2. Too sexy for my chert
Chapter 2
Too sexy for my chert
Megan wasn’t prepared for company. The postcard fluttered to the floor while she jammed her nipples into her bra and zipped her shorts.
Outside, a vehicle door slammed, sounding louder and heavier than a car’s would.
She tugged the quilt into place and fluffed the pillow, eliminating the most obvious signs of her horizontal jog, but that didn’t relieve her dry mouth or the weighty feeling in her breasts. The beeps of a truck backup signal prodded her to find the shirt she’d tossed away earlier and stuff her arms into the sleeves before she scooped up the postcard and moved toward the window.
Through a gap in the white sheers, she watched a lanky guy in the driveway guide a white panel truck toward the garage. A smaller van parked at the curb displayed a cartoon logo of two muscular men draped in togas, flexing for a gaggle of grinning women beneath the name Full Service Movers. Across the bottom, a rippling scroll proclaimed: We give FULL SERVICE! No request refused.
Nope, no double entendres there, definitely not.
While she stared, the pad of her thumb flicked the edge of the postcard, matching flutters in her imagination. What if—this was what she needed to pin down before it disappeared—what if she proposed that the playable roles were an all-female cult? They could take it further than the female roles in games like Assassin’s Creed by requiring that any of the eighteen million original players who wanted to explore the expansion would have to play females; the female gaze would drive the whole damn thing. We’d have to hire a lot more female developers and artists. That would set us apart. We’d have buzz about that, and pretty sure we’d have a noticeably different product at the end. This wasn’t her lane, it wasn’t even close to her job description, not to mention it was probably ludicrous and wrong and ill-informed, but—
The truck shut off, the silence indicating that the men would soon expect her attention.
She never had enough time to think, cycling among work, her daughter’s activities, the grocery store, and taking care of her town house. Of course she had to interrupt a blossoming idea for her work-self in order to handle chores.
The door on the big truck opened.
Her brain didn’t have to tell the rest of her that the second mover, the one who hopped out of the truck, was a full-on, bona fide adult male who, at least from this distance, checked all her grown-up woman boxes. His dark brown hair was long enough to be pulled back into a stubby ponytail, which emphasized the angles of his face. The jeans that covered his lean hips were so faded that the morning sun turned the tight denim nearly white across his thighs. The lines and planes of this man’s chest and legs didn’t say “lanky,” they said “firm.”
He stopped next to his coworker and scanned the front of the house.
She retreated, hopefully before his examination had reached her window. Hovering in the middle of the floor, she felt odd, bendy-funny, as if her little break on the bed and her burning ideas about the game extension and then the men’s arrival had stretched her in too many directions.
When a hero climbed the mountain at Delphos to seek a prophecy, did the second-chance virgins who served the Oracle—in college, she’d learned they’d usually been previously married older women—peer out to watch his approach like she’d done? Perhaps they too hid behind sheer fabric or touched their own breasts as they looked upon a visiting male arriving in their midst. Perhaps the sight of a sun-bronzed male caused them to slide the linen of a pleated chiton across their tightened nipples while marveling over the visitor’s legs or considering how to unpin his wrap, how to untie his belt, how to undo him.
Images filled her brain, like screenshots flashing in front of her eyes. The Oracles in her proposal would be a team of women who weren’t punished for their desires, but rather celebrated and empowered. The color palette could reflect the jewel tones and gilding in Collier’s painting, flush-warmed skin and lots of swirling crimsons, whether fabric or blood or fire. Lush imagery was one thing her workplace did extraordinarily well.
Feet scuffed across the gravel drive.
Fuck. The embodiment of her imaginary man, a man she’d say yes to in an instant, was poised to knock, but she needed five minutes on her laptop, which, of course, she’d locked in her car. Virginia Woolf’s thesis that a woman requires a room of her own in order to work as productively as a man hadn’t included having the room packed up moments before an idea hit. At least her mother’s clipboard by the front door would be guarded by a squad of pens. She could get this idea down in two minutes, tops.
Years of familiarity helped her skip down the stairs while she folded and shoved the postcard into the rear pocket of her shorts. The men’s hazy, backlit outlines approached the front door, but she knew the rippled antique glass and dim entry hampered their ability to see her.
She reached the hall table, where, yes, her mother had included markers. But being economical and tidy, she had not left blank paper.
One of the men knocked. Without the muffling entry rug and framed paintings, the sound bounced between the bare floor and walls.
