Read Choose Me (The Me Novellas) for Free Online Page A

eyes.”
    I smiled. “Shut up.”
    He laughed. “I’m serious. You know I love your hair.”
    He grabbed my bag and wheeled it behind him as we made our way through the airport. Plenty of female heads turned as we walked, their gazes frank, assessing. He wore designer jeans and a fitted Western-style shirt that he’d probably picked up from Urban Outfitters. A pair of tan and brown Bapes completed his outfit. He was hip and beautiful and, to the untrained eye, a fine-looking heterosexual male.
    Except I knew better.
    “Where’s the rest of your stuff?” he asked. “What baggage claim are you at?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t have anything else.”
    Lance frowned at me. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
    “Like?”
    “Um, like your art .” I’d told him a quick version of why I was in town.
    “Oh,” I said, shaking my head. “No, they were shipped separately. They’re already at the gallery.”
    Yuri had made arrangements to have my pieces shipped the same day he’d made my airline reservation. Again, without asking.
    “Excellent.” Lance smiled. “So, we can go back to my place and then grab dinner?”
    “Sure.”
    I followed him through the walkway to the parking garage. He stopped in front of a shiny red Mini Cooper.
    “Nice car,” I said.
    “Right?” Lance said. He stowed my bag and hopped in the driver’s seat.
    “Alright,” he said as he navigated out of the parking garage. “You said you’d share details when you got here. You’re here. Share.”
    So I did. He drove out of the airport and onto a parkway that paralleled the river and I filled him in on what had happened over the last week. He’d known I had my own studio—we’d kept in touch sporadically via email and text—but he didn’t have details about the exhibit or why I was coming to DC, other than my half-hearted explanation that it was “for art.”
    “Wow,” he said, his eyes drifting from the road to me. He looked impressed. “Good for you, Meg.”
    I nodded. And then I told him about Yuri.
    “Oh my God.” His alarm was sincere. “Are you serious?”
    “Yep.”
    He let out a whistle as we crossed a low bridge into the city. The monuments were off to the right and it suddenly felt surreal to me, sitting in a Mini Cooper with a friend I hadn’t seen since high school, crossing the Potomac River into the Nation’s Capital, preparing for a prestigious art show. One week earlier, I’d been sweating bullets over the tiny show in Minneapolis. And now here I was, a thousand miles away … on multiple levels.
    “He sounds brazen,” Lance said. “Arrogant.”
    “He is.”
    He glanced at me. “Any chance he’s gay?”
    I laughed. “Um, I don’t really know.” Not if you asked Andy, I wanted to tell him. Andy was convinced Yuri had developed the hots for me during our five hours of minimal interaction at last weekend’s art show.
    “Hmm.” Lance hit his blinker, turning left on to a street bustling with cars and pedestrians. “We need to find out.”
    “Where are we?” I asked, scanning the scene in front of me. It reminded me of Uptown with the shops and restaurants but there were high rises mixed in, too.
    “Georgetown,” he told me. “It couldn’t be better, you know.”
    “What?”
    “The location. My place is three blocks from here. The gallery where the show is? It’s only six blocks up M. You can easily walk there.”
    “Oh.” I hadn’t known that. He’d said he lived nearby when I’d called and begged for a place to stay, but that’s as far as we’d gotten.
    “Not that I’ll let you,” he said.
    “Let me what?”
    “Walk. I plan to be your personal escort this weekend.”
    He pulled into the driveway of a tall building, a modern highrise with walls of windows, and followed the road as it wound its way to an underground parking garage.
    “You live here?”
    He nodded. “Isn’t it awesome? Just wait until you see the inside.”
    He waved a card in front of a sensor and the