4. Not a girl wizards outfit
Chapter 4
Not a girl wizard's outfit
“Megan?” Nico repeated. “Are you in there?” Clearly, her personal choose-your-own-romance sticker featured a man with a truck.
“Just a sec.” She yanked her hand out of the box and slammed the lid into place. “Come on in.” Her breathing and her pulse both felt too fast for a woman who had merely been leaning on a tool bench, but at least her voice sounded composed, not like a woman left nearly undone by a fictional fireman.
Nico stepped through the door carrying a square electric fan balanced between his hip and elbow. “Found this in the laundry room.” He handled the metal box with ease, and the way he’d coiled the dangling cord around one wrist emphasized the strength of his forearm. More strands of hair had escaped his short ponytail, falling along his cheekbone and drawing attention to his mouth. If she hadn’t been reading that magazine, she wouldn’t have let her gaze drift lower to his shirt, which conformed to his chest, or dart below his belt, where his jeans stretched tight enough to hint that he tucked left.
Shock coursed through her. What the hell had happened to her self-control? Her manners?
“Do you want it?”
When she jerked her gaze back to his face, she caught him similarly glancing the length of her body, all the way to her bare legs, and then rising again past where she assumed, hoped, prayed, that her aroused nipples didn’t show through her industrial-strength bra.
He lifted the fan and raised his eyebrows. Did she want it, he’d asked, presumably meaning, did she want the fan .
“Thank you,” she managed. He seemed to be waiting for a gesture, but she didn’t—couldn’t—move, uncertain whether her knees would support her if she abandoned the bench. Although possibly if she took a step toward him, she wouldn’t stop until she’d pressed against his clingy T-shirt, and that wasn’t acceptable either.
He moved in her direction. She couldn’t look away from his dark stubble, guessing that he hadn’t shaved since yesterday. She wasn’t an expert on men’s facial hair, but she’d volunteer to track how many weeks it took him to grow an ’80s mustache.
Please let him blame her flushed skin and breathing on the early summer, the temperature, moving boxes, on anything but the truth, as expressed with a word as outdated and tacky as the magazine she’d been reading: She was horny.
To set the fan on the tool bench, he came close enough that his arm nearly touched hers. She wouldn’t describe his hands as huge, not like the fireman’s in the story. Nico’s were in scale to his tall, lean proportions. The encircling cord compressed individual dark hairs on his forearm, reminding her that before cell phones, most men had worn wristwatches, the wide bands emphasizing the difference between a masculine wrist and her own. The few times she’d borrowed a watch had felt more intimate than borrowing a sweater, perhaps because a man’s pulse usually beat directly under the band.
“Shall I plug it here?” He even spoke like a librarian’s offspring.
“Sure.” Somewhere, a universe existed in which she would be witty, maybe even sparkling. “I mean, yes, please.”
Observing his hands as they unwound loops of cord from his wrist felt as intimate as watching someone remove clothing. What would it look like if he spread those work-roughened hands over her breasts? Or even—and this vision was so filthy that her brain paused all its other functions to marvel at the perfection of its lewdness—what would it look like if he wrapped his hand and fingers around his own cock? If instead of electrical prongs sticking out from between his thumb and fingers, it was the big fat head of his penis?
One part of her brain recognized that she’d let her imagination sail too far, and yet, somehow, the high rasp of her own breathing, the deeper sound of Nico’s, even the dull buzz of the ceiling light, were all louder than the voice cautioning her that single mothers must always be careful.
Inserting the plug into the wall outlet required him to stretch across the plywood bench, which brought his arm and shoulder into the envelope of her space. Work had warmed his scent, melted away any shampoo traces and left a man who smelled like his natural skin. She suspected that even though she hadn’t been toting boxes, arousal had worked the same transformation on her body.
“There.” He turned to face her. “Ready when you want it.”
