The Girl Next Door

by Jordan Blake

  He leaned down and his lips brushed against my ear. “But where are you going right now?"

  I let my head fall against his back and opened the folds of my robe open to reveal my glistening breasts. "I kinda need to get cleaned up first."

  “I’m very good at cleaning up dirty girls,” he growled as he picked me up and crossed the room to the small bathroom.

  As my arms flew around his neck I decided that dinner and space could wait…

  13

  Dakota

  I took the last bite of spaghetti from my plate and then leaned back and smiled at Drew. It felt so odd and at the same time amazing being out in public with him, sitting at a table at a restaurant together. Like a real date. It was exactly what I’d fantasized about since forever, and now that it was happening, it didn’t feel quite real. It felt like a wispy, beautiful dream I was afraid to wake up from.

  “Was it good?” Drew asked.

  I nodded. “Awesome. Yours?”

  “Great.”

  I nodded again. Like an idiot. Which was a problem.

  This was another big part of the problem. We weren’t acting natural together; it was awkward. In fact, that exchange about the quality of our meals was about as casual as we’ve been able to achieve throughout the entire dinner. I didn't know what it was. Maybe just the fact that this was all so new. Or—and I didn’t even want to think about this possibility—maybe it indicated that we weren’t really compatible in any area aside from the bedroom. Dang. That was such a depressing thought; I didn’t even want to entertain it…but here we were, with nothing to say to each other. It was hard to get away from that.

  Then, Drew did something that made him burrow into my heart even further than he had been before. It was the same thing that I loved when he did during sex, and it turns out that it was just as hot out of bed as it was in. He took control.

  He leaned forward and took my hand, looking steadily into my eyes so that I knew he was really present in the conversation. He'd given what he was about to say a lot of thought.

  “So, let’s address the elephant in the room. Or, at least one of them,” he finished a little sardonically.

  All of the air rushed out of my lungs in a relieved sigh. Just like that, he'd broken the awkward tension between us and the comfortable vibe we’d shared before was back. “Yes, please! I don’t think I can take one more second of this excruciating politeness.”

  He smiled and leaned back. “That makes two of us. So, I’ll start. First of all, I was a real shit for leaving while you were sleeping. Seriously. That’s not like me. The situation was one that I’ve never been in but I shouldn’t have done that.”

  I couldn’t help the thrill of hearing that he didn’t go around banging all the girls in the neighborhood. Of course, I hadn’t thought that was his MO. But hearing it was nice, nevertheless. Still, I didn’t think he should completely be off the hook “No, you shouldn’t have.”

  “If it helps at all, I did have second thoughts about it and went back the next day.”

  “I’d already left by then.”

  “I know. Your mom answered the door.”

  My jaw dropped. “Shit.”

  “Funny, that was exactly my reaction, too.” He grinned.

  “Did you tell her anything?”

  “I don’t kiss and tell.” Then his tone turned serious again. “There’s no excuse for my actions but I at least want to explain.” He lowered his voice and leaned even closer to me so that there was no way anyone in the restaurant could hear what he was saying. “When you fell asleep in my arms, after we’d just had the best sex of my life, I think the reality of the situation just hit me. I’d been fantasizing about you for months. And when we were together, it was like a heightened version of that fantasy. It was incredible, but also a little unreal. But then, holding you in my arms, watching you sleep. So peaceful, so sweet…it just all came crashing down on me, and I needed to breathe.

  “So, I did the only thing I know to do. I did the thing that’s become my habit, and my downfall, for so many years. I left. I tried to go back to my comfort zone. I don’t know if you know this, but Cecilia and I tried to have kids. We tried for years. After her third miscarriage, I wanted to stop, but she didn’t. So instead of facing it with her I shut down. With my wife, it had just been emotional. After her last miscarriage, she’d had an affair. I caught her and she begged me to stay. She said she couldn’t live without me. I forgave her, at least on some level but it just drove me further away. I completely checked out. She might have physically been the one to finally leave, but I’d been gone for years. I was empty and I was fine with it, because nothing could hurt me when I was empty.

  “With you, I actually left, not just emotionally, but physically, to head back to my comfort zone. The place that I had total control over everything. But, here’s the thing…it didn’t work. I still couldn’t stop thinking about you. It was different. You were different. You weren’t a fantasy that kept coming back to my mind. You were a reality. From the moment I touched you, you were mine and you owned me.

  “Every time the thought of us being together popped into my mind so much more would come flooding in; your smile, your eyes, the way your hair smells like a summer rain, the way your cheeks flush when I touch you. And there were hundreds of other moments, things that I couldn’t erase from my mind no matter how hard I tried. I ached for you in those moments. It was more than mental, more than emotional. It was a physical craving.

  “I realized I’d finally found it—what I’d been missing for all those years. Something that was real. I know that you are it for me. I found the one thing worth stepping out of my comfort zone for. You. And I know that things are complicated, but I’m willing to fight for us. To fight for you. I can work from anywhere. I’ve wanted to move for years, but something kept me there. I think now I know it was you. I was looking at apartments around here, and, well…we can see if this is real… If that’s what you want.”

