Chapter 22 Fit
FIT
Michelle
Work was out of the question, it seemed.
After straightening up his desk, he knotted his tie, and handed me my jacket.
“I’m famished. Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked as he held the coat for me.
“Yes, and I’ll just carry my jacket,” I said. I didn’t need it for the weather; I’d worn it for the costume. “I only had it on for the effect.”
“I’d say it worked. So long as the intended effect was a spectacular orgasm. For both of us,” he added.
I shot him a smile. “Yes.”
He placed his hand on my back and led me out of the office, now bathed in the twilight glow of a building coasting into evening. Most of his employees had left for the day, and he waved quick goodbyes to the few remaining, hunched over laptops in their cubicles.
Perhaps I should have been embarrassed to be seen leaving with the CEO, knowing what we’d just done in his office.
I wasn’t though. Maybe because I believed him when he’d said his office was virtually soundproof, or maybe because I was still glowing from that earth-shattering orgasm he’d delivered.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a news report that one of the planet’s tectonic plates had shifted.
It had been that powerful a climax. Unbidden, I shuddered, the sweet, memory washing over me.
“Chinese? Thai? Indian?” he asked as we walked past the gleaming white reception desk with the letter J embossed in silver on the wall behind it. Joy Delivered was the Louis Vuitton of sex toys.
An image of a Thai fusion restaurant on the Upper East Side flashed in front of my eyes.
I’d been researching cool new eateries, so I mentioned the name, and some of the dishes on the menu.
“I’ve been wanting to try it. Tonight seems a perfect opportunity,” I said, and he dusted my lips with a kiss saying yes.
“Do you want to walk there? It’s not too far away.”
“I’d love to.”
When we reached the lobby, he laced his fingers through mine and squeezed.
A private little gesture. A silent moment.
Sending a message just to me that he liked holding my hand in public.
Tingles skipped through my bloodstream, so happily and so quickly that I barely noticed a familiar face a few shops down, watching me from the fruit stands outside a bodega.
When it registered why the dark hair and thick glasses felt so familiar—like the man who’d bumped into me then held my elbow too long—he was gone.
Worry shot through my bloodstream, but I quickly tamped it down.
This was Manhattan, an endless island of people and faces.
It was the land of the unknown, but when you live in close quarters with millions, the city has a way of fooling you.
Tricking you into believing you know everyone.
Even so, I peered into the doorway of the bodega as we walked past, but the view inside only confirmed my theory. New York was jam-packed with people. He was nobody I knew, just like last time.
“You okay?”
I smiled. “Totally. I just thought I saw someone who looked familiar. This guy with glasses.” I returned to far more pleasant topics. Our hands together. “I never would have pegged you as a guy who likes to hold hands in public.”
“Why? Do I seem like an asshole who doesn’t want to have his hands all over his woman?”
I laughed, but thrilled inside—against my better judgment—at the use of his. I wasn’t his woman. I had no plans on being his woman. But I was his woman for another fourteen days. Happily.
“I just would never have thought you were that type of guy.”
“You didn’t think I wanted to have you in my lap either. But yet I did,” he said, stopping to bring our clasped hands to his mouth for a quick kiss as we passed a florist, the front of the shop teeming with flowers in bright orange and yellows—late summer shades. “How else am I surprising you?”
How else?
In so many ways. He was not what I would have expected from the first night, or from what I suspected people saw on the surface—his gorgeous chiseled good looks, his sharp well-dressed style, his cool blue eyes, both warm and distant at the same damn time.
He had more contradictions than I’d ever have suspected, and I was someone who trafficked in contradictions.
Who was accustomed to them. Who had come to expect them.
But Jack was tender and sweet when he could have been removed; he was removed when he could have been calloused; he was self-protective when he could have been cruel.
“Well?” he asked, prompting me as we darted past a group of teenage girls hanging onto each other and their phones outside a yogurt shop. The girls clearly weren’t going to move. And Jack clearly wanted my opinion. “How am I different than what you expected?”
I parted my lips to speak, my natural instinct, my professional desire to speak the truth plainly kicking in. “You’re sweeter, kinder, and more affectionate than I would have thought, given why you were in my office,” I said, looking him square in the eyes.
He stopped in his tracks, forcing me to stop too. “You didn’t think I could be affectionate?”
“Well,” I said as if the answer were obvious.
“I so can,” he said, and wrapped his arms around my waist, and tugged me close, dropping his forehead to mine.
We stood in the middle of the crowded sidewalk.
People in suits and shiny shoes with determined looks on their faces, rushing to catch trains and buses and cabs home, were forced to walk around us.
“With the right woman…” he said and brushed his lips ever so gently against mine so that all thoughts tumbled out of my skull, leaving me with nothing but feelings.
The fresh bloom of feelings for this man.
“Who’s the right woman?” I asked when he pulled away.
