Reckless (2 page)

“Oh, but I do. A guy like him has probably never seen cellulite and C-section scars in his life, and I’m quite positive the last person he wants to screw is some thirty-something ex-housewife slash single mom slash divorcee-with-baggage slash born-again-virgin.”

“Go back over there,” Saige insists, chin tucked into her chest and posture squared with mine.

“No.”

“Maren.”

“
No
,” I say, this time with more grit.

“You need this,” she says. “I know you. You’re going to leave here tonight and hole up in that big empty house of yours and be the devoted mother that you’ve always been. And that’s fine. But one of these days you’re going to wish you’d have gotten back out there when you had the chance.”

I glance away, soaking up her words and giving them a chance to resonate, but I’m still not feeling them. Maybe she has a point? But I’m dead certain this isn’t the guy for me.

“You’re hot,” she continues. “And you’re single. And you need to get laid just as much as the next person. I’m not sure where this lack of confidence thing is coming from, but I sure as hell know it’s not you.”

“It’s not that I’m not confident. I’m sensible,” I say. “You don’t try to sell a Lincoln to someone who’s shopping for a Lexus. It’s a waste of time and energy for both parties.”

Saige rolls her eyes. Hard. And makes a gagging noise in the back of her throat. “You’re killing me here.
Killing
me. You don’t get it.
At all
.”

“You’re forcing this on me,” I say, arms crossed.

Her jaw hangs. “Just last week you were complaining about how you wasted your twenties on bad sex with Nathan, were you not?”

I nod. It’s true. I said that.

Married fresh out of college at twenty-two and a mother at twenty-three and again at twenty-seven, my twenties were exhausting and exhilarating. When my sex life didn’t consist of missionary-in-the-dark-and-under-the-covers, it was basically non-existent.

“
And
you’ve been busting your ass at the gym for the last six months,” Saige adds, “because you said looking good was the best revenge.”

“It is.”

“But I guess all of that means nothing now.”

I know what she’s doing. She’s using a reverse psychology guilt trip cocktail on me. And it’s kind of working.

“We’re
baaaack
.” Tiffin places a tray of tequila shots and lime wedges and saltshakers in the center of our table. “Let’s do this, girls.”

“Y’all, I’m getting real, real sick of listening to these two bickering like a couple of old bitties,” Marissa says, grabbing a salt shaker.

“Agreed.” Gia glances at me, winking. “You two need to agree to disagree. Maren doesn’t want to screw the hot guy and there’s nothing Saige can do to change her mind. It’s Maren’s loss, and she’s okay with it. Right, Maren?”

“Right.” I grab a tequila shot and elbow Saige, handing it off to her. She knows I still love her, and I know she’s extremely frustrated with me right now.

“Besides, he’s gone now,” Lucia points toward the bar, toward the empty seat once occupied by one of the dreamiest men I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Saige’s shoulders fall and she yanks a salt shaker from Marissa, a silent symbol of defeat, and we all queue up our shots. The tequila goes down smooth and finishes with a slight burn, and as it settles in my blood, I’m enveloped in warmth and relaxation.

Taking my seat at the table, I settle in for an evening with my girls. My best friends. The ones who’ve been by my side through hell and back. Over the course of the hour that follows, we shove our faces with cake, exchange motherhood war stories, and complain about our husbands – current and ex.

Exhaustion sinks into my bones after a bit, a product of staying up late with Beck last night I’m sure, and I check the time on my phone during a lull in conversation.

“I don’t want to be the first but . . .” I slip my purse over my shoulder. “It’s getting late, so . . .”

Marissa checks her watch. “Oh, wow. It’s almost eleven. I told my husband I’d be home by ten. You know how he gets his tail up when I come home too late and wake him up.”

Saige swats us. “You guys are super lame, just so you know.”

“Call me tomorrow, okay?” I slide off my chair and wrap my arms around my best friend, kissing her cheek. “Thanks again for the party. I had fun, I swear.”

I tell the rest of the girls goodbye and head out, checking to see if the rain has died down yet, and I see that it’s beginning to dwindle. A row of cabs line the street, all proactively waiting to collect bar patrons and safely deliver them to their homes.

I waste no time hailing a ride home. Rattling off my address to the driver, I climb in and lean my cheek against the cool, rain-slicked glass of the rear passenger window. The chiseled, shadowed face of the suit at the bar comes to mind as we head to suburbia, and I can’t help but curiously wonder how tonight would’ve gone had I listened to Saige and not given a damn.

But it doesn’t matter now because I’ll never know.

* * *

I
kick
off my heels and let my sore feet sink into the plush carpet of my living room. My house is eerily calm tonight.

Nathan and I separated six months ago and share fifty-fifty custody, but alternating between a loud, wild household and pure, deafening silence every few days hasn’t been an easy transition for me. At least not yet. I miss my boys like crazy when they’re not here, but I know they look forward to their time with their father. I’d never take that from them, despite the fact that he’s a cheating liar of the douche bag variety. Plus, I couldn’t if I tried. Nathan’s blue-blooded, old-moneyed family pushed a pre-nup on me shortly after our engagement, and I, being young, naïve, and woefully in love, signed on the dotted line. Our fifty-fifty custody arrangement was in place before the first Greene baby was even conceived.

