RICH & F*CKING (18+)

Chapter 7 - ADELINE

Chapter 7

Adeline

"attempting to find a distraction" 

*

Now that Adeline had admitted, both to herself and to Lucas, that she was attracted to him, she could finally combat the sexual frustration she had been feeling.

After she first went out with Oliver, which failed, she went out a couple more times in an attempt to find someone to distract her. But while Adeline chatted up heaps of guys and got a heap of numbers, she couldn't help comparing them to Lucas.

The men were attractive sure. Objectively, some might say they were even more attractive than Lucas. But there was something about Lucas that simply turned Adeline on, as if it were something beyond logic. Something purely animal.

She'd been very attracted to him online, but seeing Lucas in person, being around him every day...her attraction was magnified and made so much stronger...and so much worse.

She couldn't help it, Adeline told herself every time she felt like a bad friend to Selena. You can't help who you are attracted to - that's a fact. What mattered was your actions, and after her words to Lucas in the shower, they mostly avoided each other, only exchanging a few words when necessary.

Adeline should have been able to distract herself at the bars...but she couldn't.

"No one here good enough for you?" Oliver had asked once, taking a seat beside her, when Adeline had been drinking alone, ruminating over Lucas.

"It's not that," Adeline said. She smiled teasingly. "It's just that no one here is as good as you."

"How flattering," Oliver said, and ordered a whisky from the bartender.

"What about you?" Adeline said. "Why aren't you currently wrapped up in girls?"

"I realised I couldn't, not while you're here, looking sad."

"I'm not looking sad," Adeline argued. "I'm just...tired."

"Uh-huh." The whisky arrived, and Oliver gulped some down.

"And," Adeline added, "maybe a bit lonely."

Oliver nodded. "Selena having a boyfriend and all? I get that. Good thing we have each other."

Adeline smiled at him. "You're right. I'm glad you're here."

*

The days stretched out. Shopping, swimming, eating out at restaurants, partying late at night, sleeping in. One day, after a particularly long night, Adeline woke up at eleven o'clock. The house was silent. When she stepped out onto the balcony, she saw no one about.

Then Lucas entered her vision. He'd come up from the beach, and was wearing swimmers with a towel around his shoulders. He walked across the lawn, and Adeline, unconsciously, watched him.

Even the way he walked filled her with longing. He looked effortlessly confident.

Stop looking at him, she told herself. Don't admire him. He's an asshole remember? Rude and infuriating. A liar.

True, another voice in her head said, but if you were fucking him, you wouldn't have to talk to him. His irritating personality would be invisible in bed.

Flashes of what sleeping with him would be like flashed through Adeline's mind as her eyes followed him disappear into the house. The flashes grew and became fantasies that energised her, and without being aware of deciding it, Adeline was moving through the house, towards the ground floor.