Afternoon Delight - By Mia Zachary Page 0,19
stepped outside her sensual cage, there would be no going back. Her safe little world would be irrevocably altered. And she wanted it to be. Rei lifted the phone and forced herself to dial before she lost her nerve. Right now she didn’t care if this was crazy.
Because, no matter what logic her mind tried to enforce, her body knew exactly what it wanted. And what could be more life affirming than making love?
CHRIS REACHED INSIDE the doorway of his loft in Oakland and flipped the switch. Simulated daylight filled every corner from one end of the 850-foot space to the other. He hated the early evening gloom of mid spring, the way the rains swept in from the Pacific as evening overtook the city.
The singer who’d left his heart in San Francisco had probably never spent April here.
Chris laid the pepperoni and bacon pizza on the breakfast bar as he passed the open kitchen and headed for his office to drop his briefcase. His oldest sister, Andrea, was an interior decorator. She liked to use his condo as a testing ground for new ideas and the result was a different design style in each section of his home. Right now his office area looked like the inside of a ship, all done in gleaming teak and brass.
And it was occupied.
“Hey, how’d you get in here?”
The fourteen-year-old boy sitting at his computer firing arrows and spells at the Uruk-hai advancing on Helm’s Deep didn’t take his eyes off the computer screen. “Hi, Uncle Chris. I, uh, caught a couple of Muni buses then walked the rest of the way.”
He arched his brow at the incomplete answer. “How’d you get into my apartment, smart guy?”
Gabriel finally looked at him, both pride and anxiety in his deep brown eyes. “I talked my way past the doorman with a sob story and then used an extra key.”
Chris decided not to bother asking when or how he’d gotten a key made. “Do your parents know where you are?”
With a sullen expression, Gabe turned back to the video game. “Like they care.”
“I’ll take that as a no.” He reached for the phone on the desk.
“Aw, come on, Uncle Chris—”
He spoke quietly, but firmly, in his best I’m-the-adult voice. “They need to know you’re okay.”
“Whatever.”
“I’ll let you share my pizza while you’re waiting for somebody to pick you up.”
“Whatever.” Gabe seemed to be concentrating on the game, but then he slid Chris a sideways glance as his stomach rumbled. “What kind of pizza?”
He reached down to tousle the kid’s dark-blond hair as his sister answered her cell phone. “Hi, Diana. How are you?”
“Busy. I just finished showing three houses and now I have to get across the city for a settlement. Is this important?”
Chris ignored the agitation in her voice. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking. Gabriel’s fine, too.”
“Gabriel?”
“Yeah, you know. Your son?”
The boy muttered darkly, the words too soft for him to make out, but things were blowing up all over the computer screen.
Diana didn’t have a sense of humor at the best of times, and right now he could hear her cursing the slow moving drivers around her. “I know who he is. What about him?”
“He’s here at my place.” The silence that followed told him that Di hadn’t even realized Gabe was missing. “I’m calling because I figured you’d be worried.”
“Thanks, Chris. Damn it, watch the road! Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to come across the bridge to get him. Can you call Michael? I’ve got to go.”
Gabriel avoided his eye as Chris set the phone down but the tension emanating from him was palpable. Suppressing a sigh and a whole lot of things he’d like to say about his sister, Chris dialed Mike’s number. He got a similar “I’ve got other things to do” attitude from his brother-in-law, who was still at the office, and so offered to drive Gabe home himself.
Chris laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, feeling the tight muscles beneath the Bay Academy school T-shirt and hurting for him without knowing how to make it better. “Why don’t you shut down the game and we’ll go eat.”
He led Gabe back to the kitchen, a large open space that resembled a particular Italian chain restaurant. It had a brick oven he’d never used, a forty-eight-inch programmable six-burner gas stove he didn’t know how to use and an empty deep freezer that he only used for bags of ice when he threw a party.
Chris grabbed a couple beers