I take the phone from my purse and leave my bag and keys on the foyer table, the clink of metal on marble echoing through the first floor.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, I work the buttons of my blouse and unzip my pencil skirt, letting everything fall into a pile at my feet before sweeping them up and folding them neatly over the back of an arm chair when I make it to the corner of my bedroom.

A personalized notepad with my monogram rests on top of my pristinely organized dresser, between a gold wristwatch and a pair of rose quartz earrings laid side by side. My eyes are tired, but I click on a lamp and read tomorrow’s To Do list.

1. Personal trainer – 8 am.
   
2. Call Gerald to fix the broken back step. Cedar?
   
3. Fill out paperwork for temp agency – due Monday!
   
4. Make hair appointment. Wax too???
   
5. Call Aunt Margaret to wish her happy birthday. 62? Ask Mom.
   
6. Return sweater to Neiman’s. Find receipt!
   

Sliding the top drawer of my dresser, I retrieve a pair of matching satin pajamas, white with navy polka dots, and I head to the bathroom to wash up for bed. I mentally run through tomorrow’s to do list one more time, nodding to my reflection and agreeing with myself that I’m much too busy for casual sex with hot twenty-somethings anyway.

I finish up, click off the lamp on the dresser, grab my phone, and return to my bed, occupying the left side the way I have for years and leaving the right side perfectly made. Firing off a text to Saige, I thank her again and tell her not to stay out too late.

She replies with a devil-horned emoji.

Laughing in the dark, I don’t have the time or energy to decipher the code, so I darken my screen and slide my phone across my nightstand.

Buzz, buzz.

“Saige,” I groan. Yawning, I roll over and tuck my face into a pillow. If I ignore her, she’ll stop texting me after a bit.

Buzz, buzz.

“For the love of God.” I yank the phone back, eyes squinting at the brightness as I place it in front of my face and prepare to inform her I’m trying to get my beauty rest. I’ll also tell her she’d be wise to do the same seeing how she wants to tag along to my personal training session in the morning.

Two text messages fill my screen, attached to a Seattle area code and a number I’ve never seen before.

The first message reads, HI, MAREN. I’M DANTE.

The second, ARE YOU UP?

Heart racing, I sit up in my bed.

WHO ARE YOU? HOW DID YOU GET MY NUMBER? I fire back. I’m ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure Saige has something to do with this, but if this is the guy from the bar, he was long gone by the time I left.

I’m so confused.

Three dots bounce across the screen. If I was tired earlier, I’m wide awake now.

His message flashes across the screen a second later: CAN I CALL YOU?

D
ante

M
y phone rings
three seconds after I sent my last text. A slow smirk crawls across my face. Here I was worried about coming on too strong, but it turns out she wants this just as much as I do.

Clearing my throat, I answer with a deep and seductive, “Hello.”

An hour ago, some blonde chick approached me at the bar of my hotel, giving me some story about her “fabulously single” best friend who’d been eyeing me all night, and then she slipped me her friend’s number and told me I’d be wise not to lose it.

It just so happened her friend was the one I’d been watching all night. The dark-featured beauty with the elegant sway in her walk and the kind of aura that commanded a room full of suited-up business men.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Maren’s whispered yell fills my ear. “Do you know what time it is? And who just calls a random woman in the middle of the night? Saige put you up to this, didn’t she?”

My smile fades. “If Saige is the one with the crazy blonde hair, then yes. Saige gave me your number, but she didn’t put me up to this. I’m a grown man. I called you because I wanted to call you.”

I’m met with silence for a few endless seconds, and then she exhales. “Listen, I’m flattered. Dante, was it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m flattered, Dante, but you don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?” I stifle a chuckle to hide the amusement in my tone.

“You don’t have to pretend like you’re interested because my friend told you some pitiful story about me,” she says. “I’m not the mercy fuck type. Or the type to screw strangers. Or the type to sleep with men half my age.”

“You’re fifty-four?”

“What? No,” she answers without hesitation, and then she’s quiet again, like she’s calculating my age. “You’re twenty-seven?”

“I am.” I don’t ask her age. To me, it’s irrelevant. She’s a beautiful woman, ageless really. When I first saw her tonight it was dark, but her laugh was what captured me. That was the very first thing I noticed about her. She had this buoyant laugh that cracked through the dark bar like lightning, and a pretty smile almost too big for her face. Shiny, dark waves cascaded over narrow, feminine shoulders, and I found myself angling toward her most of the night, waiting for an opportunity to steal a glance again and again until I had to return to my hotel room to take a phone call.

“You’re still too young for me,” she says. “No offense.”

“Offense taken,” I scoff. “You sound ridiculous. You know that, right?”

“Ridiculous or realistic?” she shoots back. “You’re just a baby, Dante. You couldn’t handle me, I promise you that.”

“Try me,” I say, calling her bluff.

“Try you?” she laughs. “Trying you would entail screwing you, and it’s not that I don’t want to, I just don’t think it’d be a very good idea.”

