by Julia Kent
Hi, nice to meet you. I paid $5,000 after watching you gyrate shirtless on a stage. I’m Laura Michaels and don’t feel obligated to have sex with me.
She barked aloud at the thought, scaring Snuggles and making the cat hiss, then attack the spider plant that grew for what seemed like miles in a spiral around the living room.
“Sorry, Snuggles.” Even her tone carried a thick blanket of guilt. Laura rolled her eyes. Hot bachelors. Buying a date. If she could catch a guy like that, what would she do with him? Probably shake with terror and worry he’d point at her and make fun of her. She was so far out of the league of guys like that. It was like she played a different game in a different language on the wrong planet.
What would it be like to be with a man...like that? The kind with chiseled features, his chest a relief map of hot flesh? How would it feel to run her hands through his hair, to smooth her palm across a cobra back covered with muscle, to possess him and have full access to touch and tease and enjoy him whenever she wanted?
Even better—to be wanted by a man like that? One who would burn for her, whose touch would be more sensual than sexual, more primal than functional, a man who couldn’t wait to be with her, to watch her, to touch her.
To own her. Not just her body, not just her sex, but her heart—mind—soul.
Another smile played at her lips, but this one was wistful. Sad. Yeah, right. Like that would ever happen.
A girl could dream, though.
And, apparently, she had.
Hefting herself up off the couch, she let herself indulge in a pity sigh, the kind that comes out in a long, slow, tortured outbreath with a little whine at the end.
The kind no one ever admits they do.
The closest she’d ever get to a man like the ones in the bachelor auction would be in her imagination. A shower was what she needed before she headed to work. A shower where her own hands could be those hands, the shower head could be the second set, and the hot water would help to wash away her tears.
And then she’d start the day fresh, clean, and mostly emptied of the memory of two men she didn’t even have the right to imagine would want her.
Yet she did.
Dylan
“How about this tie?” he called out to Mike, who was stirring something on the stove. The guy was so tall the steam from the pot wafted up, passing the oven hood, making the ends of Mike’s blonde hair curl slightly. He always looked like a gentle giant tending to a dollhouse stovetop when he cooked.
Shirtless, wearing his firefighter uniform pants and suspenders, Dylan had found a red tuxedo bow tie that matched the stretched-out suspenders. He took a quick look at his own body, taut and muscular compared to Mike’s tall, lean look. They were opposites, but the laws of physics were right.
Opposites attract.
Mike turned around and let out a choked sound of surprise. “Nice. Love it. You planning to oil up that chest?” His roommate turned back around and shook his head slowly. If Dylan weren’t as deeply amused by his own plight, he’d have thrown something at Mike, but he let out a strangled snort instead.
“Good idea. Baby oil or olive oil?”
“Shouldn’t the ‘Italian Stallion’ use olive oil to keep it all authentic? Mediterranean and all that?” Mike said, his back turned to Dylan, head hunched over a pot of something on the stove that smelled like heaven.
Dylan was really regretting the fact that he agreed to be in this bachelor date night auction event. All the money would go to charity, but...
He didn’t like feeling like an entree in a room full of hungry, rich women.
“What are you cooking?”
“Beef bourguignon. I got this great cooking wine from this wine dealer in Winchendon who sells Spanish and Portuguese wine—”
“It’s red. That’s all I need to know about wine.” Those words made Mike turn and give Dylan a look of mock hurt, his hand dropping the spoon and going to his heart, as if he’d been shot.
“Philistine.” A lover of good wines, Mike had dragged Dylan to more vineyards than Dylan could count. Seriously. He couldn’t count them because all that good wine had made him drunk, and once he was sloshed he couldn’t remember much.
“Hipster.”
“Them’s fighting words,” Mike growled, making Dylan laugh with a sound that came out of him before he even thought about it. A sound that made Mike pause.
A genuine laugh.
Hadn’t heard much of that since their partner, Jill, had died more than a year ago.
His eyes caught Mike’s and in the space between them, in that second of connection he knew Mike was thinking the same thing, too. The soft smiles on their faces wore off like sand on a windy day, swept off by a sudden gust of wind, leaving a barren spot.
“Huh,” Dylan grunted, breaking the gaze. He lifted the red bow tie and walked next to Mike, opening the cupboard above the stove. Mike reached first—the guy was more than half a foot taller, after all—and his big hand wrapped around the olive oil bottle.
“Here,” Mike said, back to one word utterances, eyes troubled and dark. Dylan took the bottle with a curt nod and ambled back to his bedroom, wondering how his life had devolved into this.
Half naked, a bottle of oil in his hand, and no woman.
He knew exactly how. That was the problem.
Jill.
His eyes moved slowly, crawling over the dresser, the end table, the big, wide bed. Dylan surveyed his desk and bookcase where pictures of her dotted the landscape like bright bursts of wildflowers, the only true color in the room, vibrant and achingly beautiful.