He meant the fan, nothing else. “Thank you.” She mirrored his position, shifting to brace a hip on the bench. They became two pieces that could fit thigh to thigh if they slid toward each other. He looked relaxed, half smiling and seemingly without the self-consciousness that afflicted her. His body alignment, the way his shoulders tilted one direction but his hips rotated at a different angle, evoked the classic lines of Michelangelo’s David . Men like Nico, men who had the poise of an artist’s model, made her ache for enough talent to sketch from life. Maybe if she’d spent a decade in a studio, she’d be a person who could casually wield a pencil or charcoal to evoke the human form on a blank page. Or she’d be able to manufacture the warmth of flesh from inert clay well enough to recreate the dip where a man’s waist connected to his hips, to form the rise of his pelvic bone and breathe life into a male Galatea.
“What are you thinking? Your expression—” He broke off his question and raised both eyebrows.
“Ahh, about contrapposto .” The art term wasn’t the least confusing answer she could have given, but at least she hadn’t blurted out that he made her want to sculpt nude torsos. She’d take the label geek over cougar.
“Is that a…” His brows lowered as he made a guess. “Coffee place?”
She felt her cheeks heat enough that it must be noticeable, even in the increasingly stuffy garage. “No, it’s an art term for a specific pose.” His smile and the way he leaned closer to her as she spoke invited her to continue, so she waved a hand back and forth between their bodies. “The way you were standing, weight on one leg, shoulders and hips twisted in two different axis. Axes? Axises?” She always saw these words in her head, but stumbled on the pronunciations.
At least the interruption when he looked down to check his unconscious pose enabled her brain to close her mouth before she could ramble about how the sculptor Polykleitos had tried to capture the ideal male proportions through mathematical ratios. Under no circumstances would the phrase ideal male proportions exit her lips.
“Is that what you do?” He looked at her again. His brown eyes seemed darker than they had a moment ago. “Art history?”
“Sort of.” She had this nailed. Normal topic, normal speech, normal respiration—well, maybe not quite. “I work for a video game company in Seattle. It’s called Bronze Age Digital.” Usually, she let people think she was a techie rather than explain that she advised on details like clothing and architecture for developers of an ancient civilizations role-playing game, but she might as well tell Nico the complete story. “I check that stuff like the art and settings look authentic. Gamers always complain if a hoplite spear looks like a medieval pike instead of a doru . Always.”
“Bronze Age?” He grinned, but it wasn’t mocking. “Sounds modern compared to my regular job.”
“What do you do?” Work was a safe topic compared to imagining how his arms would feel wrapped around her.
“Geology. Surface process interaction with volcanic landscapes.” He held out one hand, palm up, and ran the fingers of his other hand across it rapidly. “Lava, meet erosion.”
She was undeniably the lava. Her eyes fell to the T-shirt slogan she’d noticed earlier. “Ergo the chert shirt? I assume that’s a rock?”
He nodded. “A sedimentary one, sort of like flint, often used for arrowheads. Today, we use it for roadbed gravel.”
Her turn to nod.
“Mostly, I spend summers doing field work near Bend, but my old roommate founded Full Service when we were undergrads. He still runs it. I pick up jobs for him when I’m around. I head out next week, in fact.”
She didn’t have any more rock questions, and he seemed content to stand near her and…not talk. The smile that flirted around the corners of his mouth combined with the masculine straightness of his lower lip and the lush bow that defined his top one to draw her closer. His expression also hinted at a slight awkwardness, if she had to guess. Then his gaze landed on the bankers box next to her.
Exactly what she wanted to avoid. She pointed to the container labeled costumes in the high corner. “Do you think you could get that bin down for me? The stepladders are already gone.”
Unexpected bonus that he stretched enough to flash a strip of skin above his waistband, not much, and not for longer than an instant, but she was clearly in the take-what-you-can-get phase of single status.
She slid the box of magazines farther down the workbench in time for Nico to plop the tub of costumes in its place.
“What costumes were popular in the late nineties? Power Rangers?”
“For boys, maybe.” She worked her fingers under the edge of the lid. “I think I was Hermione—”
She froze.
The black leather on top was not a girl wizard’s outfit.
They stared silently into the container. She could distinguish a thing on the very top of the stack. She wasn’t going to even think leather panty, so maybe it was called a bikini bottom, but it wasn’t shaped to fit a female bottom, but rather a man’s front.
It had leather fringe.
