Chapter 2 #2
“Other than that, it was a totally worthy goal.” I sip the champagne, which is pretty damn delicious. “Well, we all have stuff that sounds like a fantastic idea at eighteen, and ten years later you’re wondering what the hell you were thinking.”
“True enough.” Sarah unwinds the yellow scarf from around her throat and sets it on the arm of the couch. “Is it hot in here?”
“It’s pretty warm,” I agree, though it has nothing to do with the temperature of the room and everything to do with that long, bare slope of her throat. Her tank top dips low above her breasts, and I force my eyes off her as attraction chatters through my body like an electric current.
“So how about you?” she asks. “Did you get to skydive the way you wanted?”
“Not quite the way I wanted.” I pause, wondering if I should tell this story so soon after our reunion. It’s going to take my cool points down a few notches.
What cool points?
“I went up in a plane after I turned twenty-one and I was totally planning to jump out,” I tell her. “They had me strapped to the guide for the tandem jump and everything.”
“And?”
“And I chickened out,” I admit. “The other two guys on the flight went through with it, but the pilot had to take me back down to solid ground.”
“Ooof.” She grins. “Well, not all goals are made to be achieved.”
I refrain from telling her this was on the one-year anniversary of Shane’s death. That I was feeling sick and heartbroken and a little too eager to hurl my body at the concrete from twelve-thousand feet, screw the parachute.
“Do I make up some cool points if I tell you I got my pilot’s license the year after that? I even bought a little four-seater Cessna Skyhawk.”
Her eyes widen with surprise. “That totally counts. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” I tell myself to shut up so I don’t come off like some bragging idiot.
It’s true I’m doing well on the career front, but I don’t need to blurt it out within the first ten minutes.
Instead, I comb my brain for memories of Sarah’s other goals.
For snippets of late-night dorm room conversations and confessions.
“You wanted to live overseas,” I recall. “Did you get to do that?”
Sarah shifts a little on the couch, and her knee bumps against mine.
The effect is electric, shooting a delicious, warm jolt all the way up my spine.
I’d forgotten it was like that between us.
That our video game sessions in my big brown beanbag chair felt way more intense than just friendship.
I kept myself in check, thanks to her string of boyfriends and my long-term, long-distance girlfriend.
After we broke up, there was this time with Sarah that I thought—
“I lived in Venezuela for six months teaching English,” Sarah says, jarring me back to our conversation. “I would have stayed longer, but I got swine flu.”
“That’ll put a damper on things.” I glance down to where her leg has come to rest against mine and try to focus on our teenage life goals instead of the warm pressure of her body heat.
“You wanted to learn French, right?” she asks.
“Oui,” I tell her, wracking my brain for something witty and useful to say. “Avoir le cul bordé de nouilles.”
Her lips part just a little, and belatedly I recall she had a thing for languages. Our sophomore year, she confessed to hanging out near the exchange student advisory center just to listen to foreign students bantering with each other.
“What does that mean?” she asks, and the words come out breathless.
“Literally? It means your ass is surrounded by noodles.”
Sarah bursts out laughing and sets her empty champagne flute on the coffee table. “That’s something you need to say to someone on a regular basis?”
“It’s an idiom,” I tell her. “A slang way of telling someone they’re very lucky.”
“Avoir le cul bordé de nouilles,” she repeats, slaughtering most of the words, but giving it her best effort. “I like it. Say something else.”
I should probably confess that I know only a few French phrases, and that most of what I know I learned from a colleague with a fondness for foul language.
But the way her fingertips graze my thigh sends me thumbing through my mental rolodex again. “Péter plus haut que son cul.”
The words roll off my tongue, sounding a lot sexier than they ought to, and Sarah licks her lips. “What’s that?”
“Uh, literally—someone is trying to fart higher than his own ass.”
She snort-laughs so hard she falls into me, and I can’t believe how good she feels up against my chest. I’m half tempted to pull up a French website on my phone and just start rattling off random phrases. Anything to keep her touching me like this.
“It’s like saying someone thinks he’s too good for something,” I explain. “That he has a high opinion of himself. Too big for his britches, I guess might be the English equivalent?”
“It sounds way cooler in French,” she says, tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. “Now I’m regretting that I learned Spanish instead of French.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask what else she regrets. If there’s anything else that happened or didn’t happen over the last ten years that she wishes had gone differently.
But I stop myself and stick to the present topic of conversation instead of seizing my urge to steal another glimpse down the front of that tank top. “Let’s see…did you ever see Death Cab for Cutie in concert?”
“Three times. How about you?”
“Nope. But that was your goal, not mine.”
“Hmmm.” She scoots her bare toes under my thigh, something she did in college. A friendly gesture, one between two best buddies, but the touch leaves me reeling now just like it did back then. I curl my fingers into the arch of her foot and give a squeeze.
“Oh, that feels good.”
My breath hitches as I order myself not to get turned on. It’s a foot rub, for crying out loud, not foreplay.
I stroke my thumb over her arch again, pretending it’s a casual gesture and that her soft moans aren’t getting to me.
“Let’s see,” she says, shifting so I’ve got better access to the ball of her foot. “Okay, I’ve got one.”
That’s right, we’re still playing catch-up. “Did you sleep with that girl—the one from art history class?”
“Annabelle?” I trace a finger in a slow circle around the happy face on her knee. “I don’t kiss and tell.”
She quirks an eyebrow at me. “You used to. We used to tell each other everything.”
Not everything. Jesus, definitely not everything.
“How about you?” I say. “Remember that threesome fantasy you told me about?”
“God.” Sarah covers her face with her hands and laughs. “I can’t believe I told you that. I was drunk on fuzzy navels that night, for the record.”
“And yet, not an answer to my question.”
She pulls her hands off her face and looks me in the eye. “Would you respect me less if I said yes?”
My dick lunges at my fly, and it’s all I can do to keep from pouncing on her. “I’d respect you either way,” I say. “For going after what you want, or for deciding that wasn’t what you wanted after all.”
“Good.” Sarah licks her lips. “Because there’s something I want right now.”
“Oh?” My heart revs like a jump-started engine, and I can’t quite read the heat in her eyes. “What’s that?”
I hold my breath, listening to the thud of my pulse hammering in my eardrums.
“This,” Sarah says and leans up to kiss me.