Everlasting Bad Boys (29 page)

“Let’s walk along the river,” she suggested. “I need to clear my head.”

In a few short blocks they were by the Hudson. The usual ships and boats drifted by and there was even a kayaker, paddling in a steady rhythm that made her wish she was out on the water too, bobbing along.

They kept to the pedestrian part of the path, letting the bicyclists and rollerbladers whiz past. Justin shortened his long stride to match her pace, swinging the bag and looking her way. “So where do we go from here?” he said after a while.

“I have to fold laundry and feed Freddy and play with him a little. You can keep the food. I probably wouldn’t eat it.”

He frowned, not looking too thrilled at playing second fiddle to laundry and a geriatric cat. “Okay, Beth. If that’s how you want it.”

He seemed to be waiting for an invitation, which she couldn’t bring herself to give. “I guess that means I’m going home to the Bolt Building,” he finally said. “Alone.”

Beth nodded.

He stopped and looked directly into her eyes. She drew in her breath with a gasp. They were a fiery blue, fueled with emotion. “You don’t want to make that connection again, do you?”

“Not just yet,” she said after a beat. “Not until I know more. I have to be sure that I’m in control of what happens to me. Mortal or not, it’s the only body I have and I don’t want to lose it.”

The fire in his eyes died down some. “I think I understand. You mean no sex for right now. But you don’t mean never again.”

Beth breathed out a great big sigh of relief. “That’s right.”

“And we’re still going to work together and pal around and talk until one in the morning and stuff like that.”

“Well, yeah,” she said cautiously. “Unless that gets the light show going again.”

“It’s fine with me if you want to chill for a while. Although we could try just oral sex. Me doing you.”

“Do we have to have this conversation right here? Right now?”

“Let me know the second you want to have any kind of sex again.” Justin swung the bag dangerously high, looking really happy. “Then you have a deal.”

“Careful,” she said. “Your entrée is going to end up in the Hudson.”

He turned around in joyful circles, his arms outstretched, whirling and whirling. “I don’t care! It’s fish!”

“Yeah, but it’s filleted. It’ll never swim again,” Beth said and smiled awkwardly at a little old lady passing by on an honest-to-God giant tricycle. “He’s nice but he’s nuts,” she said to her.

“Enjoy it while you’re young, dear.” The old lady pedaled away, heading north.

“Stop it,” Beth hissed at Justin. “You’re so impulsive. Why are you so goddamned happy?”

He stopped whirling and enfolded her in his arms, giving her a huge hug. “Because you gave me a second chance. It may be a snowball’s chance in hell, but I’m taking it.”

Beth opened her mouth to argue and got herself a sensual kiss instead. She gave into it, half enjoying it and half wondering whether she was shimmering. The sensations racing through her one after another sure made it feel that way.

“Shtop it,” she said around his tongue.

He shook his head and kissed her harder, and she gave in. Justin was a fabulous kisser. She could always do a light check on herself afterward with a pocket mirror, just in case. They could probably still do this even if they didn’t have sex for a while.

His tenderness and his skill and his being so damn hot for her added up to a kiss that was just too good to stop.

A bicyclist whizzed by, bent way over his handlebars and so close they could hear his chain clicking, and Justin pulled her out of harm’s way, right up against him. He lifted his head, about to shout after the jerk when Beth spotted the old lady on the giant tricycle coming back.

“Don’t curse,” she said.

He heard Beth just in time to yell, “Eff you, you effing eff!” after the cyclist, who was long gone.

The old lady beamed at Justin as she approached, picking up speed. “That crazy asshole almost sideswiped me!” she shouted. “I’m going to run over his skinny butt if I can catch up with him!”

They watched her head south, pedaling madly, bent on vengeance.

“Go, granny, go,” Beth murmured. She looked up at Justin again. “Where were we?”

He bent his head to hers and got right back to kissing her.

“Ahhh.” Justin eventually came up for air but he wasn’t letting her get much. He was holding her very close. “I’m blissing out on you—your smell, your nearness, everything. I can’t get enough.”

“This
is
a public place,” she reminded him.

“But no one stops long enough to see anything.”

Beth laughed and pushed him away. “Let’s do something else. Walk. Jog. I don’t care.”

Justin thought for a minute. “Tell you what. How about we watch a basketball game that makes the Knicks look like ninety-eight-pound weaklings? And it’s free.”

“Okay. You’re on. Where?”

“West Fourth Street over in the Village. Not that much of a walk from here.”

“Fine.” She took the hand that wasn’t holding their bagged entrees and they headed that way. Then she stopped. “Hey, wait a minute. Is that where your friend Windham Devane plays basketball?”

“That’s right.”

“I remember you saying he was on the West Fourth Street team.”

Justin squeezed her hand in his. “He’s amazing. All the guys are.”

