Chapter 5
It was dark, with bursts of light rhythmically flashing here and there. Gemma closed her eyes. She was drunk.
More drunk than was wise.
Normally, she was good for splitting a bottle of wine over dinner, but this was out of hand. She’d gone in search of numbness and had found sweet oblivion.
Her eyes shot across the dance floor to where April gyrated against a man with light brown skin and short curly hair. She wondered if her friend would take him home.
I wish I could do that.
The thought surprised her. After the stress of this day, Royce’s disappearance and the brush of death on the edges of her life, she desperately needed human contact.
She wanted to make love.
That’s when she noticed a man looking at her. A young guy, maybe thirty, with a body like a department store mannequin. She resisted the urge to look behind her for the younger, more attractive girl he was gawking at.
Let it be me.
Her eyes wandered over that beautiful body of his.
The men she dated were long past that strong and sexy stud phase.
Sure, most of them were fit, taking good care of themselves and aging as well as they could, but you just didn’t find a forty-five-year-old guy who looked like that man did over there.
Not even close.
Did the women he dated know how good they had it? With his ready erection and what she was sure must be his endless energy? Hell, she couldn’t even remember the last time she dated a man who didn’t have at least some gray hair. If he had any hair at all.
Time was hard on men.
Hard on.
She laughed to herself and the man cocked his head, his stare questioning. She raised her glass to him.
If you only knew what I was thinking right now.
He headed Gemma’s way.
Fuck.
He was incredibly tall and walked like a big cat, all sway and muscle. When he reached her he bent down and said in her ear, “What’s so funny?”
He smelled like the quintessential male, as if nature had created him to lure her like a flower lured the bees. “Honestly? You don’t want to know.”
“That makes me want to know even more. Would you like to dance?”
“No.” She held her hands up to ward him off. “I mean, I’d like to, but I’m not a dancer.”
“Then just hang on to me.” He took her hand and pulled her onto the dance floor, never breaking their stare. She liked the feel of his long, strong fingers wrapped around hers. Was it true what they said about the size of a man’s hands and the size of his penis? She giggled again. So damn drunk.
There was a bandage on his hand. “What happened?” she asked.
“Just a burn.”
He took her in his arms, swaying to the beat. She copied him. “Relax,” he said, his voice smoky and deep.
Why the hell not? Her eyes were stuck on his chest, and she longed to feel it with her hands. Her insides were melting like candle wax next to a flame. What would those sculpted muscles feel like under her eager fingers?
Stop it, Gemma.
She shouldn’t be thinking about this guy like that. Not when it was making her heart race and her back arch, so that her breasts jutted forward against his body.
“You’re very beautiful,” he said.
She opened her mouth to shrug off the compliment but his stare dropped to her lips and she froze. There was so much sex in that one single look—more sex than she’d had in her bed for the last few years, easily—and she wanted it.
She wanted all of it.
She lifted her chin and met his mouth in a scorching kiss. He tasted like mint and he smelled like spicy leather, an intoxicating fragrance she wanted to inhale and keep forever inside her.
Still the music played, the pounding beat resonating between her legs, seemingly in sync with the steady pulse that hammered there. The room fell away, leaving just the two of them and her body’s overwhelming response to this man.
His hands were around her waist, pulling her tightly against him, and his hard body felt every bit as good as she’d hoped it would.
She should stop. Shouldn’t she? The petulant child inside her rebelled.
Other people got to do these things, have these experiences.
Hell, April did it all the time. How come she never could?
The answer to her unspoken question rose up in her mind, the same answer she’d relied on to get her life back on track after the affair.
Walk the straight and narrow.
Don’t do anything reprehensible.
No casual sex.
Expect everything to come out in the open, and when it does, know that you will be able to hold your head high.
His mouth moved to her neck, and her head fell back with the glorious sensation. Maybe just this once she could live her life without her past dictating what she should do. Maybe just for this night she could be someone who wasn’t so goddamn careful.
She needed to be touched, desperately.
One hand snaked up her back while the other moved lower, cupping her bottom and pulling her firmly against his erection. When she would have moved back, he whispered in her ear.
“Do you see what you’re doing to me?”
She knew it was a line. Probably one he’d used a hundred times, but she didn’t care. She wanted to be that person. Wanted to be capable of driving a guy like this crazy with desire.
You’re drunk, Gemma.
Go home.
Yes, that’s what she needed to do. Quickly, before she could change her mind.
She pushed away from him, surprised when the movement made her head swim. She needed to find April. She would pull her back from this cliff she wanted to jump off. That’s what friends were for. “I need to go to the ladies’ room.”
He nodded and yelled over the music, “I’ll wait here.”
Spinning around, her eyes raked over the crowd.
Was it darker in here than it had been before?
Everything seemed more intense, overwhelming.
She pushed through people, her body seeming to brush intimate parts of everyone as she made her way off the dance floor. She hated this shit, hated dance clubs.
Why the hell did I let April bring me here?
She caught sight of her friend up ahead, and pulled her away from the man she was dancing with, into the ladies’ room.
“What’s wrong?” asked April.
“I want to go home.”
“Really?” She laughed. “Because you looked like you’re having one hell of a time with that guy.”
“Yeah. Ten more minutes of making out and my clothes would be all over the floor.”
“Would that be so bad?”
“I don’t even know him.”
“Some of the best sex of my life was with guys I didn’t know.”
Gemma rolled her eyes. “You know I can’t do this shit.”
April dug in her purse and withdrew a condom. “Au contraire. You can do this shit, and I think you should.”
Gemma took the condom from her friend’s hand, looking at it questioningly. “I have a condom in my purse.”
“It’s probably been there since college. Use mine.”
“Today of all days, you don’t see why this is a bad idea?”
“Today of all days is the reason you should do it. You’ve been beating yourself up about Royce for eight years.
Eight fucking years, Gemma! Let it go already.
You made a mistake. We all make them. But you’ve been living in some sort of prison you made for yourself, and the only time you come out – really come out – is for some public flagellation. ”
Gemma could feel her cheeks heating. “That’s not true.”
“It is true.” April opened the bathroom door, the music and that tribal beat now filling the ladies’ room. “You need to go and get laid.”
Gemma turned and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was falling out of its tame style, auburn curls framing her face. The little makeup she had put on for work had virtually disappeared, save for a light touch of mascara that framed her hazel eyes.
She was ordinary.
Her eyes caught on the little lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes.
And I’m getting old as fuck.
Old as fuck and alone. And responsible – oh so responsible! And what did she have to show for it? Really show for it? Her career, of course. Everything had been about her career for so long, she could almost make herself forget she had ever wanted anything more.
But she had.
A quiet voice deep inside her remembered. She had wanted things she knew now would never be a part of her life. She thought she’d made her peace with that.
She was okay with it.
Except suddenly she wasn’t okay with anything. She wasn’t okay with her tied-up hair, or her white blouse and navy skirt, or the lack of excitement she’d guaranteed with her walk on the straight and narrow.
She reached up and pulled at the bobby pins that held her hairstyle in place, as if each one represented a decision that had gotten her to this place where she was so afraid of everything, including that guy out there who had probably moved on to somebody else by now.
She tucked the condom into her purse and stepped back into the dance club. She pushed past people, no longer concerned when her body brushed theirs. She was part of it now, part of this room and the energy here, but her mind was on the man she left on the dance floor.
If he really was waiting for her, she would go to him. And whatever would be, would be.