“Why not?”

“It’d be extremely reckless, for one,” she says. “What if I’m a serial killer?”

“Are you a serial killer?” I ask.

“No. But what if
you’re
a serial killer?”

I laugh. “I’m
not
a serial killer.”

“I’m sure that’s what Ted Bundy said too,” Maren says.

“In Ted Bundy’s defense,” I string together four words I never thought I’d utter in all of my life, “I don’t think anyone ever asked him if he was a serial killer. You know, not when they were first getting friendly with him.”

“Oh, sweetheart, we’re not getting friendly,” Maren says. “This . . . this is not a friendly conversation. This . . . this is what happens when I’m trying to sleep and my phone is being blown up by some random guy in a suit from some bar who’s trying his hardest to get a piece before the clock strikes twelve and he has to report to some boring-ass business meeting in the morning and then fly back to Kansas City, Missouri where his fiancée waits in their luxury townhome.”

Blowing a sturdy breath between my lips, my shoulders slump. I pinch the bridge of my nose and clear my throat. “Maren, Maren, Maren.”

Her name feels good in my mouth, which is a weird thing to notice, but I like the way it sounds. I like how easily it rolls off my tongue.

“What?” she asks.

“Do you do this to everyone?”

“Do what?”

“I’ll admit, the backstory is imaginative if not a little cliché, but I can guarantee you you’re wrong on all accounts,” I say. “For one, I live here. In Seattle. I’m staying at Hotel Noir while my place is being renovated. And second, I don’t have a ‘boring-ass business meeting’ in the morning. I don’t schedule meetings on Fridays. It’s bad for morale. Last, I don’t have a fiancée waiting for me in Kansas City. I’m single. Certifiably. Happily.”

Maren is silent on the other end. “Okay, so I was wrong. Still doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“That’s too bad,” I say. “I had this whole thing pictured in my mind . . .”

She’s quiet. I can tell she wants to hear more but she’s too proud to ask.

“I thought maybe I could come over,” I continue. “And you’d greet me in the door in nothing more than a silk robe. Nothing underneath. I’d untie it, letting it slip off your bare shoulders as your back is pressed against a nearby wall, and then I’d kiss you. But it wouldn’t be one of those hasty, prelude-to-a-fuck type of kisses. I’d kiss you hard and then soft. I’d kiss you like I meant it. Fully present. In command. I’d kiss you the way a woman deserves to be kissed. And then my fingertips would graze your belly, going lower, and lower still, until it comes to the tender spot between your thighs, the spot silently pleading for a man’s touch. I’d run a finger between your wet slit, slipping deep inside you, waiting for that sigh . . . the one that tells me your knees are seconds from giving out and my name is seconds from becoming a breathless whisper on your lips.”

The other end is complete silence. Still. I’ve captured her full attention now.

“With my fingers buried deep inside you, my mouth would leave yours, traveling down your jaw, to your ear, then down your neck, stopping at the bend just above your collarbone. Your hips would grind against me, your body pleading for more, for the real thing. Your hand would reach for my belt, grazing across the front of my pants and feeling what you’ve done to me . . . feeling how hard I am for you . . .”

“Good god,” Maren breaks her silence, breathless.

“Not God,” I say. “Just a man in a suit from a bar that you want nothing to do with.”

With that, I hang up.

It’s not something I planned to do, and it’s certainly not something I put a lot of thought into. It just felt right in the moment. And the second the call ends, I taste a hint of regret on my tongue.

Sure, I could’ve stayed on. I could’ve finished the story and waited until she begged and pleaded for me to come over and give her the real thing, but never in my life have I had to work this hard to get a piece. And it’s late. And I’m tired.

Maren’s face flashes across my mind, along with all the things we could’ve done to each other. All of it fades into the distance. It’s a shame, really. We could’ve had a lot of fun together. And sure, it would’ve been reckless, but that’s exactly what I was in the mood for.

Reckless behavior.

Sex with no emotion.

No strings.

Zero expectations.

A little risk and a lot of fun. God knows I’ve been severely lacking in the fun department these last few years.

I darken my screen and push my phone across the nightstand, wishing more than anything that I could see the look on Maren’s face right now. It isn’t possible, so I imagine it instead. I imagine her full lips shaped like an ‘O’. I picture her dark eyes shimmering in the dark, her chest rising and falling as she struggles to catch her breath. And then I envision her body squirming and impatient, as if there’s an aching burn between her legs that could only be quelled with the real thing. The very
thing
she turned down. The very
thing
she made perfectly clear that she wanted nothing to do with. And then I visualize her slinking beneath her covers, her hand traveling south, her mind replaying my words and regretting hers.

Clicking off the light to my right, I climb under the high thread count sheets of my king-sized bed at the Hotel Noir and rest my head on a feather pillow, attempting to drift off to sleep on a cloud of sheer satisfaction.

I’m two seconds from passing out when my phone buzzes, scooting across the tabletop. Opening my eyes, I see the dim light from the screen illuminating the spot next to my alarm clock. Reaching out, I pull it closer to my face and wait for my eyes to adjust. Wearing a smirk, I read Maren’s text.