Quick Study - By Gretchen Galway Page 0,5

self-indulgent, sentimental slacker her mother always said she was.

Back to her laptop. “Really good with tongue. Breast man. Nice ass, and didn’t recoil when partner (i.e., myself) expressed moment of sexual dominance by grabbing—”

She exhaled loudly and quickly hit save. Maybe she’d start tomorrow with another guy, one from a bar, where no confusion or deceit could conceivably cloud the results of her experiment. Yes, that would be much better. This morning was a blip, an unexpected rough draft she’d delete from her brain. A trial run. Off the record.

Setting the laptop aside, the damp cups of her bra rubbed against her tender nipples and her body flooded with heat. Her body knew she was a liar. Bodies never forget a skilled touch.

“Damn,” Bonnie said, and went to the bathroom to strip off the bra and wash away as much of Uncle Paul as soap and scalding water could manage.

And resist the urge to release the pressure with her Water Pik. She needed as much carnal tension as possible to brave a shot at Man Two. Whoever he might be.

Chapter 3

Paul lasted two days before he had to ask his sister about her.

“But Jakey’s mom had to go out of town for her job,” Mary said over the phone one afternoon, distracted as usual by children screaming and laughing in the background. “She was begging with the teacher to take him every day for the rest of the week and her neighbor would watch him at night. From her building. A graduate student or something. But they needed somebody on Wednesdays to drop out so he could drop in, because they have licensing laws about class ratios—”

Paul was too busy feeling a rush of optimistic lust flooding his body to listen to the rest of it.

A neighbor.

Before his smart sister could figure out—or have time to grill him—why he’d asked about a woman at her son’s preschool, he abruptly ended the call and ran across his ornately tiled bathroom to shower a second time. And shave. With the good-smelling stuff. Ten minutes later, in a fresh shirt and jeans fresh from the dryer, Paul sent an email off to his team excusing himself for the rest of the day, then ran out the mud room door to his car parked under the porte cochere thing his real estate agent had creamed over.

Fingers on the wheel, he realized he couldn’t just rush over and start up where they’d left off. As much as he really, really wanted to. He’d thought of nothing else for two days, from the lurid daydreams reliving the slick heat of her body, then descending into obscene nightmares at night where she strapped him to a bed with bungee cords and tormented him until his balls were so blue he turned into a Smurf.

A neighbor. No wonder she hadn’t been ashamed. She had no reason to be.

He hadn’t given her a chance to explain.

She’d tried come off as fearless, but he remembered the flashes of shyness, which only made him want her more, now that he suspected she was just a helpful neighbor with nothing but her own, reasonable needs. And no husband or little kid to worry about.

Breaking several traffic laws, Paul drove down the secluded hills out of his neighborhood to the flat, concrete ugliness of hers. He parked outside the squat apartment building but didn’t get out of his car. What was he going to say? How would he get in to talk to her?

Checking his teeth in the mirror, his breath on his hand, then pressing his palm against the fly of his jeans, Paul reminded himself to find more about her this time before they took it too far.

He had to ring seven of the buttons at the front gate before he found hers.

“Hello?” she asked through the speaker—her voice, finally, distorted but recognizable.

His heart leaped. “Bonnie? It’s me. Paul. Can we talk?”

Silence. Then, “Who?”

He didn’t believe her. “We can go out for coffee. For real this time.”

The speaker crackled, then was quiet. Paul stood there, gazing at his own reflection in the glass of the entry door past the battered security gate, wondering if he was a handsome guy.

He thought he might be, but after spending the first thirty years of his life staring at a computer monitor snorting Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, peanut M ‘n’ M’s, and Gatorade, his self-image was that of a larger, paler, geekier version of himself. Paul 2.0 might look like hot shit, and his sister and