Cocky Nerd Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Epilogue

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Olivia

  John

  Connect with Kayley

  Also by Kayley Loring

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. Olivia

  2. Olivia

  3. Olivia

  4. John

  5. Olivia

  6. John

  7. Olivia

  8. John

  9. John

  10. Olivia

  11. John

  12. Olivia

  13. John

  14. Olivia

  15. John

  16. Olivia

  17. John

  18. Olivia

  19. John

  20. Olivia

  21. John

  22. Olivia

  Epilogue

  Connect with Kayley

  Also by Kayley Loring

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Kayley Loring

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Kayley Loring

  Cover photo from iStock

  Created with Vellum

  Dedication

  For Alex, who will always be Hot Stuff to me,

  And for all the sexy nerds out there—keep on sexy nerdin’.

  Prologue

  JOHN – TWO YEARS AGO

  The music of Tchaikovsky has always quickened my blood, but right now it is contributing to the uncontrollable stiff one that is thankfully covered by the bouquet I hold in my lap. Not that anyone else would notice. The audience is too busy being captivated by the crescendo of the booming orchestra, the dreamy backlit gauzy scrim, and the members of the Pittsburgh Ballet who are flying through the air on stage before us, barefoot in leotards and stunning.

  I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve attended a professional ballet performance. I went to Olivia’s dance recital when she was twelve, but that was just girls in tutus and an old lady playing the piano in a warm studio. This is grand and breathtaking on every level. A modern choreography of a classical ballet—Swan Lake. Fascinating.

  Most of the eyes in this theater are no doubt trained on the prima ballerina, but mine are irrevocably fixed on Olivia. She is in the Corps de Ballet, an “apprentice” it says in the program, but surely I’m not the only one who can see that she is the most beautiful and riveting dancer of the entire company.

  She is poetry in motion and I’m a brain that happens to be attached to a body. For years, she has been the woman who invades my brain, reminding me that I have a body, a body that wants hers. Every line of logic has led me to the conclusion that we don’t belong together. Every memory of her curves, of the words from her lips, leads me back to the part of me that is wordless, free of thoughts. In that place I know that I will only ever feel whole if I’m with her.

  She doesn’t know I’m here. Her brother definitely doesn’t know I’m here. I didn’t know I would be here until six hours ago, but it’s one of the best spontaneous decisions I’ve ever made.

  Now I understand why she decided to devote her life to this.

  Now I understand that she’s brilliant.

  Now I know that I will do whatever I can to help her achieve her goals.

  I’m having a full-body shiver of acknowledgment and joy, like when I realized I actually understood Einstein’s mathematical equation for the theory of general relativity. Just like that elegant equation that describes space-time and how it’s related to matter and energy, this realization connects me to a moment in the future when she’s mine, to the moment in the past when I first admitted to myself that I was attracted to her, while also illuminating everything about my life that matters, the history and expansion of my universe, how and why things have evolved the way they have. Olivia is the sun, and without knowing it, she is telling me how to move.

  This is a moment that I’ll remember my whole life, like when I had the idea for my startup.

  One day I’ll look back on this moment when I realized that I’m going to marry my best friend’s little sister.

  We haven’t seen each other in nearly four years. She probably still thinks of me as an annoying geek. She’s probably in love with someone else. But one day. The gravitational pull goes both ways. Mine will only grow stronger.

  Once the applause and my private shameless physiological excitement has subsided, I wait for most of the audience to clear out of the building before taking the lavender bouquet to the interior door with a sign that says To Backstage. There is a polite young gay man with an iPad who’s asking people for their names and checking a list. I’m not on a list. He’ll have to talk to someone on his headset to ask her if it’s okay to send me back. I’ll have to wait around and make small talk with strangers. It may not be worth it.

  There’s a leather jacket-clad man in front of me who has long-ish sandy blonde hair. He smells like pot, synthetic musk and artsy-fartsy bullshit. He’s talking to his agent on his cell phone and I can see that he wears an engraved silver ring on his pinky finger. I hate him. He is holding a generic bouquet of red roses.

  He tells the man at the door that he’s going back to visit with several people that he knows, but the roses are for Olivia Montgomery. His name, he says, is Julian Bartlett.

  Who the fuck are you, Julian Bartlett?

  The door guy’s eyes light up. Christ, this guy must be somebody important in the ballet world. I guess that’s a thing.

  “Oh of course, Mr. Bartlett, I’m a huge fan of your work. Olivia’s expecting you.”

  Good luck with that, buddy. She thinks red roses are a cliché. Her brother would hate you, her entire family would hate you.

  “Mmm, those smell wonderful.” The door guy leans in to inhale my lavender bouquet. “Who are you here to see?”

  “Um. No one. Can you make sure that Olivia Montgomery gets these?”

  “Sure. Is there a card? Will she know who they’re from?”

  “No. She’ll have no idea. Just make sure she gets them.”