“Of course, Wind is the one who’s a little bit more than human,” she reminded him.

“He only uses his powers for good,” Justin said seriously.

Beth snorted. “What, have you been reading comic books out there in the stratosphere?”

“No. But I read some over a few shoulders when I was just pure light. It’s fun. I pick up stuff quickly.”

“Guess so.”

“Ask my genius buddy at MIT. The man knows how to mind-meld. I acquired the equivalent of a college education because of him in one night. It was a long night, but that’s all it took.”

“Uh-huh.” She looked up at Justin, who was humming under his breath. “I sense there’s more.”

“There is. It involved a bong and Wikipedia. He got high and figured out how to download the whole damn website into my brain.”

“Holy cow. No wonder you’re such a know-it-all, Justin.”

“I am not. I learn something new every day,” he said with a little-boy grin.

On his rugged face, it was heart-meltingly effective. Beth didn’t feel like arguing the point. It was just too peaceful to do anything but be together and be happy. The streets of the Village were relatively quiet, the old glassed-in restaurant fronts radiating a warm, golden glow onto the cobblestone parts.

She stopped to pet a dog sitting outside one, tied to the tree while he looked inside anxiously at his master, who was paying for an order of takeout.

“Be right there, Beau,” the man inside called to the dog.

Beau’s tail thumped in anticipation. She gave his ears a final fondle and strolled on with Justin. There were a few other couples out, hand in hand, just like them.

They went down Bleecker Street and walked past the guitar store, stopping to admire what was in the window. A steel guitar was front and center, hand-engraved with a wild profusion of vines and flowers.

“Look at that,” she breathed. “I’ve never seen a guitar like that in my life.”

“Want it?”

She leaned on his arm, looking at the glittering beauty of the instrument and laughing. “I can’t play a note. But thanks.”

“You could learn.”

“Not well enough to justify what that probably costs.”

Justin bent down, looking for a price tag. “Uh…twenty thousand dollars.”

“Yeah. Not for me.” She sighed appreciatively, gave it one more look, and tugged at his hand to get him to move on.

Bleecker Street still had the small shops that made New York so great, she thought wistfully. The big chains hadn’t taken over every single storefront. There were still grocers with fruit piled in neat pyramids on bright green racks, and still a couple of mom-and-pop stores. Okay, so what if mom and pop were selling flavored condoms? Small businesses had to do what they could.

Aglow with nostalgia, she got him to the intersection of Sixth and they dodged the onrushing taxis to cross the wide avenue, ignoring the blaring horns. A block or so up to the left were the West Fourth Street courts and she could hear a raucous game in progress even from here.

A crowd milled around the high chain-link fence, shouting and encouraging the players.

“There’s Wind,” Justin said.

Beth saw a tall, lanky black guy spring into the air and seem to hover there, the ball spinning on the tips of his fingers. He threw and the basketball went through the hoop in almost the same second.

Below it a bunch of shoving, screaming players tried to take control of it as the crowd roared. Someone she couldn’t see passed it to Wind, and he handled it as deftly as before, scoring another point.

They were close enough now to see the game. Great-looking but sweaty guys in headbands, baggy shorts, and loose tanks, all different heights and different colors, slammed into each other, playing with a fierce passion that their audience shared.

Eventually Wind detached himself from the crowd and went over to the corner of the fence to grab a Gatorade, exchanging high fives and more complicated handshakes along the way.

He uncapped it and literally poured a full bottle of liquid down his throat in one go, swallowing smoothly and evenly. Beth was fascinated. She had never actually gotten this close to an athlete, pro or amateur.

Wind licked his lips and looked straight at Justin for almost a minute without saying anything.

Justin didn’t look away. Beth realized that the blue of Justin’s eyes was intensifying, but it wasn’t because he was angry, just in challenge. A guy thing. A staredown.

Which Justin won. Wind burst out in a huge laugh that made her jump.

“A’most had you,” he said to Justin. The two of them exchanged a handshake of unbelievable complexity. She couldn’t follow the ins and outs of which hand was where. “Justin, Justin. My man. How ya been?”

“Better than ever.”

“Uh-huh. I can guess why. And who is this pretty lady?”

“This is Beth.” He looked down at her proudly and then back up at Windham. “Beth Danforth.”

“Nice to meet you, Beth. Is he—and I do mean Sunny Boy—treating you right?”

“Yeah, he really is,” she said with a grin. “He’s a great guy.” So was Wind, whom she liked instantly. He had the same enthusiasm that Justin did, but it was more like a cool breeze.

“A’ight.” Wind capped the bottle and slam-dunked it into a recycling bin. “Gotta get back in the game. See you two around.”

“If you’re lucky,” Justin joked.

“Nice to meet you,” Beth said, getting another uproarious laugh from Windham. She threw a what-did-I-do look at Justin, who only shrugged.

