Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
I want to keep kissing him, but under the fluorescent lights everyone is suddenly all business, signing receipts and gathering their things to leave. I want him to do that thing to the nape of my neck again. I want him to take me home and do it over and over.
I fumble in my purse for my credit card, but the bartender waves me off. Our drinks are on the house. Before I can question why, I’m being guided toward the exit, my knight in hoodie armor’s massive protective arm over my shoulder to prevent me from being jostled by lima beans.
“I’ll just … call a cab?” His voice is innocently smooth, but his subtext is dangerous. Am I going home—or home with him?
“A cab home will be great. Don’t get me wrong,” I add quickly, “I admire sex-positive people. I just haven’t ginned up the courage to become one myself.”
His features break into that amused smile, the one that fills me up and makes me feel all sparkly, and we push through the door to the bracing air outside. My taxi arrives, and he draws my lips to his one last time.
“For some reason, I can’t stop kissing you. You’re addictive.”
“See? I’m right. It’s the pheromones,” I say breathlessly. His fingers interlock with mine at our sides. Even at my height, I have to arch up on my tiptoes for one more kiss.
“Or,” he says, pulling back slightly to look at me, one eyebrow raised, “maybe I’m right, and it’s the other thing.”
He releases my hands and takes a few steps back while I duck inside the taxi, my head spinning.
The “other thing”? Love at first sight?
Heat radiates from my body in waves. I roll the window down for some fresh air.
“Wait,” he says as my cab pulls out from the curb. “I need to know your name.”
“It’s Elizabeth,” I say, picking the first fake name that pops into my swimming head. “My name is Elizabeth Holmes.”
He smiles, holding one hand up as we drive off. He disappears in the rear window, but the taste of his cool daiquiri stays on my lips.
“Elizabeth Holmes,” the cabbie says, peering at me from under tangled salt-and-pepper eyebrows in the rearview. “I saw you on 60 Minutes. You’re the one with the turtlenecks and fake medical company. What was it called? Thanos?”
“Theranos. And I’m not really Elizabeth Holmes,” I explain. “I just look like her a bit. And we share an affinity for turtlenecks. I gave him a fake name.”
“Why would you do that?”
“So he can’t ever find me,” I say, the answer obvious. “He could be a serial killer.”
Wait—I didn’t get his name. I can’t ever find him. Great. I kissed a demigod all night and forgot to get proof. Maya will never believe me without photographic evidence.
“Glad my wife gave me her real name forty years ago,” the cabbie says, more than a little smugly.
“Funny how small choices can change everything. Even create new people.” He taps the Polaroid taped to his air vent, sepia-hued from the passage of time.
They’re at the seashore, his wife in a green bikini, clutching his forearm and laughing as windswept hair obscures her face.
He grins into the camera as small children, building a sandcastle at his feet, frown in concentration.
“A real name, or a fake one. A small choice with big ripples. Ah, well, Danny. Better luck next time.”
My eyebrows lift in surprise. “Wait, you know him?”
“I deliver his Instacart order each week. Doesn’t seem like a serial killer, but one never knows,” he says, shrugging.
“He meets me at the curb so I don’t have to hunt for parking near the Met, even though he lives on the top floor.
Don’t know any serial killers who’d do that.
He’s also very complimentary about my produce selection.
” His voice lowers to a conspiratorial whisper. “The trick is to smell the stems.”
The image of Danny’s huge hand covering mine takes over.
You are not alone in the world. Let me prove it to you.
“You know, I made a mistake on his last order,” the cabbie says. He grins at me in the rearview. “We could circle back to the Met and deliver the missing item. Your choice.”
I hold the bunch of bananas too tightly, their creamy yellow hue unblemished by carelessness until now. The higher this elevator rises, the more tempted I am to chicken out.
This is stupid. I should go home. There is only so much disappointment one can handle in a day, like, clinically.
But I don’t want to be alone tonight.
At the top floor, I’m spit out into an expansive hallway, my shoes sinking into the luxe carpet. Shaky legs carry me down the hall to the corner unit. I knock three times, hard, on the glossed wood. The door opens.
Danny is glistening from his shower, wearing nothing but a charcoal-gray towel low on his hips.
His muscles flex as he leans one massive shoulder against the doorway.
His other shoulder is etched with intricate tattoos, triangle-shaped like sharks’ teeth, trailing down his bicep and inching over his pectoral muscle.
Water droplets bead off his skin, down his abs, and I want to touch my tongue to each one.
He still smells of cool, fresh air despite being so warm from his shower that he’s literally steaming.
Finally, I summon the courage to drag my eyes up to his face.
His dark beanie is gone, and his hair mimics his eye color, dark amber with flecks of gold toward the ends as if bleached from an endless summer.
“I …” I close my eyes, not sure what to say or how people do this. “I brought bananas,” I say lamely.
Silence.
I open my eyes again just in time to see Danny raise a hand to my face and brush a strand of hair from my cheek.
He comes closer, and the warmth of him plays in the space between us.