Her skin would have to suffice. At least she couldn’t lose it or toss it while packing. The cap of the blue permanent pen came off, and she wasted a precious fraction of a second switching the marker and cap between her left and right hands while the elements of a proposal—characters, plot lines, art, themes—burst in her imagination. She scrawled Oracles = assassin cult near her inner elbow as they knocked again, louder. She added Collier, in case she misplaced the postcard and forgot the artist.
“Coming,” she called as she stuck the lid on the tip of the pen, brushed a hand over her abdomen to confirm she’d fastened everything, and took a deep breath. By the time she flipped the bolt and yanked the door inward, she’d adopted a smile and pushed work to her brain’s “later” list.
Wow. This close, the men on the porch had the tanned and perfectly scruffy forms that advertisers plastered on promotions for luxury four-wheel drives. If these two sold deodorant, she’d put it under her pillow and have dreams filled with manly essence, indeed she would. The dark-haired one was older than a job at a student-run moving company implied. She’d guess late twenties, based on the mature strength that filled out his shoulders and neck without the padded edges men in their thirties began to develop. A guy his age who worked for a campus moving company was probably a grad student, the owner, or a total stoner. Regardless, he appeared to be old enough that she didn’t have to be embarrassed to let her eyes linger on the tight fit of his T-shirt.
Her conscious mind finally processed that the slogan Too Sexy for My Chert , printed above an image of a faceted gray rock, must be a geology joke, assuming the pronunciation of chert sounded like shirt. So, a grad student, and maybe a literal stoner. Pretending to read the horrible pun again gave her a second chance to study the hint of dark hair peeking past the ribbed neck of her demigod’s tee. Nice.
“I’m Nico, from Full Service Movers.” His smile wasn’t quite symmetrical. At the corners of his brown eyes, one cheek crinkled into deeper lines than on the other side. He tilted his head to indicate the younger man. “This is Tyler.” Then Nico flourished his arm in a way that drew her attention to the elaborate curving lines and colors of a tattoo that encircled his left biceps and disappeared under his sleeve. “We’re at your command, Mrs. LaSorda.”
Not only was Megan not Mrs. LaSorda, she wanted to tell him she wasn’t Mrs. Anything. “I’m Megan, the daughter. My mother left me to handle the house. Come in.” She waved a hand to usher them past. Odd that her mother had booked the movers under Megan’s father’s name rather than Jensen, which her mother usually used.
“Pleased to meet you, Megan.” Nico stepped aside to let Tyler enter, then he followed.
From this position, she could confirm that Nico’s butt was, in fact, a masterpiece under the faded denim, but she suppressed the need to wet her lips. The man was a furniture mover, not an ice cream cone.
He turned to her, but she was confident she’d raised her gaze to eye level before he could catch the direction of her attention. “I hope your mother didn’t have a problem,” he said.
If a voice could be a snack, Nico’s would be the brownies you knew you should let cool in the pan, but couldn’t resist diving into while they were too gooey to be cut, forcing you to keep slicing to even the edges. Staring at him while he spoke made her feel like running her tongue on that sticky-sweet brownie knife.
“Apparently, she asked for me specifically.” His slight shrug let her know that he questioned why, and she too thought the news that her mother had asked for a specific mover was odd.
“Maybe moving was too emotional after forty years in the house?” That hideous girlie uptalk couldn’t be coming out of her mouth. She swallowed, and prepared to modulate her voice into competent adult tones. “She did leave a detailed list.” Megan didn’t need the written reminder of her two other responsibilities, the garage and family room, so she handed the clipboard to Nico.
Before he’d flipped past the top page of instructions, his eyebrows—winged like Mercury, herald of the gods— Geez Megan, stop already— arched at what must be their maximum peak. “Detailed.”
“Yep.” Megan’s awe over how her mother had managed complex job responsibilities alongside a smoothly organized household had increased with each stage of her own child’s development. “She’s a retired research librarian.”
“Wait, what?” He jerked his gaze from the clipboard to stare at her. “Your mother’s a librarian? That’s a coincidence.” He glanced around the hallway, seeming to look for another person, but there was only Tyler reading on his mobile phone. “So’s mine.”
“How likely is that?” Skepticism trickled down Megan’s spine. Even in a place with four thousand university employees, not everyone was a librarian, yet both of their mothers were.
“Extremely.” His grin reappeared, crinkling the corners of his eyes in a way that made her return his smile and nod. “If she plays poker.”
