Chapter 9 #2
“Her fears of what would happen to her after motherhood,” Mo finished. She turned away, moving her shadow farther from his and examining the inset tapestries of flowers and trees on the wall as they talked. “I know. I read about it in college.”
“The fertility angle is interesting. I noticed that in your reading today. I hadn’t really thought about how she probably was pregnant at that party, timing-wise. Not that I have mapped out a literary character’s menstrual cycles or anything.”
“Oh, I did,” Mo said, then realized how weird it sounded.
“It was for a paper for that class. A women’s studies/English crossover class where we talked about periods in literature.
Uh, not like thematic interrelated years of writing, but actual menstrual periods.
” She tried to catch his expression. She wasn’t trying to unsettle him purposely, but if that was a side effect, she’d take it.
His face gave away nothing, maddeningly.
“That’s cool,” he said, sounding genuine.
It annoyed her when men were put off by the existence of periods, as if women weren’t much more inconvenienced for six days a month, plus all the hormonal turmoil on either side of that.
Maybe his interest was part of the agent persona.
In her experience, an agent was good at selling a lot of things, including a feeling they wanted you to have about yourself.
In this case, making her feel uncomfortable didn’t work into whatever four-dimensional chess he was playing.
“What novels did you read in the class?” As Wes asked, he sat on a bench on the far end of the ballroom. His body language invited her to join him, and after a second, she did.
“A lot of the classics. Little Women . Middlemarch . Pride and Prejudice .”
“It’s been a few years since I’ve read any of those, but I don’t actually remember any mention of periods.”
Mo laughed. “I know. The class focused on the erasure of natural body processes—periods, pregnancy, menopause—even in these texts heavily read by women. Sometimes these older books were so much about the mind of the woman, but they didn’t mention her body. At least not the normal mechanics of it.”
“It wasn’t considered genteel to talk about,” Wes said. She could smell him from his position, a citrusy, piney smell that could only be from cologne. Unless he naturally smelled that good, which would be royally unfair.
“Kind of like masturbation,” he added, jarring her from her thoughts, which had veered too close to his body anyway.
She choked on a laugh. “I mean, yes. Absolutely.”
“Tell me Ahab wouldn’t have been wanking off every day, Moby Dick or no Moby Dick. I mean, a dude at sea?”
“Jane Eyre would totally have been rubbing one out on the regular,” Mo said. “Young woman with a tough job and a hot boss? That’s—”
“Only natural,” he finished. He stood, breaking eye contact, and rubbing his hands on his jeans.
“Stress does that to some people,” Mo said to his back. She could still sense the warmth of his body, just a foot away.
His eyebrow quirked. “Does what to some people?”
It was her turn to stand. She wanted to see if he would step back from her, but he held his ground. “You know …”
“No, tell me.”
“Makes them horny,” Mo said, not seeing a point to avoiding the word.
“Oh, see, I thought stress made people OD on edibles. My mistake,” he deadpanned.
She shoved him lightly. The hardness of his chest under her hand made her stomach go liquid. He must have seen something in her face, because his laughter stopped. His glance snagged hers, eyes brown and flinty.
Once, on vacation in Colorado with friends, she’d seen a wildcat up the hill, hidden by the trees, all except those gleaming eyes.
Instead of feeling hunted now, his changed expression made something in her predatory.
Her heart racehorsed in her chest. She wanted to feel the full weight of him, take the measure of this man who was trying to beat her.
He was her better by so many common standards—educationally and financially and socially.
But here, this weekend, in this ballroom, they were equals.
She was staring at his mouth. As she forced her gaze back up to meet his, she noticed that he too had been eyeing her lips.
Without knowing who leaned first, leaning happened.
Mutual leaning, though Mo would never admit to leaning more than Wes did.
Once their lips met, the kiss deepened instantly.
A magnetic tug so deep she felt it through her core.
She was so dialed in to his lips that when his fingertips whispered over the back of her neck, she froze.
It was her fault for focusing on the kiss so completely.
Or maybe his fault for having the power to do that, directing her whole being through a sieve until all her neuroticism and ridiculousness had been processed into a thin sandy mixture that he let fall through his fingers. Until those fingers touched her.
He must have felt her back go taut. He drew back like she’d bitten him. “Sorry,” he said. The light shifted above them as a cloud passed over the sun, the yellows and greens and pinks going dark, the spell of the last few minutes broken. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“No, I wanted—”
“Okay, good, because—”
“Stress.” She interrupted his interruption. “Too much stress.”
He smiled wanly. “Something like that. I wouldn’t figure you for the reckless type. You seem too—I don’t know. Type A?”
She scoffed, then took a breath. “Type A? I’m a perfect AB mixture, thank you very much.
” If he wanted to pretend the kiss didn’t happen, she could do that.
She couldn’t forget what she’d felt pressing against her leg, even through his expensive jeans.
It made her curious and yes, deeply and enragingly horny.
But midwestern girls were good at many things, and hiding behind a smile and joke when all you wanted to do was scream or punch or kiss someone was one of those skills. “We should continue the tour.”
“We should,” he said, but as they walked down the hallway he said, “You have a really good mouth. It’s—pert.”
