by Elia Winters
The elevator doors dinged open right into Patrick and Geoff’s condo, and she stepped out, shouldering her messenger bag. Her first impressions were of space and light: the condo had high, lofted ceilings with exposed wood beams and brick walls, and the wall to her left was filled with giant floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Hi! You must be Lori.”
The gorgeous guy leaving the kitchen and wiping his hands on his apron was definitely not Geoff. He was white, first of all, and okay, maybe she’d been picturing someone different. But damn, different wasn’t always bad; he had a hipster vibe, with styled auburn hair and a full, neatly trimmed red beard and mustache, and he was dressed in slim-fitting jeans and a short-sleeved Henley stretched across his chest. He extended a hand. “I’m Patrick.”
His hand was large and warm, dwarfing hers. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“It’s all lies.” He chuckled and let her hand go. Her nerves settled a bit. Patrick was undeniably gorgeous, but if that joke was any indication, he was also a bit of a dork.
She liked dorks.
“Lori! Hi.” Geoff emerged from what was probably their bedroom and came up to take her hand in both of his. “I’m so glad you came.”
“Couldn’t turn down the opportunity for some free food and conversation, right?” Hopefully, that sounded noncommittal enough. “You have a place I should set my bag?”
Geoff directed her to the coat hooks on the wall near the elevator. She stepped back to look at him again. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in something other than work clothes.” He was always wearing dress slacks and a button-down shirt, usually accompanied by that same tweed jacket with its elbow patches. Now, though, he wore jeans and a polo shirt, and damn, that man had beautiful forearms. Forearms had never been something she’d considered sexy before, but he moved his hand a certain way and the muscles rippled, and she had to pull her gaze away. Shit, this wasn’t a good indicator of her ability to keep her wits about her tonight.
“Your hair looks beautiful.” Geoff adjusted his glasses, like he wanted to see it better. “Those curls are…wow.”
“I know you know better than to try and touch them,” she said, and he pressed a hand to his chest.
“I would never! You think my mom raised me in a barn?”
They laughed together, and he gestured to the condo at large. “You want the full tour?”
Patrick, who had gone back to the kitchen, called after them, “Take your time! I’ve still got about ten minutes to go in here.”
“It’s not that big of a condo, Patrick.” Geoff led her over to the windows first. They were open, letting in the late-spring breeze. “We’ve got a great view of the river, as long as you don’t get vertigo.”
“Not a big fan of heights, but I’m okay indoors.” Lori peered at the water rushing four stories below. Geoff started to tell her about the paper mill that had been here before the building had been converted, and, of course, he knew its whole history. He walked her around the living room like he was giving a formal tour, full of facts and statistics, and she absorbed it like his students probably did: half with an interest in the subject, and half captivated by his sheer depth of knowledge and passion. The living room was bright and airy with its large windows and high ceilings. Geoff continued the tour in the back of the condo, opening the door to the bedroom, then stopping abruptly in the doorway as if realizing where he was taking her. It wouldn’t have been weird if he hadn’t stopped short and then tried to regain his words.
“It’s just the one bedroom,” he said, like he was apologizing.
She peered past him. “It’s nice. Lots of room. I like how you’ve decorated.” She wasn’t kidding either. The room was resplendent in shades of light blue and purple, spacious with plenty of room to walk around and even a sitting area in the corner. She couldn’t resist teasing Geoff. “Nice bed.”
Rather than getting flustered, though, he smiled. Every time she thought she might embarrass him, he smoothly leaned into her teasing. “Thanks. We could never tolerate something smaller than a king. A person needs room to move around, don’t you think?”
“Of course.” She paused. “I’m doing all right with a queen, but I don’t have to share.”
“But sharing’s the fun part.” Geoff licked his lips, adjusted his glasses, and led her out of the bedroom. “And here’s Patrick, just finishing dinner.”
