Necessary Restorations (The Walsh Series) (A) (5 page)

She frowned and looked out over the crowd. “You know when you’re young, like eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and everything seems so fucking important? Like you’re the center of the universe?”

I nodded. I spent those years acquainting myself with a significant quantity of pussy. My cock was the center of the universe then, and I couldn’t say much had changed since. “I think so.”

“So I went to New York City for college, to Juilliard—”

“You went to
Juilliard?
” I said. I studied her, watching as she rocked with the song blasting through the bar, and tried to meld the idea of a fiercely disciplined, world-class musician with the ballsy, boho chick in front of me.

Who exactly did I share that elevator with?

“Yeah, it’s not a big deal.” She waved the notion away as if to suggest anyone could wander into Juilliard. “Anyway . . . I met someone. A musical theatre nerd. A really gorgeous, attention-whoring musical theatre nerd who was being lured into more commercial settings. And in the infinite wisdom of nineteen-year-olds, we got married. Our parents went ballistic.”

She laughed, shaking her head while she continued studying the crowd, drained her martini, and then untied her hair.

“It was fun for a little while, but it was just pretend. A scene he wanted to act out. It wasn’t real,” she said. “None of it’s real when you’re nineteen. And then he cheated on me. Apparently, he cheated a lot. And since we were poor college kids, neither of us could afford to move out of our studio apartment. So . . . we lived together, separated. I learned very quickly that I wasn’t the center of the universe when I was sleeping on the sofa while my ex-husband fucked understudies.”

At some point we’d stopped having a frisky conversation about bedpost notches, and it’d turned true and heavy. I scratched the back of my neck, my eyes wide as I digested her story. “I have to tell you, Tiel, I did not expect the jaded divorcee story from you.”

“I’m not—”

“Oh, that was jaded,” I said. “You’re jaded, I’m jaded, we’re all really fucking jaded.”

I stared at her, studying her eyes, her mouth, her beaded chandelier earrings, the trio of amber necklaces around her throat, and then dropped my gaze to her chest. They truly were sensational tits.

“Ah, Samuel? Eyes up here, please.”

I dragged my gaze from her breasts to her lips, and lifted my brows. “Yeah, you’re not my type, but you have an incredible rack, and I’d like having those lips on my dick.”

It sounded like my usual bullshit, but it was possibly the most honest, unfiltered thing I’d said all day.

She snorted, spraying vodka from her mouth and nose, and shook her head. “You need to shut that shit down. I’m not giving you a blowjob. Stop thinking about it.”

I brushed the fluid from my shirt, but I’d been a sweaty, wrinkled mess for hours now. A little backwashed martini wasn’t changing that. My eyes moved back to her breasts while she mopped the liquid from her face. “I probably won’t, Sunshine.”

She plucked my drink from my fingers and placed it on the bar, and grabbed my hand. It wasn’t my style—no handshakes, no high-fives, not even fist bumps—but I let Tiel lace her fingers with mine anyway. I figured the adrenaline was still running high, and it was obscuring all my natural reactions. “Come on, perv. I want to dance.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I danced in a dingy bar, if ever. College was about reinventing myself, and I accomplished that with a full slate of frat parties and mixers masquerading as structured hook-up opportunities. After college, I replaced frat parties with Boston’s most exclusive club scenes, and on most nights, I couldn’t tell the two apart. It was all about shallow people trying to look good enough to fuck.

I didn’t spend time trading innuendos with easygoing girls who didn’t care how ridiculously enchanting they looked as they sang along. But here I was, watching as Tiel’s yellow skirt tangled around her legs while she twisted and bounced with the music, her arms high over her head, and I could almost taste her inhibitions melting away. She didn’t care whether her hair was disheveled or her mascara smudged, and it didn’t matter to her whether anyone was watching or judging.

The opening chords of the next song rang through the bar, and Tiel searched the crowded dance floor, her eyes lighting when they landed on me.

“What are you doing over there?” Tiel yelled, pulling me toward her. She wrapped her arm around my waist and smiled up at me. Shit, she was pretty. “You have to sing with me. This tune demands it.”

She was short—taller than Lauren and Shannon, but those two bordered on pocket-sized—and this angle gave me a priceless view down her shirt. It also meant that my cock was nestled against her belly, and her soft heat felt a little too magnificent for this situation.

Talking to her meant leaning down, moving further into her space, breathing in her sweet scent. As my nose brushed against her shoulder, I had the most overwhelming urge to lick her.

I’d never wanted to lick another human being in my life, and on most days, I wasn’t comfortable touching anything that I hadn’t personally sanitized.

But I really wanted to taste Tiel.

Instead, I brushed her hair away from her ear, dropped my hand to her waist, and asked, “What is this?”

“It’s Bleachers,” she said. “‘I Wanna Get Better.’”

Even as we leaned into each other, she continued moving, jumping with the beat. I followed her lead, and I tried to see what the world looked like from her eyes. She sang every word, her bright, happy eyes fixed on me while her expression morphed with the music as if she was telling me a secret story.

Some brittle, rough part of me spasmed, softening and rupturing by degrees as the words rang in my ears.

It was too much—this song, this day, this girl—and I wanted to surrender to all of it. Turn off the noise in my head, shut down the anxiety in my veins, and have one night free from my fucking issues.