When his other hand finds soft purchase at the nape of my neck, his towel drops, and he kisses me so smoothly that I’m profoundly filled with him.
His tongue, his lips, his essence. And his huge erection, now freed from the towel, which is pressing firmly into me.
We are halfway into the open hallway when I break us apart and look each way, making sure no one has seen us.
I lower the bananas to his groin for modesty’s sake.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says, smiling into my mouth. “Just get in here.”
He’s kissing my face and my lips as if he’s as hungry as I am.
His fingertip glides beneath the fabric to touch that spot on the nape of my neck, and it’s my undoing.
I’m shrugging out of my jacket and yanking off my turtleneck, relieved to be wearing a cute bra and panties.
Much like my apartment, my body is always ready for company, despite being perpetually vacant.
Wearing underwear that makes one feel attractive is an oft overlooked cornerstone of sound mental health.
He lifts me up like I’m a feather. Maybe this is what petite girls like Helena feel like. I wrap my long legs around him as he carries me to his bed, where he lays me down gingerly on a Prussian blue duvet as if I’m made of porcelain.
He slips my bra down, and my nipples peak in the cool air. He tilts his head, looking at me appraisingly.
“Come here,” I say, my voice a deep growl of want and need. But he doesn’t move. I cover a hiccup with my palm.
“How sober are you?” he asks, taking my hand and pressing his plump lips to the tips of my fingers. “Because I want you very, very badly. But if you can’t consent, we’ll have to wait until morning.”
“I consent,” I say, the words tripping out of me. “I consent. I consent. I even have Uber condoms in my purse. Two of them!”
“I don’t know,” he says, kissing up my arm to pass his lips, featherlight, over the top of my chest, still infuriatingly far from my nipples. I writhe from the almost painful swelling of want growing inside me. “Maybe I should give you a field sobriety test just to make sure.”
“Please,” I say, “you don’t understand. I need you now.”
“Sing the ABCs backward,” he says, trailing ever so close to my breasts, his mouth hot on my cold skin.
“Seriously?”
“If you can do it, then I will fuck you hard,” he says kissing my neck, “and fast,” kissing near my clavicle, “until you come.” He nips at the top of one of my breasts and I wriggle, trying to get closer to him.
To those lips. “But if not …” He backs his mouth away, and I instantly cool in his absence. I whimper, distraught.
You can do this, Lauren. Just picture the letters in your head like your square breathing exercise for panic attacks. Draw them in your mind.
“Z, Y, X,” I say breathily, frowning with my eyes closed. See? Easy.
Mercifully, he replaces his warm mouth on my skin.
“Very good,” he murmurs, kissing down my neck to my chest. “Keep going.”
“W, V, U,” I say, and his mouth hovers over my left nipple.
“Yes, that’s right.”
He’s so close to licking it, I can feel his breath. I arch myself up, trying to close the centimeters.
“Cheating,” he admonishes, backing further away. “Very unethical behavior.”
“T, S, R! Next comes T, S, R!”
For a moment there is nothing, not a feeling or thought or sound.
“Good enough.”
His mouth crashes into me full force, sucking my nipple hard and nipping it soft.
His tongue dances on it, and I almost come, even though my panties are still on and he hasn’t touched me anywhere else yet.
I reach down for his erection and it fills my hand, so long and thick my fingers can’t completely close around it. He unleashes a low growl at my touch.
His hand reaches down and grazes the outside of my panties, and I press my hips up to increase the pressure.
And—oh no. It’s a mistake.
“I’m already too close,” I panic-whisper into the dark.
His bronze skin is everywhere, his hands, his mouth, and I try to hold it in but I’m cresting high on my wave, suspended in pleasure for three delicious beats before crashing down and unravelling around him, shaking with the warm release of what I’ve needed for too long: the sexual touch of a man who wants me.
“Did you just …?” He grins, his smile making him instantly boyish, with dimples that cut so deep I can’t help but touch a finger to them.
“I’m sorry.”
Oh god, how embarrassing. It’s all my vibrator’s fault—I’m no longer used to being intimate with an actual person.
Technology allows me to knock out an orgasm quicker than I brush my teeth in the morning, usually with an image of Casey behind my lids.
Casey, the first time we met. Before Ally. Before Helena. Before everything.
But clearly racing to check “orgasm” off one’s to do list is not proper etiquette when another person is involved.
“Don’t be sorry.” Danny draws up the cool duvet, tucking it under my chin.
My legs twitch in recovery beneath it. The intensity of my climax rocketed the anxious energy out of my body with such force, there is nothing left.
I feel heavy and tired and good, as if under the spell of a weighted blanket and two Xanax.
My eyes flutter closed, sleep drawing me in.
I try to fight it, but the urge to rest is all encompassing.
“Wait,” I murmur, flopping my hand out sleepily in the general direction of his erection. “Sex-positive people reciprocate. Do you want me to—”
He laughs, gently moving his hips away.
“No, no. You just sleep. This was the best night I’ve had in forever.”
And Danny kisses my forehead, launching me into the still waters of sleep, new ripples branching out ahead of me.