“You,” he whispered, in a voice that was clear and direct.
And cut straight through the walls. He couldn’t possibly be suggesting there was more to us?
Could he? We were nighttime. We were deadlines.
We were the city after hours. We weren’t more.
We weren’t a couple. Whatever affection he felt for me was clearly borne of sex.
So I turned the conversation in that much less frightening direction as we resumed our walk uptown.
“By the way, Jack, I’ve noticed that filthy mouth of yours was much more refined the first night I met you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
I nodded. “Yes. Now the way you talk to me is blunter. Rougher,” I said, and I’d seen the slight changes the more we were together. He seemed to let go more with that dirty mouth, using words he hadn’t used the night we’d met, asking rougher questions, demanding answers.
“Maybe it’s part of my plan to woo you,” he joked. “Is it working?”
“What do you think?”
He leaned closer, brushed my hair away from my shoulder, and whispered hotly in my ear, “I think you’re a very dirty girl beneath that good-girl exterior.”
His words sent a rush through me. He was right. He was so right.
I tilted my face to him, and answered with a curve of my lips. “And you like it that way.”
“I love it that way,” he said in a husky voice that gave away his desire.
I tensed, wondering if he’d been like this with Aubrey.
If he’d thrown her down on his desk, if he’d demanded answers about her dirty fantasies.
I wished terribly that the thought hadn’t touched down in my head, but now that it was there, it worried away at me.
There was no way I’d ask him if he’d been like that with other women.
That was too personal. Besides, it was a rude question. And I aspired not to be rude.
Instead, I simply sighed.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked, as we turned the corner onto a quieter street lined with trees and a mix of pretty brownstones, some white, some brick, all beautiful.
“Nothing,” I said, putting my game face back on.
“I don’t believe that. And you’re too damn smart to think you can get away with that kind of answer.”
“What kind of answer?”
“The kind that’s a lie. There is something wrong, and I bet I know what it is.”
“Okay. Try me,” I said, and we were treading in dangerous territory, but then this was my stock-in-trade. Surely, I could handle it with him.
“You wanted to know if I’m like this with other women I’ve been with, don’t you?”
I gasped in surprise, and we stopped walking. I backed up to stand near the brown stoop of a building with planters in the first floor windows.
“I’m like this with you,” he added, his eyes locked on mine as he held my hand tighter.
“You are?” I asked carefully.
He nodded. “Of course I like the way we fuck. I love the way we have sex. Does that mean every other woman wanted it this way?” he asked, and a part of me hoped and prayed he wouldn’t answer. He didn’t. Thankfully. “It means we fit.”
My heart jumped at those words, and I wasn’t entirely sure why.
I wanted to swat it back into place. Hell, we were talking about sex, not matters of the heart, so why on earth should that annoying organ be doing a pitter-patter?
But as he gazed at me, his blue eyes never wavering, I saw a flash of something more in his expression.
He wasn’t just talking about how we fit in the bedroom.
“I think so too,” I said quietly, as we delved into territory I usually only started to explore in a therapy session with a patient, but here we were on the streets of New York City having a frank conversation about how we liked to fuck. And yet it was a conversation about more than sex too.
“It means you’re perfect for me. And I can be myself with you,” he said, grasping my hand tighter, as he moved in closer. Heat radiated off him.
Oh god, my heart thumped hard now. And I couldn’t take it.
I couldn’t take all this beating in my chest, this heat, this stretching and expanding inside.
“So you can be the dirty guy who likes a good girl on the outside but with a filthy mind?” I countered, arching an eyebrow, and somehow successfully deflecting the deeper meaning of this conversation, even though I wanted to clasp it and hold it close.
He threw his head back and laughed. “Come on. Let’s get that stomach fed, so I can have more of that filthy mind and hot body later.”
Jack
“Do you miss her still?”
I crinkled my brow at the question she asked over dinner. “Hmm? What do you mean?”
“Aubrey.”
Oh. Right. The reason I’d gone to see her in the first place. “Honestly?”
She nodded, and laughed once as she lifted her wineglass.
“Yes,” she said emphatically. “Of course I’m asking you honestly.
We talked about it at Gia’s. It must be hard for you.
I mean, that’s why you came to see me. I don’t expect you to be over her in just a few sessions with Kira, and I’m not asking you to tell me about them. I’m just asking if you miss her.”
There was one answer. The truth. I could give her that right now. “No. I don’t miss her. Sorry if that makes me seem callous. But it’s the truth.”
“Hey. The truth is okay. It’s okay not to miss anymore. Or even just not today,” she said, then took a drink and set down the glass.
“And honestly, being with you helps. I like being with you.”
“I like that you’re with me.”
Later, I sent her home in a town car. Her choice. Not mine. Someday, someday soon, I wanted her to stay the night. When I returned to my own bed, alone, I missed her more than I’d ever expected to.