The certainty was no longer a mere suspicion swirling at ankle level. It had become a wave cresting above her head and she had to lift her chin to breathe. “On Tuesday mornings.”
“At Wiffle Waffle.” He shook his head. “I can’t even say that place’s name without smirking.”
Nico’s presence in this house was an epic setup, as far from coincidence as the secret back door to the Death Star had turned out to be. Her mother, always trying to encourage her still-seeking-other daughter, was presumably in full possession of pertinent details regarding her poker partner’s son. Megan was confident Nico was single, addiction-free, employed, and neither a narcissist nor a sociopath. She assumed her mother, sex podcast producer, was also fully aware of Nico’s appeal. What Megan didn’t know was how she should feel about this development. Or how he did.
“But there’s no Mrs. LaSorda in the Wiffle Waffle Librarians Social Club, is there?” Nico continued speaking almost as if he hadn’t recognized their mothers were casting a rom-com. “I had to engrave their names on that antique vase they use as a trophy.”
“The giant Moscow Mule pitcher?” Her mother’s crowd had become day drinkers after they retired. Night drinkers too, but she wasn’t going to police the woman who’d raised her.
He nodded. “That one.”
“LaSorda is my father’s last name. My mother’s Kathy Jensen.” She’d inherited more of her mother’s Scandinavian coloring than her father’s part-Italian heritage.
“Ms. Jensen? The one with the rainbow hair?”
Her turn to nod over the colorful changes her mother had embraced once she’d been liberated from materials acquisition budget meetings.
“My mother is Greta Galianakos,” he added.
Megan recalled the frizzy-haired lady with the loud hands who’d given her a high chair at the baby shower, and her son who’d caused such a— “Oh, are you the one…” She stopped.
She’d walled off most of the last months of her pregnancy, when she didn’t know how she was going to afford living in Seattle on a graduate student’s limited income while raising a baby whose father had left the country. The shower was one of the few times when she could recall laughing during that period.
He dipped his head apologetically. “Uh, yeah, we don’t need to…”
For an awkward moment, she wondered how to escape the sudden, yawning pit in the conversation.
“Come on, people.” Tyler, the other mover, looked up from reading his phone.
She’d forgotten he was there.
“You can’t quit now,” Tyler said. “What’d my boss do?”
“Nothing.” She flipped her hand vaguely. Flirting 101: Don’t talk about any baby shower, especially not your own, with a hot guy. “I don’t remember.”
Nico directed a look at Tyler that apparently conveyed silent guy communication, because the younger man said, “Guess I’ll go grab boxes from the truck, boss. ”
“Good idea, you do that.”
The click of the door closing behind Tyler shouldn’t have startled her. She’d been watching, after all. But in the new silence, her attention centered on the deeper sounds of Nico breathing. Her shoulder muscles tensed, and she wondered if her pulse had skipped.
“What was in that huge box my mother made me carry?”
She let out a breath, resigned to going there, at least briefly. “A high chair.” Yes, I had a baby who is now eight and, yes, I’m a single mom.
He rolled his shoulders, a move that flexed the fabric across his chest while she read the bad pun for at least the tenth time. Nico exuded the casual confidence inherent in good-looking men, ones who looked sexy enough to grace a magazine cover even when they scrubbed shower grout. No doubt his life was sufficiently charmed that he could run errands without his hair losing its touchability, pick up dry-cleaning without having the thin plastic bag cling around his legs, and open beer bottles without foam erupting from the top. Did he even know that his just-working-with-my-hands look was a magnet to women surrounded by office drones? Possibly not. He seemed too sincere.
Her plotting sex-talk podcaster mother, however, unquestionably knew that Greta’s son would tempt like a popsicle on a hot day. A-nee-thing , she’d said. Right.
“My mother still teases me about the flowers I knocked over.” His gaze flicked to a spot lower than her chest, then back to her face, too quickly to feel like he’d assessed her figure.
Comprehension of his swift glance arrived at her brain an instant later than it seemed to occur to the rest of her body, because her throat was paralyzed before she understood why: He’d checked her ring finger. Her empty ring finger.
“I'm sorry.” The expression in his eyes changed to contrition. “I must have reeked and been a total jerk. It was the morning after the game against the Huskies. I was nineteen, and I don't think I sobered up until at least five hours after the mess I made at your party. I was stupid and…" he took a deep breath. "Well, really stupid.”
