Chapter Two
Never a dull moment with you guys,” Billy Barton says, hailing a cab on Bowery. It’s midnight, and it seems the entire city is out and about. The taxis are scarce, but Mallory doesn’t mind walking a few blocks. She’s still high on adrenaline.
“Getting less dull by the minute,” Alec says. She can’t tell from his tone if he’s happy about the evening’s turn of events or not. He’s barely said a word since that woman pulled her onstage, but with Billy Barton monopolizing the conversation, it’s hard to read too much into that.
“True that,” Billy says. Ugh, he annoys the hell out of her.
She hates his foppish clothes and the way he talks down to waiters.
She hates that he signs Alec’s paycheck, and that he knows so much more about New York City than she ever will.
Billy Barton is one of those native New Yorkers who believes he’s just a breed apart.
And she hates that he’s tagging along on her birthday.
“Do you two want to join me? I’m meeting some folks at the Standard. Might be some decent connections for you, Alec.”
Mallory looks at Alec, and to her relief, he doesn’t hesitate before saying, “Another time.”
“Well then, happy birthday, love,” he says to her, kissing her on the cheek. “I can’t believe I almost got to see you in your birthday suit.”
Alone, finally, Mallory and Alec walk silently to the corner. He pulls her to him.
“So, birthday girl. That was quite a show.”
“Yeah, it was … interesting.”
“I meant your show.”
“Oh … that. Are you mad?”
“Why would I be mad?”
“I don’t know. Making a spectacle of myself ?” She shakes her head. Now, back to real life, out of the fantasy bubble of the club, she’s a little embarrassed.
“Mal, you went with it. That took nerve. To be honest, it was hot.”
“Really?”
“Yes! What else would it be to me? My god, any guy would kill to see his girlfriend up there like that. The only thing that would be better would be if we got her back to our apartment for a private show.”
“Alec.” Not that again.
“What? I told you I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Do you have to bring it up on my birthday? And I don’t need to hear about the specific women you have in mind.”
He stops and pulls her close to him, kissing her. His touch, the feel of his lips, the smell of him, cuts right through the noise in her head. That’s all it takes for her to be on fire.
“You’re the only woman I have in mind. And speaking of, I was going to take you out for dessert somewhere and toast your birthday over champagne but, honestly, all I want is to be alone with you. Is that okay?”
Mallory nods. There’s nothing in the world she prefers over being intimate with him. Nothing compares to the feeling of walking into the bedroom, knowing he’s going to touch her. Knowing how he’ll touch her.
“Of course it’s okay.”
He hails a cab.
As soon as they’re in the back seat on their way uptown, he takes off his seat belt and moves closer to her.
She resists the urge to chastise him about the seat belt; her friend Julie’s boyfriend is an ER doctor at Mt.
Sinai who told her that not wearing a seat belt in a car accident increases your chance of dying by some huge percentage.
But she doesn’t want to be a scold, doesn’t want to pierce the sexual tension rising between them like steam.
Alec kisses her, and her stomach feels like it’s a fish doing somersaults in the ocean. He still has that effect on her—even after four years. When she told that to Julie, her friend didn’t believe her.
The Sikh cabdriver is talking loudly on his phone, apparently oblivious to his passengers’ activities in the back seat. But when Alec slips his hand under her skirt, she pushes it away.
“Alec, not here,” she says.
“Shh … he’s not looking. Believe me, people do a lot worse in the back seats of cabs.”
His fingers brush over her underwear.
“Seriously, stop,” she says, this time in her I’m not fucking around voice. He pulls his hand back and slides over to the far end of the seat.
“What? Now you’re mad at me? I wish you could just go with it. You were fine to break the rules when a strange woman pulled you onto a stage.”
The edge to his voice tells her that he’s jealous. So that’s what this backseat action is all about: his need to reclaim her.
“I don’t want to do it in the back of a cab.”
The rest of the ride to East 83rd Street is spent is silence.
As is the elevator up to the tenth floor of their apartment building.
It’s one of those big, characterless monoliths crowding the neighborhood where small tenement buildings used to populate the formerly quaint immigrant neighborhood known as Yorkville.
But it’s safe and affordable and she’s grateful to have a doorman and a washer and dryer in the building.
