Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
TONI
“You did not have sex in my bed.” Max leans against the doorjamb, arms crossed over her chest. She has dark circles under her eyes and looks completely exhausted.
“Oh, hey,” I say, bundling the bedsheets I’d stripped off her bed into a ball and holding them close to my chest. “I didn’t expect you home for a while yet.”
“It’s two thirty in the morning, Tone.”
“Is it?”
I’m not sure if it’s the sheets I’m holding or if the entire room smells like sex, but what I am sure of is that Max is not amused. I shift from foot to foot, the endorphin high I’d been on after the best sex of my life leaching out of me.
Max relaxes and grins. “I’m just fucking with you, Toni.”
My body collapses in relief. “Oh thank God. I’m sorry, Max. But I?—”
“Couldn’t very well tell a woman like Audrey Adams that you’re homeless and sleeping on my couch. I get it.”
Adams. I file the surname away for later. “I’m not homeless ,” I say defensively.
Max dips her head and raises her dark eyebrows.
“OK, yes. I’m technically homeless. But, not for long.”
“So you keep saying,” Max says. She goes to the closet and pulls out a stack of fresh bedsheets.
“You have extra sheets?”
“Yes, I have extra sheets because I’m an adult,” Max says, throwing a pillowcase at my face. “Help me.”
I drop the dirty sheets and help her wrestle the fitted sheet onto her bed. Her very comfortable bed. “So, spill,” Max says.
“Come on, I can’t kiss and tell.”
Max lifts her nose and sniffs. “You mean fuck and tell, and yes, you can. My bed, remember?”
I grab a pillow and shove it into a pillowcase, catching a faint whiff of Audrey’s perfume. Or maybe that’s just the laundry detergent. “This smells really good,” I say.
“Gain,” Max explains.
I make a mental note to buy Gain detergent when I get my own place. I toss the pillow against the headboard. I lift my hands and let them drop. “It was great. Amazing. Like, next level.”
“That tells me nothing.” Max goes back to the closet.
“You do not have an extra down duvet in there,” I say.
Max pulls out a homemade quilt that’s seen better days and tosses it on the bed. “No, but you’re taking that one to the cleaner’s tomorrow.”
“OK, OK.”
Max goes across the hall to the bathroom. “So, are you going to see her again?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Toni Danzig has finally found a woman she wants to sleep with more than once?”
“Hey, I don’t only have one-night stands.”
Max gives me The Look.
“OK, yes, I’ve had a lot of one-night stands. But this didn’t feel like one. It was vulnerable. We both were.”
“No wham bam thank you ma’am?”
I lean against the bathroom doorjamb as Max brushes her teeth. “Hardly. She’s a natural top, that’s for sure.”
Max nods and says, “Nice” around the toothbrush and foam in her mouth.
“I’m not giving you more details than that.”
Max spits and rinses. “No need. I have an imagination.”
“I’m going to ignore that comment.”
Max shrugs and washes her face.
“What happened after we left Dewey’s?”
“Shae left before I could stop her. She didn’t come back.”
“What do you know about her? Shae?”
“She’s some big-shot executive. Sales, I think. The two of them were a bit of a power couple. I’ve seen them in the Sunday paper a few times, social section for all those business leader bullshit events.”
“Oh.”
Of course Audrey is out of my league. Even in jeans and a tank she had the put-together aura of a rich, successful woman. Hair that is cut and dyed every six weeks and weekly trips to the dry bar, well-made and expensive clothes, a smooth complexion that is no doubt pampered by an aesthetician on a regular basis, a body that stays fit with a gym membership and a personal trainer. She is so polar opposite of my dirtbag ways we might as well be from different planets. Hey, it’s not the first time a rich woman has slummed it with me for a night or two. But the connection with Audrey was…well, it was different. For me, at least.
Max finishes rinsing her face and pats it dry. She hangs the towel and faces me. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Thinking that she’s too good for you.”
“She’s way out of my league.”
“Every woman you sleep with is out of your league,” Max says, deadpan.
“If you weren’t my best friend I’d be offended.”
Max shrugs one shoulder. We’ve known each other all our lives, grew up together. I asked her to be my best friend when I was old enough to put the sentence together. I think we were two. She said yes and here we are, twenty-seven years later. Gentle insults are the norm, with an occasional knock-down drag-out thrown in to clear out our frustrations. Our fights usually end in laughter and we’re over it. I get along with Max better than my sister.