“You were there five minutes at most.” The part of her mind that spun fantasies calculated his current age as twenty-seven to her own thirty-five, not necessarily too young for her. And it wasn’t like she had snakes growing out of her head. She was better than passable. “Seriously, the vase was the type that comes free with every bouquet.”
“Thanks for trying to make me feel better, but I was obnoxious, and I’m sorry.”
Back then, the distance between a nineteen-year-old undergrad and a twenty-seven-year-old mom-to-be had meant all she’d noticed about him was his buffoonery, but now he was the age she’d been when she’d had Callie. The ocean of experience that had once separated them had shrunk to become a wide bay, crossable if they wanted.
“Did you ever hear how my mother made me work off the broken table?”
“Wasn’t it something from a book?”
“Our family tradition is literary punishment.” He ducked his head. A loose section of hair escaped the tie at his nape and flopped across his cheekbone.
To call his hair dark silk was a horrible cliché, but it looked smooth enough to deserve the description. Without a thesaurus to recommend better words, nothing but versions of silk, silky, silken bounced inside her skull. She had sufficient self-control to keep her hands at her sides rather than reaching out, as she might have to her daughter, but to be extra safe, she wrapped her fingers around her thumbs, making fists. She would not touch.
“I had the choice of painting our fence or coming to her office and writing ‘I will not belch, regurgitate, or curse in front of my mother’s friends’ on the whiteboard.” From the way he squished half his face with an exaggerated wince, she couldn’t decide whether he was pretending to be clueless, or if he truly had no idea that explaining his mother’s punishment would warm the insides of another librarian’s offspring. “One hundred times.”
“Basically, you had to choose between playing Tom Sawyer or Bart Simpson?”
His eyebrows, darker than his hair, smoothed out as his wince turned slightly up into a smile. “Pretty sure she was channeling Anne Shirley, not Bart.”
Her doubts vanished. A twenty-seven-year-old guy who dropped an Anne of Green Gables reference had to be fully aware that those two ladies had hatched this staged introduction. His lack of objection created an odd flutter in her stomach while his deep brown gaze looked directly into her eyes. Her feet seemed to shuffle, or perhaps she swayed, and he moved, but she was suddenly close enough to smell him. He was soap-fresh and summer-warm at the same time, and so inviting, she wanted to bury her nose in his neck. Holy crap.
It was her turn to be flirtatious and witty. She parted her lips and inhaled, the air nearly whistling across her teeth. And—
Her mind blanked. Her mother might expect Megan to be able to sort rooms while also flirting, or treat Liplock with Loading Guy as an item to be checked off a list, but Megan’s multitasking skills didn’t encompass that broad of a spectrum.
“So, ah, back to the list.” A woman with a master’s degree in classics and the ability to read—at least sort of—two dead languages ought to be able to avoid beginning sentences with so , even if Seamus Heaney used it as the first word of his Beowulf translation, but no .
At least she could stand straight, which maybe, might, or at least ought to, double for confidence.
“The boxes with my name on them—‘Megan’”—right, because he might have forgotten—“are going to Seattle with me. That’s where I live.” Not that he needed to know. Shit, he probably did know.
“Got it.”
She wanted to think he looked disappointed by her return to talking about packing as he glanced at the clipboard.
“Tyler can start in the kitchen.” When he met her eyes again, whatever emotion had flickered across his face a moment ago had been replaced with what was becoming a familiar joking smile. “Where do you want me?”
“Anywhere.” Her voice cracked on the double meaning, forcing her to swallow before she could continue. “I’ll be sorting things in the garage—it’s the door to the left at the end of the hall.” Despite the parental plot, she did have responsibilities. She wiped her palms on her denim shorts with what she hoped was casual grace but suspected was too much friction. “Call if you need me.”
“Likewise, if you need me.”
She wanted to hear him say fuck .
She should not have thought that.
“Okay, sure.” She turned and walked away. The back of her neck tingled as she sensed his continued attention. The twenty feet to where she could disappear into the garage might as well be the Pacific Crest Trail, because she couldn’t lift a foot without being aware of how one buttock, then the other, flexed with each step, how her thighs rubbed against the seam of her shorts. Don’t run, she told herself.
Tonight, at the end of the day, she could ask him for a beer. That would be fun.
Don’t run. She kept placing her feet in front of each other, even though it felt like they belonged to someone else. Walk. Don’t scamper, don’t trot—or worse, trip. Walk. To the garage.
End of the day, she repeated to herself. Do the work first.