“Now that girl has good manners, Justin,” Wind said. “Unlike you. Me and the boys and I are taking up a collection to send you to charm school. Take off them rough edges you got.”

“Hey, just because I held on to the ball last time I played,” Justin began.

“Naw, you didn’t just hold on to it. Your hands were velcro’d on to that ball,” Wind said. “That’s not
po
-lite and you know it.”

“Okay, okay,” Justin laughed. “Next time I’m down here, we’ll play a rematch. I’ll be good.”

“We’ll see about that.” Wind gave Beth a smile and jumped back in the game. They watched for a while and then wandered down a side street looking for a coffee shop.

Two decaf flufferinos later, he walked her all the way back to the street off Hudson, waiting on the sidewalk while she climbed the stoop, looking for her keys.

“I’m not going to ask to come up,” he said.

Beth shot him a glance from where she was, feeling just a little disappointed. He could, though. They could talk and not have sex. Yeah, right, she told herself, letting her keys jingle on her finger while she looked at him more thoughtfully.

“Why not?” she asked him.

“Because I’ll want to make love. And you don’t want to.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, Justin. Oh, geez—I just need to figure all this out. How many times do I have to say it?”

“As many times as you like,” he said affably.

A guy walking by looked at her and Beth realized that she was swinging the key ring even harder. “It’s not what you think,” she said to him.

The guy caught Justin’s glare and mumbled, “I wasn’t thinking anything,” and hurried away.

Justin stayed down on the sidewalk and blew her a kiss.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

He stuck his big hands in his pockets and shrugged. “I haven’t decided. I might shoot some pool. Go to a bookstore. Maybe I’ll check out that charm school that Wind has in mind.”

“Is he for real?”

Justin laughed in a low voice. “He’s about as real as I am. Will that do?”

“I guess it’ll have to,” she said. “Okay. Well, good night, then. I had a really good time.”

“Me too.”

“See ya at SpectraSign.” She put the key in the downstairs lock and pushed the door open, her back to him.

“Wow,” she heard him say. “You have a great ass.”

Beth got inside and ducked her head out. “You keep working on that charm, Justin. Good night.”

He gave her a jaunty wave and headed off down the street, whistling. Beth watched him move from one pool of light under a streetlamp to another, until he came to a dark part of the street and stood still for a second. Then she thought he’d moved on…but she suddenly realized he’d made his own pool of light and was tying his shoe in it.

He really was one of a kind. Beth turned away and looked in the mailbox, seeing her weekly letter from her father behind the pierced brass grille.

A week or so later…

B
eth was the proud possessor of a vintage drafting table as beat-up as Justin’s. It was the same honey-colored pine but a little smaller.

He’d given her a state-of-the-art computer setup to translate her sketches into a multimedia presentation for the Blue Blaze people. She still wasn’t happy with the campaign. She uploaded a few images into Illustrator and fooled around with the male model, grafting a goat’s head onto his neck and then a kitten’s. The goat’s head looked pretty good, actually.

Beth was idly rotating the image when Justin walked in. “How’s it coming?”

“Not great.”

He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was behind him before he planted a kiss on her cheek. “That’s allowed, right? Just have to make sure I don’t forget how.”

“Ha ha,” she said glumly.

“Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you needed to get laid or something.”

“Oh, shut up.” He was right and that only made it worse.

“Okay. Let’s talk about—” he looked at the image of the male model on her screen—“him. Why is he upside down and where did the goat’s head come from?”

“Clip art,” she said absently. “He’s upside down because I just don’t like him.”

Justin nodded. “Me neither.”

“I know, I know. His abs are nicer than yours.”

Justin slapped his belly. “Not for long, though. I’ve been working out with Windham at the gym.”

“Yeah?” She gave him a wistful once-over. “You two are real men. This model is like a Ken doll. I hate the way he just stands there and stares into space.”

“Maybe he needs a swift kick in his Blue Blazes jeans,” Justin suggested. “He might not react, though.”

“That’s it.” She clicked on her mouse to rotate him the right way and removed the goat’s head.

“I seem to be missing the eureka moment. What are you talking about?”

“The model needs something to react to. Or someone.”

Justin nodded sagely, coming to stand beside her. “He isn’t the only one.”

“Justin, please. Not now. Soon, though,” she amended. “Do you think we can reshoot this?”

He gave a nonchalant wave. “And go $500,000 over budget? Sure. What the hell. Let’s go for broke. The client will scream, but who cares, right?”

“Be serious.”

“I could bring it up at the next storyboard meeting, I guess. But give me something visual to go on. Blue Blazes isn’t going to pay for a reshoot unless we make it crystal-clear that our new direction is a big improvement.”

Beth fiddled with various images, shrinking the model and bringing in a few sultry females from an image-bank folder. She did a quick-and-dirty collage and Justin nodded, concentrating on the screen.