  He stopped for a moment, looking sweetly into my eyes, to gauge my reaction.

  And that reaction? Sheer. Fucking. Terror. This was real, it wasn’t just a school-girl crush and he felt it, too. He’d just opened up to me about his life, his marriage, losing a baby. He told me that he would be willing to move to be closer to me, that he wanted to see if this was real and it was everything I could do to stop myself from crawling into his lap and telling him that I love him. Love him! This was supposed to be a hot affair. I’d dressed up as a damn schoolgirl. I could not be in love. Panic rose in me and the walls felt like they were closing in on me.

  He must have been able to see it in my face, because his clouded over. “What’s wrong, Dakota?”

  “Nothing.” Even I didn’t believe the sound of my too-bright voice as it hit my ears. I’m sure he didn’t.

  “Just talk to me. What’s wrong?”

  What’s wrong? At the moment, everything. Somehow in the span of one week I’d fallen in love, that’s what was wrong! I had to get out of there. I didn’t know why. My brain wouldn’t work. All I knew was I couldn’t breathe. I stood up too quickly. My chair squeaked as it slid backward forcefully under the power of my legs. “I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” I mumbled, rushing across the restaurant’s dining room in a mad dash to safety…or what felt like it, at any rate.

  What the fuck am I doing?

  The answer to that was simple enough—running away from something great just because it got a little too intense and real.

  Why the fuck am I doing that?

  Well, that one was a little tougher to answer.

  I risked a quick glance back at Drew, sitting alone there at the table now, watching me with a bewildered and somewhat bereft look on his face. I felt a pang of guilt, but did my best to wash it away as I tore my gaze away. Unfortunately, it was a lot harder to wash his image from my mind than my eye-line.

  I hustled into the lobby and crossed the small hallway where the bathrooms were located. At the last second, thoug
h, as if my feet had a mind of their own, I veered off course and headed straight out the door. I couldn’t believe I was doing that. Not with my conscious mind, at any rate.

  I felt like I was floating above myself, observing from the outside rather than consciously taking part in my actions. I watched myself walk through the swinging doors, but I was powerless to stop it. I watched myself jog across the parking lot and onto the sidewalk, but I didn’t know why. I watched myself pull out my phone and use an app to call a car, but there was nothing I could do to interfere. I watched myself climb into the backseat and burst into tears as the car pulled away, and it was the one thing I had seen myself do since getting up from the table that actually made any sense to me.

  14

  Dakota

  “Dakota…Dakota…Dakota…DAKOTA!”

  I heard Annie’s voice from across the room, but instead of answering, I just pulled my comforter up around my chin and burrowed further in. I decided lying completely still and staring at the wall while hoping she would just give up and ignore me was a much more pleasant prospect than forcing myself to come out of my cocoon—and out of my funk—long enough to have a rational conversation.

  Until she started yelling. Then I realized that playing possum was not going to be a viable strategy.

  I rolled over, moving as slowly and deliberately as possible, as if every movement hurt and it was a gigantic effort just to make eye contact. Of course, while the majority of this was me being a total passive-aggressive drama queen, there was a bit of truth to it. I felt like shit.

  “Okay,” Annie said in her that’s-enough-I’m-taking-charge-now voice. “It’s one-o-clock in the afternoon. This has gone on long enough. You’re getting out of bed and we’re going to breakfast. I’m gonna call Mads and Mariana to meet us.”

  “Nooo…” I groaned, far more pathetically than I had to. It was just that I kind of liked wallowing. There was a certain comfort to it. It was as if, even though you know it’s bad for you, it still feels so good. Like ice cream and potato chips. Or The Real Housewives of Atlanta. You know it’s rotting you from the inside somehow, but the trip down feels like such a nice ride.

  “Yes,” Annie replied firmly. She didn’t share my theories on wallowing.

  I figured I’d offer a compromise. That way, she’d feel like at least I was cooperating a little bit. I sighed. “Fine. Breakfast. But just us. I’m not up to the whole big group conversation right now. I can’t handle it.”

  “Fine,” Annie agreed easily, with a hint of self-satisfaction. She looped her arm through mine and we walked out the door. “I never even planned on calling Madison or Mariana. That was my overshoot, which I knew you’d use as leverage to feel like you were making a deal for yourself. I just wanted to get you out of bed.”

  I had to laugh. Annie did know me. Very well. It felt good to have a friend who was that familiar with the inner workings of my brain, if a little spooky. After we had settled ourselves into a booth at our favorite dive-diner—purveyor of fine grease-laden fare, a proven cure for everything from a hangover to heartbreak—Annie said, “All right. So what happened last night? Was he an asshole, or were you?”

  Again, I had to laugh, this time at her pure bluntness. Also at the fact that, to my logic- and statistics-obsessed roomie, everything in the world was binary. Zeroes and ones. This or that. Black or white. The way she saw it, if I was upset, someone had been an asshole. Him or me. That way of looking at things wasn’t always right on. But this time? Nail, meet head. Now hit the shit out of it.

  “It was me.”

  “What did you do?”