But all that shit—it was the only thing I knew to be true. It was my filthy fucking security blanket, and I’d been dragging it around longer than I could remember. Somehow, somewhere in the haze of my masochistic workload and mindless fucking, that blanket turned into a gin-soaked noose, and it was tightening each day.

All I had to do was decide if I wanted to let it take me.

“You’re not too pretty to sing with me, Sam,” Tiel yelled. She scrunched her eyes shut, rocked her head with the rhythm, and tapped the drum beats against my back. If I hadn’t been so close, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish her voice from the sound thumping around us.

When the chorus rolled through, I yelled the words with Tiel, and as I stared at her, I believed them.

Warmth spread through my chest and I laughed out loud. I
did
want to get better. I wanted every night, every day, every last ounce of my life to feel like this moment.

The song ended too soon and she dragged me toward the door. Though I wasn’t ready for this night to end, I followed her to the alley.

“Hi,” she whispered, her hands flat on my chest.

City noises surrounded us, and though it was long past midnight, it was disgustingly humid and only slightly cooler.

“Hi.”

“We’re friends now, right? After a near-death experience, we have to be. We’ll tell stories about this for years,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“And sometimes friends kiss, right?”

Not understanding the meaning behind her words, I nodded like a fool. Tiel smiled, her hand shifting from my chest to wrap around the back of my neck. She urged me closer, and before any of this made sense to me, her lips were pressed to mine.

A moment of painful anxiety overtook me, and somehow I forced myself to focus on the way her body felt against mine, the taste of her mouth, the pressure of her tongue.

It was the first time I’d kissed a woman in five years. And there was so much more in my secret trove of nevers.

I didn’t kiss, I didn’t date, I didn’t touch under clothes, I didn’t let anyone touch me save for a particular appendage, I didn’t fuck in beds, and I didn’t undress.

Ever.

Ever.

Women liked to interpret it as my urgency to pull my cock out and get inside them, and it was good they invented that little story for themselves. Reality was less romantic.

Save for my siblings and medical professionals, no one had ever put eyes on my infusion set and it was safer that way. I couldn’t handle anyone else seeing it, being horrified by it. Technology had improved over the past twenty years and it was smaller now, less conspicuous and revolting, but there was no getting around the fact I was never free from invasive medical equipment. It was just another piece of me that was better off hidden.

Fully dressed, stand-up sex also came with the benefit of distance. There was no intimacy to be derived from exposing nothing more than the required pieces, and doing it somewhere as impersonal as a coatroom. That kind of sex never tricked my mind into thinking any of it mattered to me, or that I could matter to someone.

And yet it was staggering to realize that, for all my manwhoring and working my ass off to avoid legitimate human contact, I had been missing out on something as simple and wonderful and fleeting as this.

Then she leaned back, and it was over.

“I just had to kiss you,” she said with a shrug. “I couldn’t not.”

But I didn’t want it to be over.

“There’s a word for that. Basorexia. The uncontrollable urge to kiss,” I said.

Tiel laughed and brushed her thumb over my lips. “I guess I’m feeling a little basorexic.”

“Is that right?” She nodded, a shy smile teasing at the corner of her mouth. “Let me help you with that.”

My lips brushed against hers, tentative and in absolute fear of screwing up this one moment when everything—fucking
everything
—seemed to fall into perfect alignment. I was free and normal and alive, and even if it only lasted for right now, I didn’t want to lose one second of it.

“Just relax,” she murmured. “We’ve already survived all the terrible things that could happen, right?”

Her tongue slipped into my mouth, as easy and sweet as a summer day, and I wanted to believe her.

“OH, MOTHERFUCKING HELL,” I groaned. “I am too old for this shit.”

I was offended—deeply, personally offended—by the sunlight. The universe should have known I required some fog and clouds this morning. It also should have supplied a bucket of Gatorade and ibuprofen, and left both within arm’s reach.

“God help me, I cannot be responsible for my actions until I’ve had a bagel and a cappuccino.” I groaned again, hoping the sun understood my dissatisfaction, and then I realized two very important things.

First, I wasn’t in my bed.

Second, I wasn’t alone.

“Hello there,” I murmured.

“Why the fuck did we sleep on the floor?” Sam asked, his arms clutching my waist and his head resting on my belly. He looked up, surveying my apartment, and my bladder immediately rejoiced. He was groggy and disheveled, his eye a rainbow of bruises.

And he was shirtless.

Shirtless
and
tattooed.

Shirtless, tattooed, and wrapped around me like the best holiday garland ever invented.

“I think we had a little party,” I murmured, gesturing toward the furniture shoved against the walls and the four empty wine bottles on the kitchen countertop. “And then passed out down here.”

“That’s right,” he said. “They kicked us out of that shithole bar. I remember you saying it was too hot to dance in clothes anyway, and we had to get undressed.” He hooked a glance over his shoulder at his black boxers. “Apparently, I agreed with that idea.”

“And then we decided it was too hot to get off the floor.” I draped an arm over my face and moaned, then studied his tattoos again. “Apparently, you agreed with that, too.”

He seemed too well-bred for tattoos. Boys with fancy SUVs and gemstone cufflinks and watches that cost more than I earned in a year didn’t get tattoos.

Two doves rested on his shoulder blade, a circle filled with repeating shapes on the other, and an intricate Celtic cross rose from his waist. There were others, smaller ones, on his sides, and another peeking out from his boxers.