She took the chance to appreciate the ceiling before responding.
They entered yet another room, this one a gallery with plenty of distractions from his exasperating eyes and the way he kept trying to knock her off-balance.
If she didn’t keep moving, she might accidentally kiss him again.
“Pert mouth? That makes it sound like I wash it out with cheap shampoo.”
His eyebrows pulled together. “Is that a shampoo?”
“Oh, I bet you were bathed in the finest of argan oils with sheepskin washcloths or something.”
“Sample size, but sure. Something like that. Let’s say that my mom has always gotten a lot of free products. Expensive and nice-smelling ones, and I’ve taken my share of them. I got my pick of the men’s ones.”
“But you had to share them with your dad, right?”
“Ha, not anymore.” His back was toward her as he looked at an impressionist painting of a shepherd and lamb, but she could tell his manner had changed.
Something in him completely shut down, as if the room had cooled forty degrees, but only on his half.
She had no idea what the problem was. Did his dad get sick or something?
Was that what all the frantic whispering was about at the dress store?
She had pretended not to notice, focusing on her dress, but she could tell something was wrong.
“You didn’t hear that,” he said after a moment. “Sorry. I’m—not on today.”
“Not on?”
“Don’t you ever have to be on at work? Or with friends? I feel like that’s all I’m ever asked to be.”
“I mean, I’m friendly at work, or professional. It’s not a struggle for me, but I guess our jobs are different.”
“And you …” He left the space open for her to fill. She realized she hadn’t told him she was the clich é small-town-girl-in-NYC-doing-the-food-service-thing-to-make-rent. It was a clich é because the formula worked. “I work in catering.”
He considered that. They gave up any pretense of looking at art and sat on wooden chairs stationed near the front of the gallery. “Not writing?”
“No,” she said simply. “I had some friends who worked writing gigs—copywriting for companies, editing for textbooks, freelancing listicles and essays. It all seemed like so many words, draining the well before you even got to the writing you wanted to do. I’m not knocking it—money is money.
Personally, I wouldn’t have the creative stamina for that lifestyle, and sadly, I don’t have the family money to just write. ”
She didn’t mean it as a jab, but he obviously took it that way from the way his spine straightened. “I work. I work hard.”
“I’m sure you do.”
He ran a hand through his hair and stood.
“I didn’t get into agenting with my parents’ help.
I applied with a fake name for my first internship, actually.
When I got it, when I started working, I had to come clean, but I wanted to start on my own terms. The literary world is its own beast, luckily or unluckily.
One that my mother hasn’t tamed. I always wanted to be the person to help books be discovered, to scream about the ones I loved into the universe.
It takes a lot of my time. It’s a lot of laptop time. Writing and agenting is—”
“A lot?”
“A lot, yeah. Sometimes all I get are my morning pages. Usually a morning page, singular.”
“I do that too. They’re mostly shit, but it’s good to get it out of my head.”
“I can’t imagine anything you—” He stopped himself. “It’s useful. The lack of filter.”
“It’s nice to be unfiltered sometimes,” she said. “And thank you for complimenting my lips.”
He laughed. “Honesty is hardly a compliment.”
“You have nice lips too,” she said. She didn’t add that she liked talking to him, and that her prose made her breathless. “I ruined the mood.”
His mouth quirked. “Moods have a way of reappearing, at least in Victorian lit.”
“So you’re saying this was foreshadowing?”
“As long as there are no exes in the attic, ready to set fires.”
“At least none that we’ve seen on the tour so far.” She refused to smile at him again. If she did, she was worried she wouldn’t stop. “I need to get my head on straight for tonight. It’s obviously not right now.”
“Fair enough.” He rose and brushed the nonexistent wrinkles out of his shirt. “But while I walk you back to your room, I have to ask: Did you talk about madness in your class? I hated when I saw it in literature as a symptom connected to feminine childbearing or lack of children.”
And of course he had been thinking about that class all along. She laughed, and as they walked, she recited as much of the syllabus as she could remember from almost ten years ago as if she weren’t picturing him naked.
Which was just as well, since Gary stepped into their path just before they got to her room. He seemed surprised to see them walking together, and she was suddenly extremely grateful they were not caught doing anything else. “Estelle’s daughters have arrived,” he said. “Cocktails in fifteen.”
Mo glanced at her phone and saw that it was almost four—later than she had expected.
No delaying the inevitable. She was going to meet the people who would control the trust if for some reason Estelle …
well, she didn’t want to think about that, especially since she liked Estelle.
She also thought Estelle really liked her and her book.
She was ready to make a second and third first impression on Estelle’s kids, but she hoped she could still rouse some fighting instinct when her mouth felt bruised from Wes’s kiss.
Her kiss too, she guessed, though she’d never thought about how a kiss really belongs to two people at once.
It always felt like she was kissing someone, or she was being kissed, never that two magnetic forces were meeting.
She needed to get her head out of Wes’s mouth and back into her work. Wes gave a wave over his shoulder as he left. “Door open or closed?” he asked.
“Closed.” She had fifteen minutes, and she needed to either climax or cool down, and honestly, it could go either way. Plus reapply her mascara. She needed all the time she could get.