Free Crushing On The Billionaire (Part 1) by Lola Silverman Page B

wasn’t ten minutes and Shawn’s car rolled up to the curb. I had to laugh at him as I climbed into the passenger seat.
    “What, were you just cruising down the streets, hoping you’d find me in this big city?” I asked, shutting the door behind me and buckling the seatbelt.
    “I know how you get when you’re shooting, and you’re almost always shooting,” he said, grinning at me before pulling back out into traffic. “The rest of the world just drops away, and you wander from frame to frame.”
    “You know me pretty well,” I said, still testing the waters of our friendship. Everything seemed normal, right now, but when was reality—and its secrets and lies—going to rear its ugly head?
    “I do.” He made a couple of turns before I realized, with no small amount of dread, just where we were headed.
    “We’re going to the house?” I asked, my voice coming out in a squeak. “I thought you said you wanted to start working on the project.”
    “I do,” Shawn said, laughing. “And you should probably be taking photos of me right now. It’s the process.”
    I obeyed numbly, wondering if Patrick was going to be there. For the first time ever, I wished him away from the house. I hoped he had a meeting in Palo Alto or maybe on the moon. Anywhere, anywhere but the house. I didn’t think I could keep up my causal demeanor if Patrick was there. I reacted too much to him. Shawn would definitely take notice.
    “I just thought that, if we were going to be starting on the project, that we’d be at school, maybe,” I said, still trying to get us out of having to go to the house when I wasn’t sure what lay in wait there.
    “Why at school?”
    “Because it’s a school project,” I said lamely. “Because your studio’s at school. And your supplies. And we could ask some of the theater students if they’d be interested in modeling as a part of it, and I’d be shooting all of it. Because it’s the process.”
    “Well, at home I have a studio, too,” he said, pulling off the highway, passing by the bus stop I’d gotten off at when I’d ridden public transit out here with the unabashed goal of seducing his father. “I have supplies there, too, and we can write an advertisement to post on Facebook or something—maybe around campus—to see who’d be interested in modeling. You might be surprised that the people who reply aren’t all theater students. There are a lot of visual art students who understand how important it is to have a model for your work who’d do it. And we might get a wider variety of canvases that way.”
    I laughed in an effort to dispel some of my own tension. “It’s kind of creepy when you refer to people as canvases. Kind of on par with Hannibal Lecter.”
    “I’m painting on people, not eating them, Loren.”
    We pulled in and my anxiety exploded. Patrick’s car was in the driveway.
    “Your dad here today?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice light.
    “Maybe, I don’t know. You know he works from home a lot.”
    “Yeah.” I had to tell him. I was going to have to tell him. This wasn’t going well, and I was hiding an essential truth from him. My own pulse pounded in my ears, and I fought the urge to throw up. I didn’t have anything to throw up, which was a blessing in disguise. I hadn’t taken the time to eat while I’d been shooting this morning.
    I opened my mouth and closed it again as Shawn parked. I had to do this. It was the right thing to do. I felt sick with the truth inside, and sick at the thought of letting it outside, letting it be known. All I knew was that I was hiding something from my best friend, and it didn’t feel right or good.
    “Shawn, I have to tell you something,” I said, touching his knee softly. I didn’t care what Patrick might think about telling his son about us. There wasn’t a reason to hide. If what Patrick and I had was real, then we had every right to shout it from the rooftops. At least that’s what I kept telling myself,