Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (25 page)

Three pictures load, not in the message screen, but on his blog.

The colors are warm; look warm to touch. I think, at first, it is because I am looking at sand dunes, then I realize it is the hollow between a man’s clavicle and his neck and the next is a smooth curve of muscle—a shoulder maybe. The last has another curve of skin, and the edge of a black-ink tattoo that looks like a fancy lowercase
f
.

Bits and pieces.

I’m not sure what to say. The pictures are gorgeous, erotic even, but I feel let down. I look at the pretty dips and shadows of his pictures, then the overexposed, raw composition of mine.

He’s curated himself, and the perspective is too close-up to see anything.

In my picture, it’s just me, tall and smiling and kind of naked.

Those aren’t pictures of you. Those are just pictures
.

Then I shut the lid of my laptop.

Tears burn in angry drips from my eyes—in the middle of my new resolution to say
yes
, here was somebody, something, that was a
no
.

I lost him, or he lost me.

I was ready to tell him he was beautiful, and he didn’t give me anything to look at.

I don’t have any patience for anyone who would keep me in the dark.

Not even myself.

I call Evan’s office first thing, and I’m told he’s out of the office. When I leave a message, to call me, the person on the phone tells me she’s sure he’d want to hear from me and asks if it’s okay if she passes on my message for him to call me personally.

For the first time, ever, it makes my heart race, sharp, painfully, to talk to him, but he tells me he’ll meet me for lunch.

It’s early, so I have to occupy myself until then, and since I’ve turned over a new snowflake, I decide to leave the house for the entire morning, before meeting Evan for lunch.

So I am crunching over the salted sidewalks in a little neighborhood between mine and campus where all the good shopping and eating is, and I am buying Christmas presents to send to friends, and to have ready for my mom when she comes on Christmas Day, and you can already feel the snow in the air, ready to fall.

It’s perfect, and finding a beaded curtain for my mom made with hundreds of teeny mirrors and
SOMEBODY IN OHIO LOVES ME
T-shirts for my friends and letterpress stationery for Melissa, who’s obsessed with all things handmade, makes my whole world feel a little bigger, in a not-scary way.

Plus, the day is sunny, the drifts of snow extrawhite where they pile up away from the street, and the city’s decorations are so pretty.

Then I find the coffee shop Bob recommended to me a million years ago, that I told Evan to meet me at, called Shelby’s House of Sprouts and it reminds me of home—equal parts caffeine and things organic and aggressively wholesome.

I pile all my shopping bags around my feet and sit down with a soup-bowl-sized mug of coffee and a scone as big as my head and all I am missing is a view of Puget Sound and my mom scribbling lines of poetry into her notebook.

“You found it,” says the voice at my table and then I remember, suddenly, that it wasn’t Bob who recommended this place to me.

Evan
recommended this place to me.

I look at him, and he’s holding a bag from the bookstore, and his coat, and a giant mug of coffee, and somehow, a plate with a sandwich.

I hadn’t even seen him come in—the only table free is blocked from the rest of the coffee shop by a divider of houseplants.

“Okay.” I sigh. “You can sit.”

He smiles. “That’s good,” he says. “Because you’re at my table.”

He sits, all arms and legs and that weird grace he has that has lately made me want to lick some part of him, any part of him.

“You’re not going to believe me, but I thought it was someone from my lab that had told me to check this place out.”

He arranged his sandwich plate and mug for what seemed like a long time before he looked up at me. “Actually, I do believe you.”

“Oh.” I watch him bite into a sandwich that looked like a Seattle shade garden between two pieces of bread. He watches me watch him while he chews. “Why do you believe me?”

“Why do I believe that you’d think that someplace you’d like to go was recommended to you by someone you trust?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah. But do you like this place?”

“I do.”

“I thought you might. It seems like something you’d find back home in Seattle.”

Why is he so nice? It makes it difficult to get him to do things that aren’t so nice. With my mind, I mean.

“I’m sorry, I am. Thank you for meeting me here.”