  I barked out a laugh, still finding it difficult to believe I’d actually done something so very out of character. “He started describing all this intense stuff about how he realized his feelings for me were real, he opened up about his marriage and what had gone wrong, he said that I was worth fighting for, and I was the first thing in a long time worth getting out of his comfort zone for, and I just…bounced.”

  “You mean, like, in your chair? From excitement?”

  “No. I mean I actually, physically left the establishment.”

  “Wow. That must've been an awkward conversation. ‘Oh, I, uh, feel weird about all the shit you just told me. Can you drive me home now while we don't continue to discuss it?' So how did he take that?”

  “That would have been a very awkward conversation. If it had happened...”

  “What? If what happened? You said you left. No offense, Dakota, but you are making it really difficult to follow the chain of events here. What. Exactly. Happened?”

  “Exactly?”

  “Preferably, yes.”

  “Well, the exact chain of events were as follows—I told him I had to go to the bathroom, jumped up so fast I pretty much knocked my chair over, ran across the dining room and into the lobby like I was being chased by a rabid dog, and when I was almost to the hallway that led to the bathroom, I made a spur of the moment detour and headed out the door. Then I called an Uber and went home. Exactly.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were an asshole!”

  “Gee thanks. I really appreciate the support.”

  Annie reached across the table and squeezed my hand, her features softening a bit. “Sorry. I’m just messing with you. Well, you know. Mostly. Why did you feel the need to do that? What lit that fire under your ass that had you running away in a panic? I mean, if I’m reading all the signs right, you are head over heels in love with this guy, so why did you ghost on him?”

  I shook my head. “If I knew that, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Well, think about it. What exactly was it about the things he was saying that freak you out? What does it remind you of, or what feelings made you want to run?”

  I sat quietly for a moment, mulling that over in my brain. I leaned back in the booth and closed my eyes, trying to remember not just his words, but the mental pictures they conjured up. It became clear to me pretty quickly what the issue was. “It was just too much, too fast. It was just the speed at which I felt things moving ahead. It went from holy shit, how awesome that I’m having a mind-blowing sex fling with Mister Bean, Magical Sex God to holy shit, he looks at me and sees a white dress and a picket fence. I panicked.”

  Annie nodded. “Makes sense. Not to me, necessarily. I can only imagine that, if someone who looks like he stepped right out of the pages of a magazine and was in the habit of giving me ridiculously amazing orgasms told me he saw me as a forever kinda girl, then running out of the room wouldn’t have been my first reaction… but, I guess I can understand it.”

  My eyes widened as the realization of what I had actually done washed over me. “Holy crap, Annie. What did I do?”

  She shook her head with a sympathetic look on her face. “That’s not what you should be asking yourself.”

  I leaned forward, desperate for any advice that might put me on the path back to Drew. “What should I be asking myself?”

  “Honestly?” Her brows raised.

  “Preferably, yes!” I repeated what she’d told me.

  “How you can undo it.”

  15

  Dakota

  Hands shaking, I knocked on Drew’s hotel room door. He’d told me where he was staying during the awkward portion of our dinner last night and that he was going to be here for “a few days.” It would serve me right if he was gone. I’d left him sitting in the middle of the flipping restaurant. Even if he was here, he was probably furious with me. What if he hated me? What if he never wanted to speak to me again?

  Before my thoughts could go spinning too far into craziness, the door opened. There stood Drew, in all his handsome, sex god glory. He took my breath away, just like he did every time I saw him. His intense eyes, strong jaw with the sexy perpetual five-o’clock shadow, broad shoulders, strong abs… damn, how had I ever have left him sitting in a restaurant? How could I be scared of falling in love with him? How could I be scared of th
ings moving too fast?

  Of course, depending on how pissed he was, that may not be a problem anymore.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  Drew, yet again, saved me by doing what he did best—taking control. He smirked, but not in a mean way. It was friendly, and his eyes sparkled with mischief—like he wasn’t making fun of me. We were in on the joke together. He leaned his shoulder casually against the doorjamb. “Hey, stranger,” he teased, echoing my words to him on the steps of my sorority house the day before.

  I laughed, looking down at the ground and then back up at him. I smiled widely. It was out of my control, and I didn’t think I could’ve stopped even if I’d wanted to. “Long time no see,” I replied softly.

  He grinned and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me flush against him. “I love the sound of your laugh, Dakota,” he breathed against my neck.

  Far too soon he let his arms drop and we walked inside the room, and he gave me a bottle of water from his mini-fridge. I took it gratefully and drank a long gulp. I noticed how hungrily Drew eyed my lips around the mouth and it caused a flutter low in my belly. God, I had a visceral reaction to this man that verged on primal.

  I took a seat in the armchair that sat across from the bed, pulling my knees up to my chin and resting my feet on the edge of the chair’s seat. I wrapped my arms around my bent legs and held them there. I was, I realized, quite literally holding myself back from jumping his bones. I knew without constant vigilance, I would be across the room and tearing his clothes off in an instant. But that wasn’t how problems got solved. If we were going to have a real relationship—and I realized now I wanted that more than anything—then we need to have a conversation that consisted of more than just telling each other how we wanted to be touched.