As if the wearer would dance to make the fringe swing. As if a man who liked to jiggle his car keys had, once upon a time, jiggled other stuff that she would never, ever contemplate.
“Holy shit,” Nico whispered next to her, breaking the spell. “Those mutant ninja turtles really grew up.”
She slammed the lid back on the box. “Didn’t see it. Didn’t see anything.”
He was laughing, and she couldn’t fight joining him. Her shoulders felt like they were moving faster than her heartbeat as it all bubbled up, this incredibly strange day, this sexy guy, her mom, her dad in a nineties leather-bar outfit, and who knows what else was going to happen. But the laughter started fresh every time one of them looked at the other.
“My parents”—he gasped—“have known yours since before I was born.”
“Oh, nooo!”
“Parties.”
“No, don’t even think about it.” Shaking her head and laughing at the same time, she grabbed the block of sticky notes, found the marker that had rolled to the back of the bench, and scribbled “donate.”
He held out his hand for the pen, mischief lighting up his face and his gaze never leaving hers until she let the marker fall into his palm. She froze when he cupped her hand, the one holding the stack of innocent, blue-colored squares, in one of his. She stopped breathing. Like, she knew she had stopped because one moment, she was still slightly laughing, and the next, his warm palm was under her hand and she was completely silent. So she wasn’t breathing anymore.
Then he crossed out the word she’d just written, telling her she wasn’t going to donate the box of costumes.
He started to write a new word. First an M. Then an E. G. Watching him write her name while he cradled her hand felt even more intoxicating than the eye contact had a moment ago.
“Who knows.” He shrugged, and his tanned fingers peeled the square off the pad, then pressed it to the box. He wasn’t touching her anymore, but he could have. She wanted him to.
When their gazes connected, she realized it had been too long since she’d felt brought inside a circle of two by nothing more than the way a man’s mouth curved to smile. “Who knows what?”
“Maybe you’ll want them.”
Not as much as I want you.
His lips parted enough for her to see the white edges of his front teeth. Imagining the feel of those teeth scraping her nipples made her ache to brush her chest against something solid, something like his arm or shoulder. In the pause, his stomach gurgled.
She must have blinked or jumped, because he laughed self-consciously. “Sorry.”
Her gaze automatically followed his gesture as he dropped his hand to his abdomen and rubbed. It was impolite to keep staring at the gap of skin revealed above the band of his jeans, she knew that, but by then, he’d bunched all that soft cotton, and she could see dark hair circling his navel. Disappearing lower, like the fireman story. So yes, she stared.
“Guess I’m hungrier than I knew.” His voice broke her paralysis.
She scanned the workbench for her phone to check the time. It couldn’t be noon already. “What time is it?”
“Twelve thirty. Tyler and I are heading out to donate a load and then get lunch. Want something?”
He meant food , actual food that a person put in her mouth, not anything else.
“Like the truck says, our motto is full service. Whatever you want’s included.”
“Hey, Nico?” Tyler called his name from the hallway, jarring them both.
Nico turned for the door. “Should I surprise you?” he asked over his shoulder. She was running a beat behind, because she hadn’t answered before he added, “With lunch?”
“Sure. Okay.” She rushed words into the gap after his question. “I like ham or turkey, cheese, any cheese, but no avocado.”
“At your service.” He reached for the doorknob.
The offer of a sandwich was not an offer of his penis, nor did saying the word service with that sexy vibrating voice when they were talking about food—just food—mean she should assume subtext.
“Wait, can I give you some cash?”
He waved her off. “I’m not really a starving student. It’s fine. Back in about an hour, bearing one avocado-free sandwich.” With another grin, he disappeared into the main house, presumably to join Tyler.
If this had been a myth, a vengeful goddess would have sent Nico to expose the flaws in her character, which in turn would result in an epic disaster that would climax with some flavor of -cide. Not matricide, not precisely, and not libricide, because she had no vendetta against books. Her current grudge was with retired librarians who deliberately threw together their adult children, but neither her functional Latin nor her half-forgotten ancient Greek were racing to invent words today. The librarian posse remained undoomed.
“Took a while in there, Boss.” Tyler’s muffled voice came from a room deep in the house.