“You’re not going to believe me,” he says, “but it doesn’t bother me at all that you’d forget I recommended this place. We’ve had a long way around and I’m really glad you called.” He takes a big bite of his sandwich.

I watch him chewing, trying to figure out if this is one of his Yoda-like moments, where he means to preoccupy me with one thing and then I end up having an epiphany about another.

“Also,” he says, “I feel like I should apologize to you.”

“What for? No, not at all. Actually—”

“No, I just should have made it more clear, yesterday, when I came to see you, that I was actually completely unable to be your OT, and—”

“Right, no, that’s what I’m trying to say. I fucked that up. I can’t”—I look up at the pressed-tin ceiling, blushing, no doubt—“ask you to work with me, not like that, when the thing is that I like you. And you probably like me? But if not, it’s fine because—”

“Yes, it’s fine. That’s fine. That’s better than fine, Jenny.”

I look closely at him. He looks like he usually does, except he is wearing a zip-up hoodie, which is good, I can’t handle another one of his T-shirts, and his hair is possibly messier. He’s abandoned his lunch and brings his fist to his mouth while he looks back at me.

“The kissing thing?” I ask. “Is it—”

“More like, the wanting to do more than kissing thing. And yeah, that’s better than fine, too. More than it should have been.”

“Oh.”

“Yep.”

“We haven’t actually kissed, though.” I make myself keep looking at him, even though the
ohmyGod​ohmyGod​ohmyGod
part of my brain is sort of dialed to eleventy billion.

He looks at me in this really intense kind of way and then leans over, close. Everything is live, humming.

“No. We haven’t. We haven’t really kissed. My mouth’s only just touched. Here, and here.” He touches my forehead and temple with his thumb.

Ngh
.

“Did we,” I start, “take the other kind of kissing and stuff off the table? I mean, in a total sort of way?” My voice sounds really strange, and if he weren’t Evan, weren’t open, honest, didn’t look at me like that, like I’m just the best thing, it would be harder to look at him, meet his eyes.

“Kind of. I keep remembering what your hair smells like, though. I think I’m going to take it back.”

“Take what back?” The not kissing? Because, if he leans in a little more, I am in favor. I am in favor of that hair curling at his temple and that scruff on his neck. I am in favor of his lower lip, the chap on it from the cold air. “My apology. For wanting to do
more than kiss you.”

“You didn’t actually apologize.” I lean closer, and feel myself drop, helpless, into that force field that electrifies around a person you’re going to kiss.

“Then I’m not going to.”

“What about later?” I meet his eyes then, dead-on. My heart chokes and slows down, pushing and pushing the blood to my skin.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt this way, like I could let go, let my lower brain steer things for a while.

Let a man do anything he wanted, let him look at me however he’d like to, get all far gone and lost, a body against mine, rough hair, slick penetration.

One small adjustment of the fine focus of my life and there he is—blue eyes, hot skin.

“I’m worried about later,” his voice is lower, softer. “I have all these new reasons to worry about later, when it comes to us. There is probably a lot of apologizing to be done later.” Then he blows out a huge breath, like he doesn’t exactly want to be talking about any of this.

“Wait.” I pull back a little, just enough to think, but my voice stays low.

“Yeah?”

“This is completely stupid. I mean, I’m not stupid, I don’t think. I’m
fiercely intelligent
. That’s a true fact. Also, I get it. It’s not right for us to be not kissing and working on therapy plans together. Except, that now, I want to work on therapy plans and I also want to do all the not-kissing stuff that’s really just a lot of kissing.”

He smiles at me. “You make it sound pretty simple.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it is.” I don’t want to admit that, actually, it doesn’t feel precisely simple. I have been kind of a poor judge of simple, lately.

“I really want it to be simple,” he says, and looks worried. But then, he looks down for a moment, and when he looks at me again, he says, “You’re beautiful” in a voice that has dropped his wryness and is instead, just, I don’t know.

Boy
voice.

Boy you kind of like voice.

Low and scratchy, or something.

