Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (38 page)

“Uh-huh?”

“I’m going to come embarrassingly fast.”

There was no phonetic equivalent for the sound he made then. All the vowel sounds had been forced out of it.

“But keep talking,” she instructed.

“Uh. I—” A rush of breath at his end, and she arched her back to press harder against her hand.

“Do you use your fist? Or rub?”

“Fist. Nora—”

“Do you think you could make yourself come really soon? Like, if I tell you when I’m about to—”

“Holy fuck, Nora, the hard part is
not
coming right fucking now.” It was a torrent of stuttered words and breath.

“I love it when you say ‘fuck,’ ” she said, and then she lost control of the sensation. Her orgasm slammed her like something gathering up her thighs and pussy and womb and chest and
brain
in its throbbing, pulsing, totally possessive grip, and she heard herself yelling, “Oh,
now
, Miles, now, now, now, now, ohhhhhhhh.”

All she could hear at the other end of the phone was his strangled cry, but she knew, and she could picture the ropy white strands of his cum spilling over his fist, his face in ecstatic anguish.

It was a long time before either of them spoke, long enough that she had time to worry
that he would be ashamed or regretful.

“It turns out that the kitchen is a very convenient place to be,” he said finally. “Paper towels, water, et cetera.”

She laughed, relief and release as fine and welcome as the orgasm had been. She felt … awake, alive, thoroughly drained of tension. “I hope you feel as good as I feel right now.”

“How do we measure that?”

“There should be some Richter-like scale for orgasms.”

“Out of ten?”

“Sure.”

“Nine. And I’m rounding down because I’m sure that if I’d been buried in you to the hilt, I would need some additional headroom on the scale. No pun intended.”

Coming had apparently relaxed him enough to make him downright gregarious in the dirty-talk department.
Buried in you to the hilt
. “Nine sounds about right.” Though it would be better if she could put her arms around him right now. Bury her face in his shirt. Rub against his thigh for these last few aftershocks.

Next time
.

Where had that thought come from, and what was she supposed to do with it? He lived in Cleveland. She lived in Boston. There was no easy way to have a
date
, no easy way to make there be a next time, or at least not a next time with cuddling and shared afterglow.

“So what are
you
doing this weekend? While I’m retiling my kitchen?” He sounded calm and contented and not at all eager to run away from her, and that made her feel better. He could be coming up with a thousand different excuses to cut the conversation short, now that he’d gotten his rocks off.

“Grading lab reports. Cleaning my apartment. Buying new running shoes.”

“It’s a full life.”

“I’ll go out Saturday night.”

“With?”

She loved, loved, loved the edge in his voice. “Are you jealous?”

Silence again. Had she gone too far?

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I am.”

Her heart pounded and she got hot all over, even her fingers and toes and knees and ears.
He was jealous.
Jealous
. He didn’t want her to be with someone else tomorrow night.

“I’ll probably go out with my friend Rachel.”

“Where do you go?”

“A bar, usually.”

Silence. Then, “Do you get picked up?”

“Sometimes.”

She heard him take a deep breath and she waited, but no words came from his end of the phone.

“If it helps, I’ve been on a remarkable number of really bad dates since I last saw you.”

“What made them so bad?”

They weren’t you
. “Oh, all kinds of things. Conversational voids, hygiene issues, epic lack of chemistry.”

“We don’t have those problems.”

She loved the low hum of his post-sex voice, close to her ear, intimate. “The hygiene issues are easier to avoid when you’re having phone sex,” she pointed out.

“True. But the conversational voids can be
really
grueling. In person would be better. So much better.”

Right then, laughing with him, she made a decision. A crazy, crazy decision.

Of course, you could also question the sanity of things she’d already done. She’d picked up a random guy at a New Year’s Eve party, danced dirty with him, kissed him at midnight, and allowed herself to feel all kinds of things that better sense should have forbidden. She’d stalked him on Facebook and Twitter, tracked him down, and then stalked him once again, to the intimacy of his own phone.

She’d had phone sex with him.