Patrick was indeed wrapping up, setting everything out. He moved naturally around the kitchen. Every couple had the one who cooked more, and that seemed to be Patrick.
She joined them both at the table for build-your-own soft tacos, which was a pretty smart way to have someone over for dinner, since nobody got anything they didn’t like. Geoff poured wine for them, and Lori settled into the meal and some conversation about wine and how she didn’t know much about it.
“I always feel like a poser,” Patrick said. “My musician friends all go on wine tours, and one of them, his dad even owns a vineyard down in Connecticut. And here I am, and I’m like, ‘I like the fruity ones.’ If it weren’t for Geoff, I’d be a complete rube.”
“Who says rube?” Geoff rolled his eyes. “I only started learning about wine because of the history element.”
“How many podcasts do you listen to about wine?”
Geoff paused, clearly counting in his head, and Lori started laughing. Geoff threw her an indignant look. “Fewer than five.”
“Fewer than five!” Lori chortled.
“And what about you?” Geoff turned to his husband. “How many YouTube channels are you subscribed to that are about not just music but specifically stringed instruments?”
“Leave my YouTube out of this.” Patrick joined their laughter and added some guacamole to his taco. “What about you, Lori? What are you a giant nerd about? Because don’t tell me you’re not a giant nerd. I can tell these things about a person.”
“Well…” Lori considered how to answer. “Relationships, for one. From my PhD research. And my best friend owns a sex shop, so I’ve become a nerd about sex toys, but more nerd-adjacent. Although that isn’t really proper dinner conversation.”
“We are nothing if not proper.” Patrick’s eyes sparkled, teasing, and something warm curled inside Lori’s belly that made her want more. This was going to be trouble, for sure.
“But in a less scandalous bent, I’m fascinated by text production. Old printing presses, typewriters, bookmaking, all that stuff. I seek it out. There’s this bookbinding museum in New York…” she began.
“I’ve been there.” Patrick’s eyes lit up. “The Center for Book Arts. Right near Koreatown, right?”
Lori gaped. “You know about it?”
“Yeah! I went to one of their workshops with this woman I was dating back when I was in school.”
“You’re from New York?” Lori was about to add, “I’m thinking of moving there,” but didn’t, for some reason. She hadn’t even applied for any jobs yet.
“Not originally,” Patrick explained. “I’m from Boston, but I went to school in New York.”
“Juilliard,” Geoff added, with a fair amount of pride in his tone.
“Juilliard. Wow.” Lori had known at least one person who had applied to Juilliard but no one who had gotten in. “Geoff was telling me you’re a violinist.”
“I do what I can.” Patrick shrugged, but Geoff nudged him.
“He’s just being modest. He’s amazing. He won the National Youth Music Competition.” Geoff fairly glowed when bragging about his husband, and the love between them would be evident to anyone watching this interaction. A single point of tension eased inside Lori. She wasn’t going to destroy this relationship by joining them for dinner, or anything else.
Not that they’d reached that point, but Lori couldn’t deny the shift in her thoughts about the evening’s potential. These men were fine as hell, clearly in love, and—so far, at least—fun to talk with. They’d probably be amaz
ing in bed.
She forced her attention back to the present, because that wasn’t a line of thought to entertain while sitting at their dining room table and eating tacos. “You’re from Boston, and you moved to New York for Juilliard. What brought you back to Mapleton?”
Patrick seemed to take a long time chewing before answering. “I moved back to Boston to take care of my mom, halfway through my junior year. She had breast cancer, and it progressed a lot faster than the doctors were expecting. She was okay on her own until she wasn’t, and so I came home.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.” Lori couldn’t imagine dealing with that now, let alone in her early twenties.
“Thank you. She really wanted me to finish school, but I didn’t have it in me to move back to New York after she died.” He refilled all of their wineglasses, which had been rapidly dwindling. “I came out to Mapleton and began taking classes at the university, and I met Geoff. So I stayed.” He smiled at his husband, crookedly. “Right, babe?”