Reaching for a picture, he grabbed one of her and Mike at the summit of a ski trail in New Hampshire, goggles shoved on top of their heads, hair mussed and crazy, Mike’s eyes wild with fun and love. Jill’s mouth was open in a great, big smile, white teeth flashing, her cheeks ruddy with cold, hand splayed across Mike’s chest, covering the ski lift sticker.
Her face was tipped up to look at him and Mike looked straight at the camera, as if he casually knew she was his—theirs—as if he didn’t need to give her a ten thousandth look of love in that moment, because the first ten thousand would be followed by a second ten thousand. And a third. And a fourth and more.
But no.
Finding Jill in the early years of college had been like living with one lung and not knowing it. She was his second lung, giving him oxygen and hope, deep breaths and contented sighs. Until he met her he hadn’t realized he could breathe deeply, could be himself with more acuity, could be fulfilled and complete.
They’d met in the dorms, Dylan a jock and an arrogant son of a bitch. Mike had met her within days, being Dylan’s roommate. He was so angry. So shy. So quiet it scared Jill, who had confided her feelings for Mike in hushed tones, expecting Dylan to be upset that she was falling for them both.
Both.
In that exact, frozen nanosecond of time something in him had unearthed, like a dormant seed given permission to sprout.
And just like that—in one breathy conversation—his life had come together.
The three of them had come together.
He could just breathe. And had, for more than a decade.
As he admired the photo, his eyes raked over her face, an ache in his chest tugging at each fiber of muscle in his heart. When she’d died last year after fighting the cancer that had won—the evil bastard—he’d gone back to living with one lung.
It made him gasp, breathlessly lurching through life as if someone had performed chest surgery on him, cracking his sternum with a bone saw, without anesthesia, ripping a part of him out, leaving him half alive.
But he had no choice.
His finger traced the lines of her jaw in the picture, his desire rising up through the grief. Dead. She was dead. Ah, God, if only he could look at her one more time, show her with his eyes, his lips, his fingers, his soul, how love wasn’t enough for them all. Oh, how he would give every drop of it to her and walk around hollow for his remaining d
ays to have that one, last look.
Last touch.
Last kiss.
His last kiss with Jill had been an afterthought as she lay in the hospital bed, the beeping machines turned off, her blood pooling where her body had touched the steel-framed bed, her body lifeless and Jill—what made up the real Jill—gone. Evacuated. Banished by the brutal finality of death, ravaged by mutating cancer cells that finally hogged all that was left of her.
He’d pressed his lips to hers and the cooling flesh had not bothered him. He’d expected that.
What had bothered him most was that he’d not kissed her enough when she had been warm. responsive. Wanting.
Alive.
He set the picture down and as he reached for another, he caught a glimpse of himself in a door mirror and laughed, the sound rusty and creaky, like a snicker in church at a funeral, like a fart in the middle of prayer.
Natural, but really unwanted.
Jill had been alive two years ago, though in the middle of chemo, when he offered himself as a “Date With a Hot Bachelor” for a local charity auction. She’d been the one to suggest he saunter down the runway wearing no shirt and half his firefighting uniform.
If she were here right now, she’d go with him to the show. Her hands would be the ones spreading oil across his thick pecs, massaging his tight neck muscles, roaming over the broad, rolling hills and valleys of lats and triceps well-defined by work.
The thought made parts of him harden. Most of all, his heart, because he couldn’t continue to do this to himself. Torture himself. Make himself remember her.
Absent-minded and full of too many loose thoughts, he shook his head slightly to jostle himself out of it, hand holding the second picture. In it she was on the beach, wearing a smoking-hot bikini, hips jutting out and ribs a little too close to her skin. She was smiling, but he remembered that picture all too well. Jill had just been diagnosed and the chemo was ravaging her body. The doctors had given her a three week dose and sent her home. Told her to go and recover and have fun.
Then come back for more.
They’d tried to surf that day, on a sunny Florida beach, but she’d been too tired. Mike and Dylan had paddled her out past the beach buoys, out where you could pretend no one else was around, and she’d tipped her pale face to the sun, worshipping the quiet. The waves had lapped at all three of them and Dylan felt a stabbing pain in his solar plexus at the memory.
It was the moment he’d realized this wasn’t going to end well.
His phone buzzed. The ringtone was from work. He was on call—no choice, had to answer.
“Hey, dumbass. You coming in for staff meeting, or what?” Murphy from the station. Dylan’s fire chief was an uncompromising sonofabitch, but a softy, too. He’d been great through Jill’s death. At the fire station, his fellow brothers only knew her as his girlfriend.
They just thought of Mike as a roommate.
Dylan never corrected them.
“Shit,” Dylan muttered. “I forgot.” Work first, then the auction tomorrow night. Right now, he was just doing a test run to make sure he had his look down pat. Years of modeling when he was younger had taught him to over-prepare.
“You forget lots of things lately.”
“Like your face,” Dylan shot back, grabbing clean clothes from his drawers.