  This changes nothing. I’m only twenty-five. She’s only twenty-one. I’ll wait. I’ll use this time to work more. I’ll get richer. More established. I’ll get better at everything. I’ll get in better shape.

  I’ll get in better shape than that guy. He’s probably all skinny with ropey muscles. He probably shaves his whole body and yells out his own name when he comes. Julian. What a bullshit name.

  That guy’s nobody. He doesn’t matter. He’s just one of the guys she’s with before me. I’m the guy who knows her. I’m the man she marries. Eventually.

  I just hope I don’t fuck things up.

  1

  Olivia

  Committing to the life of a ballet dancer requires passion, discipline, perseverance, rigorous perfectionism, repetition, a high tolerance level of physical pain, the ability to work as part of a team, and balls-of-steel-confidence in the face of any kind of adversity. I’m happy to say that I possess all of these attributes, and they’ve served me well in all other areas of life too. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get annoyed occasionally every summer when I have to wait tables and it certainly doesn’t mean that I’m not immune to fantasizing about dropkicking my spoiled brat colleagues who’ve never had to supplement their dance company salaries during the off-season.

  I start my second season in the corps de ballet at the Bay Area Dance Company at the end of August. It’s July. The summer hiatus is a welcome
break for my body, but it’s a brutal blow to my bank account. San Francisco is approximately one million times more expensive than Pittsburgh, where I was an apprentice, and a gazillion times more expensive than Cleveland where I grew up. To make ends meet during the off-season I’ve been waitressing and doing modeling jobs here and there. The good news is that I work at a great restaurant, within walking distance of my apartment. The annoying news is that the last modeling job I had involved a creepy photographer with sticky hands, so I’m going to limit my modeling work and pick up more shifts at the restaurant. Which is why I’m working the lunch shift today, of all days, when Kennedy Sloane is here having lunch with her dear old daddy.

  Kennedy is in the corps with me, and is an adequate dancer (whose bony ass I can literally dance circles around), but she was featured in the festival of new works last season because her father made a major donation to the company. I’m not bitter. I’m in it to win it. I’ll get there eventually.

  Okay, I’m slightly bitter. This is an aspect of ballet and life that I’ve struggled to come to terms with, as there’s nothing I can really do to change my own circumstances other than being complacent in the face of it. It’s just hard to be complacent in front of the pointy face of Kennedy fucking Sloane. I love every other dancer at the company, but she is the epitome of a phony conceited bunhead snob.

  I got a text from one of my friends at the ballet and she wrote: OMG 911 Kennedy just instagrammed that she’s at your restaurant—pls tell me you aren’t working now!

  I sent her back a selfie of me in the kitchen, smiling like a crazy person, holding a giant knife up to my throat. A tad dramatic, but it got me an lmfao.

  At least she wasn’t seated in my section, so I don’t have to serve her, but as she passes by the bar where I’m waiting for an order, she does the most affected double-take I’ve ever seen and approaches me wide-eyed, as if she hadn’t spotted me when she entered the restaurant over an hour ago.

  “Olivia! Oh my God, hiiiii!” Three air kisses, blinking doe eyes, such baloney.

  “Hi Kennedy, good to see you.”

  “Oh my God—what are you doing here? You should come sit with us.”

  “Oh thanks, but I’m working right now.” Hence the black three pocket apron around my waist.

  “You mean a business lunch?”

  “No. I mean I’m working here as a waitress.”

  “Oh wow! Oh that’s great! It’s such a nice restaurant, you should be proud.”

  “Okay.”

  “Seriously—I just posted a picture on Instagram and my followers are all like: ‘LOVE that place!’ I should post a picture of us! My fans will love that! Our fans, I mean.”

  “I actually have to get back to serving my customers now, but it was so great to see you.”

  “Oh you too, sweetie. We should totally get together soon!” Three air kisses. “I’d introduce you to Daddy but we have to go pack for Paris. Such a rush—whirlwind trip.”

  “Aww. Next time, safe trip, buh-bye.”

  For most of the year, my muscles are sore all of the time. In the summer, it’s my ego that gets a bruising. I should be above all this. Waiting tables is a means to an end, and I’m lucky that in San Francisco it is a means to a surprisingly decent living. So—deep breath, inhale my good fortune, hold, exhale the toxic Kennedy fumes.

  It’s after two o’clock so things are starting to slow down a bit. After three deep breaths, I return to the moment and realize that half of the front of the house staff has gathered around the bar to peer out the window at a hot guy on the sidewalk out front. My buddy Franklin is a peculiar brand of gay hipster nerd, with his beard, bow ties, suspenders, tight vintage T-shirts and burnt orange leather shoes. We hate each other’s taste in music, art and fashion, but we have the exact same taste in men. He falls for straight men just as frequently as I fall for gays, although considering my vocation, it hasn’t happened as many times as you’d think.