Nico’s reply was a rumble that Megan strained, and failed, to decipher.
“I mean, she’s hot. And you—”
“Yeah, I noticed.” This time, Nico was loud enough to hear. The two men seemed to have moved into the hall, close to the front door.
“Wanted to say that we all remember Chloe, always will, but maybe you should go for it—”
“It’s lunchtime, not another fucking therapy session, okay? Let’s shut up and get lunch.”
Ouch. The hard tone of Nico’s comment made Megan wonder who Chloe was and why Nico would need therapy about her.
“Sorry, man. I wasn’t thinking.”
In the pause, Megan realized she was holding her breath, waiting for Nico’s reply.
“Yeah, me too.” She imagined him shoving his hand into his untidy dark hair, the movement short and frustrated to go with his tone. “Shouldn’t have snapped. And I am trying, okay? She’s easy to talk to. I’m trying.”
After the apologies and tumbling words, one of the men closed the front door hard enough that the workbench vibrated under her palms.
The end of the conversation had created a flutter inside Megan’s chest. Easy to talk to. One of the nicer things anyone had said about her lately. She replayed the rest of the exchange, but it was hard to understand without more context. Tyler seemed to be encouraging Nico to flirt, despite whatever this person named Chloe had meant to Nico. Maybe the younger man was yet another cog in the schemery of their mothers.
She turned back to the bench and rested her palms on the carton of magazines while she listened to the cargo van’s engine start. It seemed to her like nothing stood in the way of exploring their attraction but themselves. Granted, Nico’s past self might be messy, if his friends and his mother believed he needed this much help. But his hair was the kind of messy she could sink her fingers into, his jeans were the kind of scruffy she wanted to rub against, and she’d volunteer to wipe smudges off his cheekbones ad infinitum.
In the silence, that little flutter hatched by Nico’s words grew into an epiphany. She could be the pursuer. She could ask for what she wanted, whether it was a sandwich or whatever Nico seemed to be proposing when their gazes connected. He was an attractive man, almost age-appropriate, who liked to flirt, not hers or anyone’s impending doom. His mouth kept saying full service, and his eyes kept hinting at meanings more personal than box taping, so maybe she should ask for something that wasn’t going to send either of them to therapy, something uncomplicated and fun. Something like a beer with him later. And then maybe—
Sex? Yeah, maybe. Actual sex. With Nico.
She knew herself well enough to acknowledge that because the garage was basically finished and she was too hungry to start the family room, if she didn’t occupy her brain, she risked spending thirty minutes rehashing her conversation with Nico, and everything else she’d overheard, in light of this dangerously seductive new thought.
Maybe Aleesha could distract her. She reached for her phone. She wanted to tell her friend about Nico, but the point was not to think about him, so she looked at their conversation. Nothing new since Megan had sent a picture of one of the magazines while Aleesha was on the bus.
I read part of one of these. It was
She paused. Ridiculous wasn’t the right word, but she couldn’t decide what was while she tried to complete her thought.
I read part of one of these. It was indescribable. Kind of porny.
But then she deleted the whole text without sending it. Her friend was probably too busy to reply or in a crowd where she didn’t want to get out her phone. Texting Aleesha wasn’t going to work as a diversion.
Truthfully, she was ahead of schedule. She could probably take a few minutes to search the box for the rest of the fireman story. Her mother had practically ordered her to have fun, and reading was fun. Good, healthy fun. Mind-improving fun. And right at her fingertips too.
The magazines stuck to each other, making them hard to separate when she wanted to check publication dates. Although someone had taken the time to circle blurbs on most of the covers, they seemed to be jumbled in the box without any organization. The chaos was uncharacteristic of her mother. Under September 1985, she found April 1987, and then March 1982. She paused to admire that cover, a brunette wearing fake bunny ears with a suggestively thick and straight plastic rabbit gripped in her fist. These magazines were forty years old, but some things, including, apparently, the shape of a vibrator, hadn’t changed much.
Why would her mother and/or her aunt have kept these trashy reads for decades?
An inch of paper stuck out of the center of the September 1984 issue, which beat eeny-meeny as a way to pick.