“You met out here, but you’re both from Boston.” Lori sipped her wine.
“Ironic, right? But we love western Mass,” Patrick added quickly. “It’s beautiful. Even if the music options are kind of limited.”
Geoff built another taco with careful, methodical precision as he spoke. “Patrick’s never going to have the music scene here that he had back in New York. Or the social scene.”
“The social scene is overrated. We’ve both got friends here. But Geoff’s got something more important than friends.” Patrick glanced over at his husband. “A tenure-track professorship.”
Ah, so that explained a few things. If Patrick had been one of Lori’s therapy patients, she would have dug into that more, tried to figure out whether he was really happy here in Mapleton or just convincing himself for Geoff’s sake. But she wasn’t his therapist, and she barely knew him, and she had enough sense to keep her mouth shut and focus instead on dinner.
“Tell me about you, Lori.” Patrick leaned forward, examining her. He had gorgeous blue eyes, like they could stare right into her soul. He hadn’t locked onto her with their full power before. “Geoff told me about your thesis, but I don’t know much about your story other than that. How did you come to Mapleton? Or are you from here?”
Lori settled for the condensed version of the story, skimming through growing up in Baltimore and wanting to be a lawyer, but changing her mind while at Smith. She mentioned her year abroad in England, couch-surfing and working odd jobs while deciding what to do with the rest of her life. Finally, she shared her return to academia, a semester at Oxford before returning to the States for good. Geoff asked her about her hobbies, and the three of them spent the rest of dinner discussing the best running and biking routes in Mapleton, shows they were watching, and Geoff’s attempts to find and recreate ancient pastries from around the world.
After dinner came dessert, a lemon meringue pie Geoff had made from scratch. “I thought we were having some ancient Moroccan delicacy,” Lori teased, fork biting through flaky pastry crust.
“I almost made baklava.” He smiled. “But I didn’t know if you were allergic to nuts.”
“I am not,” Lori replied. “Despite the way my dating life right now would make it seem.”
After a second of silence, Patrick cracked up laughing, and Geoff just shook his head in amusement. “See, Patrick, I told you she was your type—of person.” His hesitation gave him away, a moment’s pause that Lori locked onto. “His type” meant something different than “type of person.”
“What do you mean by that?” Lori asked, washing down her pie with some coffee Geoff had brewed. “What’s your type of person, Patrick?”
Patrick stroked his beard, pie abandoned for a moment as he considered her. “I like a good sense of humor. Someone comfortable with themselves. Someone smart, at least smart about some things. Who’ll dig into their interests.”
“I’m smart about some things.” Lori’s pie was disappearing at an alarming rate. “Geoff, this pie is criminal.”
“Do you want more?” He went to get up, but she waved him down.
“I’ll explode. Seriously, have you thought of becoming a baker?”
Geoff made a face, and Patrick laughed. “Geoff will sleep until noon if he doesn’t have to go to work. He would never keep baker’s hours.”
She wouldn’t have expected that about Geoff, but he was nodding his agreement to Patrick’s statement. “And you?” she asked Patrick. “Are you a night owl or a…morning person? Is there a bird for that?”
“A lark,” Geoff answered. “A night owl or a morning lark.”
“Whatever’s in the middle.” Patrick shrugged and finished his pie as well. “Hon, you would know that.”
“A hummingbird,” Geoff answered. “A little morning lark, a little night owl.”
“Then that’s me.” He made little fluttering motions with his hands. “I’ll get up on the early side, and I’ll stay up late too. I peak in the midday hours. That’s when I do most of my work.”
“I’m more of a night owl, like Geoff. Who is apparently only sharing delicious desserts with friends.”
“I’m pretty selective with my—desserts.” Geoff’s lips turned up as he closed them around a forkful of pie. Was that an innuendo? He’d paused a bit right before “desserts,” but this time it appeared deliberate. Geoff had never seemed like an innuendo kind of guy, but she was gaining a whole new perspective on him this week.