  “Look at that jaw line,” Franklin mutters. “I would shave twice a day if I had a jaw like that.”

  Hot Guy, as he’s being referred to, is in profile as he’s talking on his cell phone outside. He is not an animated speaker, he’s very focused, almost definitely making a business call. Tailored navy blue pants that fit around his butt so perfectly, I want to applaud. I find myself sighing. My life has been filled with super tight leotard-clad male dancer buns, but catching sight of a cute guy’s butt on the street will always give me a mini-high.

  “That guy’s stubble is the sexiest thing about him,” says Tara the hostess. “That and his butt.”

  “Word,” I say.

  “He better come in here. It’s just mean to stand in front of a restaurant like that and then not come in.”

  “God, I bet he’s mean. I hope he comes in and insults me. I’d jizz in my pants and do a happy dance.” Franklin covers his mouth and gasps.

  “And I would pee in my pants from laughing so hard.”

  “You like it when guys are mean to you too, don’t deny it.”

  “I deny it and I resent it.”

  My day gets even better when I see Kennedy leave the restaurant with her father. She checks Hot Guy out as she passes by him, and pauses to look inside her purse, waiting for him to notice her. He doesn’t. He turns away from her. There’s so much to like about this fellow.

  He turns towards our window and notices the small crowd of us staring at him. We all immediately start talking to each other as if we’re having a staff meeting, then split up.

  I take a quick break to run to the ladies room.

  By the time I’m washing my hands, I hear Franklin right outside the door calling for me.

  “What?”

  “Do you know that guy?”

  “What guy?”

  He lowers his voice. “Jizz In My Pants Guy! Tara said he asked to be seated in your section. Ugh, he’s probably some ballerina hounder.”

  “Yeah, in my experience, they don’t really look like that.”

  “Go talk to him! Go! You lucky slut.”

  I take my time sauntering over to the man’s table. He looks to be several years older than me in age, and at least a decade older in maturity level. He’s still in profile as I approach. Tara has seated him by the window, at a table that gives her and the wait staff a good view of him, will likely cause surrounding diners to stay longer and order drinks and dessert so they can look at him, and will no doubt attract new customers from the street. She’s very good at her job.

  And this guy is very good at being handsome. His fairly short wavy hair is the color of my favorite faded black T-shirt, his eyes are heartthrob blue, and the sum of all his features are nothing short of electrifying in the sunlight.

  His eyes widen almost imperceptibly when he looks up at me, pupils dilated. He seems to catch his breath before a big toothy smile spreads across his face, transforming it. I am nearly blinded by his beautiful white teeth. I could stare at his face all day, I think. His eyes quickly travel down to my feet and back up again. I feel a slight tremor in my belly.

  And then he speaks…

  “Hey Tiny Dancer.”

  I stare at him, his smile that has turned into a smug grin. That cocky, cocky grin.

  “Johnny?”

  John Brandt, my brother’s best friend. I’ve been calling him Johnny B. Nerdballs since I was old enough to know that he and my brother were nerds. I was about five. They were nine.

  “You didn’t recognize me?”

  “You look…different.” I shift my stance, both feet flat on the ground, as if on some level I’m afraid of being knocked over. I don’t make a move to hug him, because I can’t think of one time we’ve ever hugged each other.

  “Yes, well. I finally started taking better care of myself.”

  Growing up, I saw his face almost as often as I saw my brother’s, but he looks so different. He’s not wearing glasses now, which is significant. Being able to look into his intensely inquisitive eyes straight-on is unnervi
ng, getting a full view of his cheek bones is disarming. Gone is the sallow skin, the dark circles, the layer of puffiness. He has the golden glow, toned skin and confident posture of the very rich. And he is—very rich. I don’t know the specifics, but he’s a tech founder and entrepreneur, very successful.

  My parents and brother have spoken of him and his success a great deal, whenever I visit them, but I’m so dance-obsessed I’ve never taken the time to look him up. I could tell you everything you need to know about Misty Copeland, but all I can say about Johnny is that he seems to have become exactly as awesome as he always believed he would, on a global scale. I was very happy to hear of his good fortune, but it never really occurred to me that we’d cross paths again, even though I knew he was based in Palo Alto. He wasn’t exactly supportive of my decision to become a professional dancer, so I suppose I wasn’t eager to get in touch.

  Seeing him now, I’m suddenly feeling homesick.

  Seeing him now, I’m realizing that I’ve missed him.

  “Wow, what’s it been? Five years?”

  “More than five years, yes.”

  “Right.” I haven’t seen him since he and my brother graduated from MIT. “It’s good to see you. How are you?”

  “I had dinner with your brother a week ago—did he tell you?”

  Did you always have such long thick eyelashes? “No. If he was in the Bay Area and didn’t see me I’ll kill him.” Nathan lives in Chicago, and claims to be allergic to the air in the West Coast.