iota of tension seeps out of me, like a fishing line being given some slack.
“Why?” he asks, a laugh hidden in the word. “Do you like dogs?”
Denise: divorced, dental hygienist, loves dogs. The alphabet dating game has a few necessary rules. Never bring them home. Don’t fall asleep. Stick to the story. “No,” I hear myself say. “I don’t like anything.”
“C’mere,” Chris murmurs, almost as though he can hear the warning bells clanging in my brain. He cups my face to kiss me and I try to calm down, will myself to focus. To do this. Mechanical, reliable. Get what I came for.
I press onto my toes and grip the sides of his flannel shirt to anchor myself. The fabric is soft under my fingertips, his chest firm beneath my knuckles. I open my mouth and kiss him harder, but he eases back, fingers curled into my hair, preventing me from following. He has his eyes open, watching, showing, and he kisses me again, slowly.
He doesn’t give a damn about midnight.
“I get it,” I mutter, twisting my head away.
“Get what?” he asks. His fingers find the hem of my hoodie and draw it up and off, tossing it onto the table. I’m wearing a black T-shirt underneath and now he slips his fingers into the waistband of my jeans and strokes back and forth over the skin above my panties.
I huff and try not to sound petulant. “What do you want?”
“The same thing you want, I think.”
“If you wanted what I wanted, you’d be naked.”
He laughs, tilting away from me. He doesn’t take his hand from my pants, and I feel his knuckles bump against my stomach. “You’re funny,” he says, wiping his other hand over his face.
“I’m serious.”
He’s still laughing. “I know.”
I pull off my T-shirt, and he goes quiet. Thank God for push-up bras.
“Give me what I want,” I say. I take his hand out of my pants and unzip my jeans, shoving them down to my ankles so I’m standing in a black bra and panties. His mouth opens a little bit. I know I’m not perfect. I’m too thin, too pale, too mean, too shadowed.
“Oh,” he says softly. Almost unconsciously, he begins to unbutton his shirt, letting it fall to the floor before tugging off his T-shirt. His socks and jeans follow suit, and then we’re both standing in our underwear.
He hooks a finger between my bra cups and tugs me in. I feel his other hand at my tailbone, tracing small circles there, dipping under my panties, but not far enough. Then those calloused fingers scrape ever-so-slowly up my back until they’re catching on the lace band of my bra. The hand in front slides over my throat to cup my face again, holding me in place for his kiss, but with his eyes now closed.
I relax and kiss him back. I feel the coarse skin of his palm on my spine and the scratch of his chest at my front, and I stand on my toes and put my arms around his neck and do what I came here to do.
“Your hair’s soft,” he murmurs, pulling back and staring at the strands he’s filtering through his fingers. “It’s pretty.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Thanks.”
“You’re pretty.”
There was a time those words mattered to me. It was before I saw my dad in a prison jumpsuit and I buried my brother next to my mother. It was before—
“What happened here?”
The hand at my back drops to my right leg, to the top of the bumpy pink scar that extends eight inches down the outside of my thigh.
“Car accident.” I don’t know if the truth is just easier to remember or simply harder to forget. I went to my brother’s funeral in a wheelchair. They pushed me over the damp grass at a rate so slow I could have crawled to the gravesite faster, but I know that’s what they wanted. They moved slowly so the press could take pictures, ask questions. Were you driving, Reese? There are doubts your brother was the driver. Did you choose the cliff on purpose, Reese? Why would you do that? He was only twenty-one, Reese.
“Looks painful,” Chris says. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
Most men just ignore it. A couple cringed, but most didn’t care. They were nice enough not to ask questions, and they didn’t touch. I’m over it. A broken femur is the least of my battle wounds.
While I recovered in the hospital they made me see a shrink. He told me