“She won’t be out of your league come Monday,” Max says with a wry smile.
“I am not going to turn into a corporate automaton like my sister.”
“She’s one of the most respected businesswomen in Colorado. You could do a lot worse.”
“You only say that because you’ve been in love with her since you were twelve.”
“Thirteen, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s amazing and you could learn a lot from her.”
I wave my hand. “Yeah, yeah.” I don’t want to think about Monday, my first day in the family business.
“How did you leave it?” Max asks. “With Audrey.”
“No number. No promises to get together again. She’s not in the right place. They just broke up.”
“I gathered that from the fuck-you song she sang.” Max chuckles. “I would have never imagined she had it in her.”
“While she was bringing down the house her sister was at her and Shae’s place cleaning it out.”
Max’s eyebrows lift to her hairline and she laughs. “No shit. I can’t decide if that’s cowardly or a power move.” She flips off the light switch and pushes past me.
Huh. I hadn’t thought about it like that. It’s a good question. I turn and follow Max. There’s no way I’m going to fall asleep anytime soon.
“Wanna smoke and play Zelda ?”
“Migraine.”
“Shit, Max, you should have told me.” Max has suffered from migraines since high school. The best the doctors seem to be able to do is give her medicine to stop it before it starts. It doesn’t always work. “Do you need your medicine?”
Max strips down to her boy shorts and sports bra and climbs into bed. “No, I took it when the aura started. I just need a dark room and my bed.”
“Let me get you a cold washcloth,” I say.
In a couple of minutes I return with the cloth folded in a rectangle. Max has put on an eye mask while I was gone. I sit on the bed and put the washcloth on her forehead.
She gives me a wan smile. “Thanks, Toni.”
“You’re welcome. Anything else?”
“I’ll be fine in the morning.”
“Call me if you need me.” I lift the washcloth and plant a kiss on her damp forehead.
There’s a small smile on her lips and she hums in response.
I pick up the dirty sheets and duvet and close the door softly behind me. The sheets do smell like sex. I smile as I walk into the kitchen to start the laundry. A glance at the oven clock shows it’s only been about thirty minutes since Audrey left. Seems longer.
I’ve wanted to see you like this for a while.
“Oh my God,” I mutter, remembering how Audrey’s voice caught at the end, how her gaze raked over my body as if she was committing every inch to memory. How my body lit up in response.
That’s happening now, too.
“Move. I need to move.”
I start the laundry and potter around the kitchen, cleaning up. Trying my best to not think about Audrey. But how could I not? I’ve had a lot of good sex with a lot of women, but I’ve never felt so consumed by someone in my life. I can feel how her hands slid down my body even now, caressing my breasts, trailing lightly over my stomach to my legs, and down to my inner thighs. Her gaze, intense and hungry, on my cunt. The way she took me in her mouth. Her bedroom voice when she said, Come for me, Toni .
Christ, it wouldn’t take much for me to come right now.
I look around the kitchen and am surprised to find it’s spotless. How long have I been daydreaming? I sit at the kitchen table and open my laptop. Email alerts pop up in the top right-hand corner of my screen, one from my sister, no doubt reminding me about being at work bright and early on Monday. I ignore it and open my browser. I click on the search bar, my fingers settle on the keyboard, and I pause.
Audrey Adams. With a name like that how can you not be a successful, high-powered woman. It would take less than a minute to google her and find out everything I want to know. She’s a consultant so she’s sure to be on LinkedIn and have a website.
I sit back and drop my hands to my lap. What do I want out of this? To see her face? Yes. To find out more about her? Absolutely. To reach out to her? OK, yeah. I do.
But, I can’t.
Audrey made it clear that this isn’t the right time for her, that she isn’t interested in dating. She set a boundary, and finding her on social media and contacting her would cross a line and breach any trust she might have in me. That’s not who I am, though my stomach is revolting at the thought of never seeing her again.
I think back to the women who had reached out to me after I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in anything more than a night or two of fun. I’d always been nice, or tried to be, except to the ones who would just not leave me alone. I’d always thought they were pathetic and desperate, talking to me about our connection and how they’d never felt that way with someone else. Now here I am, struggling to stop myself from doing the same thing.
Hypocrite, much?
I snap my laptop shut. Nope. Not going to do it. Only three million people live in Denver. I’m sure I’ll run into her. Maybe she’ll even take me up on my suggestion of role-playing as strangers.
I fall asleep daydreaming about the possibility.