Alec opens the door and walks directly to the couch, where he sits and looks at Mallory expectantly. She wonders how to defuse the situation. He should be the one trying to mollify her, but she decides it isn’t a fight worth having.
Mallory stalls by rearranging a vase filled with long-stemmed yellow roses. That morning, Alec had sent her three dozen of her favorite flowers. She fans out the stems and asks, “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to dance for me,” he says with a smile.
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious,” he says. “When you were up there onstage, I kept thinking I just wanted you to do that for me.”
It’s classic Alec. He’s always pushing her just past her comfort zone.
It’s one of the things she’s come to love the most about him.
She comes from a conservative family, raised in Philadelphia’s WASPy Main Line.
Both of her parents are lawyers, as is her older sister.
Not only are they not rule breakers, they’re enforcers.
In the Dale family, bad behavior is not tolerated.
Neither is failing to meet expectations: Mallory has known since elementary school she was supposed to be an attorney.
And then she met Alec her junior year at Penn.
He was as smart and ambitious as most of her friends, but he had an irreverence that cut through her defenses.
He made her laugh, he made her take everything a little less seriously.
When she was with him, she felt her oppressive perfectionism slipping away like an unneeded old coat.
She’d slept with a few other guys before Alec, but all of her important “firsts” were with him: first simultaneous orgasm.
First sex in a public space (library stacks one weekend when he was visiting her at law school).
First time she let someone take a nude picture of her (she made him erase it, but it was surprisingly hot).
Everything he opened her up to made her feel closer to him, and closer to her own sexuality. But this whole threesome-with-another-woman thing … she’s afraid it will have the opposite effect—on her and on their relationship.
“I was thinking you probably wanted to get that woman home with us,” Mallory says, still focused on the flowers.
“No. I was thinking about you.”
She turns to him. His blue-green eyes have that cloudy, intense look they get sometimes. It’s incredibly sexy. She remembers the first time she got on top when they were having sex, and he looked up at her with that heavy-lidded, ocean-like gaze and it made her come.
He takes her hand and kisses it. “I’m serious, Mal. I’m not going to fuck you tonight unless you dance for me.”
She knows he’s serious.
“Oh my god. Fine. Play some music.”
“You should pick the song,” he says, tossing her his iPod. “I’ll get us some drinks.”
She scrolls through his playlist while he uncorks a bottle of red wine. It only takes her a few seconds to find what she’s looking for.
Alec settles back on the couch, handing her a glass. She dims the lights and cues up the Mos Def song “The Beggar” on the iDock. It’s hazy, dusky, and mournful. It sounds like a smoke-filled room at the end of a long night. She takes a gulp of the merlot and presses play.
It’s ridiculous after all the times he’s seen her naked, after all the different ways he’s fucked her—but suddenly she feels nervous taking off her sweater, despite the fact that she just did it in a room full of strangers.
But somehow, being on the stage made it impersonal.
She had felt, for a few moments up there, like someone else. But now she’s just Mallory.
She tries to imagine she’s not. She envisions Bette Noire, and somehow that puts her in the right frame of mind to sway to the music and slowly pull the sweater up over her head, letting it drop to the floor.
Thankfully, years of ballet muscle memory gives her some idea of what to do with her body.
Topless, she moves her arms into bras au repos.
It’s amazing that despite all the time that’s passed since she last set foot in a dance studio, her limbs still ache for the positions that that have been imprinted on them.
Alec watches her with a lustiness she’s never seen before, and it makes her incredibly hot. She releases her ballet arms and eases out of her skirt. Wearing only her bra, underwear, and the silver Elsa Peretti heart pendant he had given her on their anniversary, she sways to the sensual chorus.
She tries to recall a burlesque move from the show tonight, but nothing specific comes to mind.
Instead, she does a pique turn, and even though she feels silly doing it in her underwear, it’s exhilarating to use her body in that way.
With Alec’s eyes following her every move, she feels more beautiful than she has in a long time.
Moving to the music, she connects to something she thought was long gone: a feeling of feminine power that she’d pushed away as an illusion of adolescence.
“Come here,” Alec says, his voice low. Then he pulls her onto his lap. She straddles him, instantly feeling his hardness. She rubs herself against his erection.