“Crazy-smart, too,” he says, almost against my mouth. “I could listen to you talk about your research all day. And sometimes, I can tell you know how to enjoy things, and
have fun, and sometimes, you kiss me at bus stops.”

I’m just watching him speak, how he’s not looking away or fidgeting, now. We’re just this girl and this boy, and our table is a little too private, and our knees are touching, and so are our hands, and our faces are close.

Then he says, “Say something, say something else,” but he smiles, like he knows this negotiation between us, before we do something more than almost kiss, is almost the best part.

“Will you get in trouble?” I can’t believe I just said that.

My question swoops through me, live.

It’s not what I meant to ask, exactly.

But as soon as I do, both of us lean in a little more.

He smiles, he’s so close I can imagine that smile against my mouth. “You should know I already talked to my supervisor about you. Before I even went to the lab with you, that day.”

“Oh.”

“Before we even did that exercise in the lobby.”

Oh
.

“I talked to her because I was pretty sure I was going to kiss you sooner rather than later.”

“That is”—I take a breath—“a really strange reaction to a difficult client.”

“It’s probably not the difficult-client part that got me thinking about kissing, exactly.” He puts his hand over mine on the table, and I feel it between my legs, over my thighs.

It starts to ache when he traces my knuckles. “Do you remember the day you came in with that huge strawberry milk shake?”

“It was a smoothie, and I think it was pomegranate.” I don’t even know if I’m speaking out loud, it’s all I can do not to let my eyes roll to the back of my head from all this delicious anticipation.

“There was like three gallons of whatever it was.”

“You would know, since all of it ended up in your lap.”

“You were using that giant cup to kind of gesture at me, while you yelled about night-vision goggles.”

“I don’t remember yelling, exactly.” I think I was kind of yelling.

I had just failed a test concerning my night blindness that put me in a more serious category for my diagnosis, and he had completely gone after using the night-vision glasses, which were awkward and pinchy and huge and I decided I would just never go anywhere in the dark, basically.

“You were yelling. And then the lid came off your drink, and then I was dripping with cold, pink goo.”

“Yeah. Not one of my finer moments.”

He strums over my knuckles and the lust is just bolting right through my middle, hard and sweet.

“Except, that it was. Because you went from yelling to helping, and laughing at yourself and you were even tearing pages out of this lab book from your bag to try to clean up the smoothie and it was like you didn’t even know where you were
rubbing
. I realized that even though this was serious, your pain and your diagnosis, you didn’t take yourself seriously. In the best way, I mean. There was this incredible, massive grief and you still drank giant pink smoothies and yelled and tried to be helpful and kind. Not like you were noble, just like”—he looked up to find the words—“you were the kind of person that was nice to have around, in this life, in this fucked-up life, in general. The kind of person that made everything mostly bearable.

“After that is when I talked to my supervisor.”

I smile, let myself enjoy really looking into his eyes. “I totally realized later that I had been rubbing lab graphs on your junk and it took three beers before I was over it”—I captured his finger with my thumb—“by the way.”

We sat like that, my thumb over his finger, looking down at our hands. Then his other hand is under my jaw, and he tips my face up to look at him.

His big hand at my cheek, his thumb under my jaw—God. I let myself blink slowly, to recover, to enjoy the lush high coming over me.

“I really want to kiss you,” he says.

None of the kisses in my experience have enjoyed so much premeditation, and I think all this talking about almost kisses and wanting to kiss someone has made everything completely unbearable, in a way that feels like nothing, nothing he could do to me could relieve the ache.

He’ll try and try and I’ll just ache
more
.

I can’t help looking at his mouth, which is in one of those almost smiles, but now
I can see the curve under his lower lip and the patch of bristles there and God, that would feel so amazing against my tongue if I just licked right over that lip, halfway into those bristles with one of those kisses that’s about tasting and trying not to bite and biting a little, anyway.

“I want to kiss you more, when you look like that,” he whispers.

“You have this great mouth,” my horniness says.

“You almost killed me in your lab locker room.”

“Yeah? Was it my clogs? The safety goggles?”