Yet what she was contemplating doing next was crazier than any of those things. Stalker-lady crazy. Big-money, big-gesture crazy. No-turning-back crazy.

But she was realizing something important.

She was
crazy
about him.

And in a twisted sort of illogical way, that caused all the other kinds of crazy to make sense.

In the early days after Deena’s departure, Miles had been too hurt and angry to do much of anything other than consult his lawyer, sulk, and drink too much. There were gaps on the bookshelves and in the CD and DVD racks where Deena’s belongings had been. Empty drawers where her knitting projects had lived. Squares and rectangles of lighter-colored paint on the walls where her paintings and posters had hung. He’d wallowed, too much, in those daily reminders of his right to be wounded and furious, and he’d indulged too much in those emotions.

But after New Year’s, something had shifted.

He’d watched Nora at that party. She’d never stopped moving, never seemed to lose her sense of direction. While he hovered at the edge, she dwelled thoroughly in the room, part of it. When he’d talked to her and kissed her, she’d invited him into her vibrancy and purpose somehow, made him feel as if he could take a few, uncertain steps forward, come unstuck. She’d made him believe he could stop fixating on empty spaces and absent objects. That he could touch the world again.

He’d flown back to Cleveland and he’d poured himself into projects. Purging and rearranging the book and media shelves to erase the evidence of Deena’s departure. Repainting walls and hanging new paintings and posters in the gaps. And then, step by step, working on neglected bits of the house. He’d paid to have the floor refinished, but he taught himself to do everything else. He replaced all the quarter-round trim along the new floors. He hung shelves in his study. He re-sided the front of the house. With each project, he saw Nora in his mind’s eye, her luminosity undiminished by the intervening months, like a beacon shining at him through a tunnel.

Sometimes he thought he might try to track her down, bring her out of his thoughts and into his life. But the thing that had stopped him was a fear that his darkness would diminish her brilliance. So he left her where she was, hovering in his mind as he gained a sense of mastery over not only wood and nails, anchors and the grumpy electric drill, but also his emotions. The anger subsided to a dull murmur, like the ocean on a calm night.

He could go on like this for a long time, tackling one project after another, fighting
entropy with his own sweat and effort. It was solitary work, but it was good work, and it made him forget how much he missed them. The people. His staff, the board members he’d scrapped with so many times, the children in the videos and on his trips around the country, the ones who thanked him for bringing breakfast to their schools
and
the ones who blithely informed him that they’d been happier with peanut butter crackers and soda and could take or leave his stupid nutritious lunches.

He’d never wanted gratitude. He wanted them fed.

None of those people—not his staff, not the board members, not the children—could look him in the eye. You had no idea how much you took people’s faith for granted until it was removed. Someday, perhaps, it would be restored, but in the meantime?

There was comfort in brick and hardwood, in plaster and tile, in its blank regard. You couldn’t betray it, and it couldn’t betray you.

This weekend, as he had told Nora, he was going to retile the kitchen, and his first step would be to confront the heavy orange-yellow hardback edition of
Better Homes and Gardens New Complete Guide to Home Repair & Improvement
, which he’d left on the kitchen counter yesterday afternoon.

The paper-towel holder was still sitting where he’d set it last night after the sound of Nora yelling “Now!” over and over had made him spurt all over his fist and the kitchen floor. There was doubtless a specific biblical prohibition against coming on the kitchen floor, or maybe it was okay as long as you sacrificed something afterward and buried the paper towel in the backyard according to rules laid out in Leviticus.

The whole thing had happened so quickly, from the moment the unknown number had first popped up on his screen a week ago and he’d thought,
Boston. What are the odds?
, to the moment he’d finally laid the phone down late last night. The emotions had come like a chain of cigarettes smoked: Unexpected relief when he’d heard her voice on the other end of the phone the first time.
Oh, shit
, when he remembered why he’d thought it would be a bad idea for them to follow up on their brief New Year’s Eve contact. Pressure in his chest every time they talked, all the words he’d wanted to say to her, and fear, all the things he hadn’t wanted to talk about. A thrill when their conversation last night had turned sexual, and a buildup of pleasure so fast and hard he couldn’t believe it had happened without the visual or tactile reality of her. Release and peace, their murmured, half-whispered conversation about nothing and everything, a susurrus of
Nora until he’d fallen asleep with the phone in his hand. And the sense of peace still with him this morning, even though he should worry that he’d let things get so out of hand, that he’d let her in so far and built her expectations up so high.

