s
all I can