“Don’t lie. Geoff is a slut with his desserts.” Patrick winked, and they all laughed.
“It’s true.” Geoff sighed. “I can’t resist. I bake something delicious, I want everyone to be able to enjoy it. Our neighbors downstairs get a lot of it, and the rest of our game night group, and I bring sweets into work all the time.”
“Maybe I need to come by your building more often and cash in on this.” Lori smiled and set her fork down on her plate. “What about you, Patrick? Are you giving your gifts away as well?”
Patrick raised an eyebrow with mock affront, but the twinkle in his eye indicated he was enjoying their game. “I beg your pardon?”
“Geoff said you play in a band. Do you have any concerts coming up? CDs for sale?”
“Yes to all of that.” Patrick played with his fork. “If you’re interested, we’ve got some gigs on the calendar. Maybe you’d like to come along.”
“Maybe.” The possibility was intriguing. She’d come over for dinner to get to know them better, and with their flirtatious banter building throughout the evening, she could see the possibility of something much riskier to her heart than a one-night stand: an actual, ongoing friendship.
She got to her feet, as unsettled by that realization as she was interested in seeing where the evening took them. “Can I help with the dishes?”
Geoff let her load the dishwasher amid protestations that it was unnecessary, and finally succeeded in shooing her away so he could put the rest of the leftovers in the fridge. When she returned to the living room, Patrick was sitting in an armchair watching her like an attentive predator, gaze following her every move. Damn, it had been a long time since anyone had looked at her like that, like he wanted to devour her. Geoff sat on the couch, leaving room for her to join him.
The breeze blowing in through the windows was cool, but Lori felt a lot warmer. Both men were focused on her with clear interest. The atmosphere pressed heavily against her with a different type of energy. She could get used to this kind of attention, and suddenly, her hopes for the evening shifted toward far more physical desires. Crossing her legs at the knee, she leaned back and stretched one arm along the back of the sofa as Patrick changed the topic to where she thought they might eventually end up.
“Geoff tells me you did a whole doctoral dissertation on polyamory.”
“I did.” She hesitated, then went for it. “Geoff tells me you’re polyamorous.”
Patrick smiled. “I’m not surprised.” His gaze flicked over to his husb
and, then back to her. “I’d love to hear about your research.”
Sometimes, people asked her that like she was going to tell them a list of sordid details from orgies, even though that wasn’t what polyamory was about. From Patrick, though, it sounded like both: a genuine invitation and a come-on. His tone was soft, sultry, and a bit playful.
She wanted to give in, flirt back, but it felt wrong to do disservice to her topic. So, she went for the honest route. “The first part of it was pretty dry. Lots of books, most of which said the same things over and over. A fair share of academic journals on human sexuality and psychology. But the later research was better. A lot of interviews with polyam people. Most in person, some by Skype.”
“Most in person,” Geoff repeated. “Are there that many polyamorous people in Mapleton?”
“More than you’d think.” Lori was always surprised by the way small liberal college towns attracted nontraditional relationship structures. “But I traveled as well, across New England. More cities than towns. A good amount in Boston and a bunch down in New York.”
Patrick stroked his beard. “Do you think we’re all a bunch of kinky degenerates?”
Lori shrugged one shoulder. “I’m sure some of you are.” She smiled, eyeing Geoff near her on the couch. He was more than she’d expected: flirty, confident, driven. Although he was pure “buttoned-up professor” at work, he unbuttoned quite a bit at home…and she wanted more. “But I like the kinky degenerates, so I’m probably not the best person to ask.”
Geoff laughed. “I think everyone’s a weirdo of some kind, when you get down to it.”
“Yeah?” Lori shifted, watching Geoff’s gaze follow the slide of her hem above her knee. Perfect. “What’s your perversion of choice?”