Where did things go from here?

He’d have to tell her the truth the next time they talked.
I’m the prime suspect in an embezzlement investigation, and with the way things appear to be going right now, I’m going to be charged before Christmas
.

Oh, well, then, by all means, let’s take this thing to the next level!

No, that was not the response he imagined from her. More like that same look of suspicion Deena had worn on her face. And he wasn’t sure he could bear to see it on Nora’s.

You won’t have to see her face if you tell her on the phone
.

Coward
.

He consulted the index and turned to page 42, where he was instructed about how to choose and buy ceramic tile. Graph paper. Right. He had some somewhere—

The doorbell rang.

What are the odds?

The words filled his mind before he had a chance to imagine something more likely. Cub Scouts selling popcorn, Girl Scouts selling cookies, student athletes selling gift cards. Environmentalists, politicians, Mormons.

Nora.

He hadn’t showered or looked in the mirror this morning. He’d pulled on another pair of jeans and a different long-sleeved T and come downstairs, probably with his hair in disarray, to confront the book as early as possible so he could get to Home Depot or Ace Hardware and get this show on the road.

No time for vanity now. Besides, the Cub Scouts didn’t care.

He pulled open the heavy front door—restoring its frame was on his list of to-do items, too—and found her there, messenger bag slung across her shoulder. Pixie hair, freckles, pale-blue eyes full of uncertainty, teeth worrying her lower lip.

He stood for a moment, staring, because even though he should have been surprised, he’d known it would be her.

She shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. She wore jeans and a pretty top, a deep
blue that made her eyes even bluer, with a soft neckline that draped like a scarf, exposing just enough of the curve of her breasts to make his mouth water.

“Did you
fly
here?”

She nodded. “Owen gave me the address.”

“Wow.”

“Are you mad?”

“I’m …”

“Speechless?”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“It seemed like a good idea last night when I bought the tickets,” she confessed. “But I’ve been getting steadily more and more nervous as I’ve gotten closer, and, honestly, if you kicked me out because I’m a crazy stalker I
totally
wouldn’t blame you. I mean, I’d be bummed because I came a long—”

He took her face in his hands and kissed her. Just once at first, to shut her up, and she gulped air and blinked at him in surprise, but then she grabbed him, too, threading her fingers into his hair and kissing back. It was reunion kissing, which maybe was the best kind: kissing someone you’d been familiar with a long time ago but had forgotten about, reaquainting yourself with exactly how they fit and how well they knew you and how perfectly your lips slid and nipped and clung.

She did this thing with her tongue that made him want to bite her. She kind of teased it in and stole it back, and it made him insane, hungry, and somehow his hands were all these places on her body that he hadn’t meant to put them yet—on her ass, yanking her up so he could mold her body against his, on her breasts, cupping and shaping and teasing over the hard nub of her nipple until she whimpered.

“We’re on my front stoop,” Miles said inanely, on a par with, “I’m standing in my kitchen,” as if geography were the only thing on his mind at moments like these. In some sense, it was: the terrain of her mouth, the landscape of her under his hands, and all that goddamned unexplored territory, which he would claim
just as soon as he got her off his front stoop
.

He maneuvered her around the door and shut it behind her, lifted her messenger bag over her head, and deposited it on the floor next to her. He had grand plans of carrying her to some softer surface, but his brain didn’t seem to be in charge. Nor was it capable of any higher-order
thinking at all, nothing civilized. The animal ruled, the beast that lifted and pressed her against the front door so she could wrap her legs around his waist and he could press his erection between her thighs. She whimpered into his mouth and wriggled against him with so much conviction that he had to break off the kiss and instruct her, “Hold
still
.”