“See what I mean? Even though I’m just slapping this together, he looks a lot more alive now.”

“You’re right.”

Beth felt excited about this campaign. “If you put the right woman in there, you’ll have a sign that will make everybody stop and stare. Men and women.”

“I see what you’re saying, but go on.”

“It’d be like a romantic movie. A hot romantic movie. And you could make it a little different every day, so people don’t know what to expect.”

“Got it. That’s great. We could post clips on YouTube and try to get it to go viral.”

“And we could track who was watching it online with Adzilla or Phorm. But the original sign in the Times Square location is key. You’d get repeat views. Traffic would come to a standstill.”

“Yeah. This is really good, Beth. I think our client is going to eat this up.”

Two days later, they were in the middle of a studio photo shoot that involved a rusty old pickup, a bale of hay, and amber waves of fake wheat, lightly stirred by a plastic fan.

The models actually did seem hot for each other, at least at first. They acted like there wasn’t even a camera on them. In fact, there were fourteen cameras in all, still and movie. He was really into her and their chemistry came across.

Hours and hours of footage were shot the first day, and hours more were shot on the second day. The models pouted and posed and panted at each other until they got sick of it.

“So much for their chemistry,” Justin whispered in Beth’s ear when a playful tussle turned into a vicious slapping match.

“Great stuff!” the director shouted. The female model burst into unphotogenic tears and stormed off, refusing to return. The director finally called it a day after a few more close-ups of the male model tensing his abs and unbuttoning his fly until he couldn’t take it any more and stormed off too.

“That’s a wrap,” the director said, like he’d planned it that way all along. The production assistants ran around, frantically breaking down the set and issuing orders to each other.

“Now what?” Beth said. She was exhausted. Her whole body was stiff and her mind echoed with the endlessly repeated dialogue. Making a movie, even a three-minute-long movie, was utterly unglamorous. All she wanted to do was to get out of there.

“Gil and the film editor shut themselves up in a dark room and make movie magic on a digital console. We’re not going to see them for days.”

“Thank God. I’m sick of looking at them. And everybody else on this set. Moviemaking is boring,” she said crossly.

“You’re just tired. Come on. I’ll take you out for a burger.”

“You’re on,” Beth said. “Fries and ketchup.”

“That’s my girl.”

“Maybe I am at that,” she said.

Justin looked at her curiously. “Would you mind telling me what’s gotten into you?”

She blew out an exasperated breath. “All this fake lust. It worked in reverse. At first I couldn’t take my eyes off them. And then I started watching you. And I wanted the real thing, even though you’re not really real. And then they started fighting and I thought about the way you make me feel—”

“Which is?”

She scowled at him. “Lighthearted. Happy.”

“So why are you making that face at me?”

“Because I really, really need to blow off steam. I want to get physical. Does that make sense?”

“No, but I can work with it.”

He looked around for someone from SpectraSign and realized they were the last two from his company there. He didn’t even have to make an excuse. They could just
go.
Then he hustled her out the door of the studio, into her coat and down to the street, where he hailed a cab.

“Where to?” the driver said as they got in.

“Just drive through Central Park, please. We’re still trying to figure that out.”

“Okay, boss. Whatever you say.” The driver started the meter and the red numbers started running.

“So you want to fool around,” Justin whispered. “You’re tired and frantic and you need release. That definitely calls for oral. Hmm. May I put my hand on your leg while I think about it?”

“Are you going to ask permission for every little thing?”

“No.”

“Good.” Beth wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him, rumpling his hair and half-crawling into his lap.

“Mrmmf. Yeah,” he said thickly. “More of that. I suggest we check into a hotel. Before you change your mind.”

She didn’t.

They got checked in and headed for the elevator, eyeing each other heatedly. Once inside the suite, he got her naked in record time and had her spread out on the squooshiest, most luxurious bed ever. But he didn’t take his clothes off. He didn’t waste a second. That long tongue of his got to work, licking her clit and gently pushing between her labia.

Holy…wow. She had never been tongue-fucked. The sensation was amazing. Tender and lingering. She could concentrate just on what she was feeling. Her nervous tension was eased away as he sexed her down like a pro. She could go with this flow forever. Oh yessss…yesyesyes.

Justin Watts was a master of this, too. She surrendered to his expertise, running her fingers through his hair, pushing his head down between her legs so he could make her come…and come…and come…

“That was unbelievably excellent,” she said when he had her cuddled up. She was still naked and he was still wearing every stitch of clothing he’d had on, but not shoes. “I can’t believe you’re still dressed.”

“Had no choice. I would have rammed up inside you right away,” he said. “No, this is fine for a while. It’s probably good for my character.”

“Oh, please.” She reached down and unzipped him. “Allow me to return the favor.”

And she did.