“Hah. I’d forget my face too, if I could. Just get your pretty little ass down here. Maybe you can prance down the runway for us after we take roll.” The guys knew he’d volunteered again for the bachelor auction and wouldn’t let up. Still shots from the video on YouTube the charity organizers had uploaded dotted the locker room at work, pictures of Dylan smiling a sexy smile, using his finger to lure the winner on stage, dipping her back for a saucy kiss.
Someone had made a fake Dancing with the Stars poster and superimposed his face and red suspenders on it. Nice. Jill had found immense joy from that picture, and it pleased him now to remember how her laughter had pealed like church bells on the somber oncology ward, how the video of his antics made her day.
“I could teach you how, Murph,” he said after a long silence on the phone, shaking himself out of his memories. “You could surprise your wife. Give her the full monty.”
Murph let out a bellowing howl. “I walk into the bedroom half naked wearing my uniform pants, dancing like a stripper, my wife’s gonna think I overdosed on something from the police evidence room. Not get all ready for sex. Out—see ya in a few.” Click.
Dylan tossed the phone on the bed and sprinted to the bathroom, shower on and clothes off in seconds. If he’d learned nothing else in a decade or so of firefighting, it was how to take a one-minute shower.
He looked down as the water soaked him. Damn it. Hard as rock and pointing up with an accusing eye.
Make that a two minute shower. If he showed up at work with a boner like this he might as well paint it neon green and tie a red ribbon on it.
The second he touched himself his mind flashed—for the first time, ever—not to Jill, but to the mysterious woman in his dream last night.
Blond, wavy hair and creamy skin. That’s all he remembered. The warm, enveloping love of her touch, the air tinged with compassion and passion, too. With excitement and comfort and—everything.
But not Jill.
A few strokes and he was close, remembering how he’d nuzzled the woman’s neck, how Mike’s hand appeared across her generous ass, palms memorizing the planes of this new, unexplored, lush land.
Her breath had come out in little moans that—
And he was done.
Spent. Like a thirteen-year-old boy with a lingerie catalog.
The rest of the shower went quickly, but his skin warmed at the thought of the dream woman. Something all-pervasive invaded his thoughts, his flesh, his sense of self.
As he toweled off, he gave his mirror reflection a half smile. Maybe she was a manifestation of hope. If he wasn’t dreaming about Jill, finally, with every waking second he could spare, then perhaps the grief counselors at the oncology ward of the hospital had been right.
You really do move on. Eventually. And you can find love again, too.
He threw on an old Star Wars t-shirt and jeans, stuffing his feet in brown loafers, hair still wet as he marched into the kitchen, grabbed a bottled water and an apple, and snaked his keys off the hook next to the door.
“Where are you going?” Mike asked, incredulous, as Dylan snapped the front door open with ruthless efficiency.
“Work.” He had to get out, get away, go do something with people who didn’t look at him with the kind of pain Mike carried in his eyes nonstop. Rescuing people from fires, working on car accident victims, helping old ladies with chest pain was better than this.
God, that made him feel like a jackass.
But it was true.
* * *
“We gotta do something, man. We’re not cut out to live the rest of our lives as monks,” Dylan said, opening up his laptop and plunking down on the couch next to Mike. Dinner had been reheated beef stew Mike had made yesterday. They both had cracked open beers -- and they’d need them for what Dylan had planned.
One of the finer points of getting a ton of money this year had been upgrading from a laptop that was heavier than a semi-truck’s wheel. The sleek, slim computer made him feel guilty. The money came from Jill. From her death. From her secret.
But damn if it didn’t make life a lot easier.
“I’m perfectly happy living like a monk,” Mike said, eyes glued to the television. Dylan looked at the screen. Some nature bullshit show. How much did they really need to learn about the mating habits of some Australian fish?
They the had mating habits of the North American Male Human to worry about.
“We need to do something, Mike. Anything. I’ve gone out on a few dates, at least.”
“Yeah. I know. You’re ready and I’m not. Now be quiet so I can concentrate.”
Dylan peered at the television. “Dude, they’re s
howing footage of a fish’s erection. If that’s your idea of porn these days, you are way more desperate than I am. At least I look at human genitals.”
Mike snorted and clicked the television off. He turned to Dylan. The guy was scruffy. Three days of growth on his face, the same t-shirt Dylan saw him wearing...three days ago, and a stinky funk that made him wonder.
“Have you gone running in those clothes?” he asked, afraid of the answer. He really hoped that crusty look to the shorts was from sweat.
“Sure,” Mike said with a shrug. “Why?”
“You’ve gone running and then you didn’t bother to shower?”
“No time.” Mike’s answers were turning into two word utterances. Uh oh. Dylan knew what that meant.
“No time?” Dylan made a derisive noise as he focused his attention on the laptop, navigating to the online dating site he’d picked out for both of them. “You’re a ski instructor. It’s July. If there’s ever time to take a shower, now is it.”
“Shut up.”
That was a definitive two-word answer, wasn’t it? Dylan opened the profile he’d started for Mike the other day and shoved the laptop screen in his partner’s face. “Here.”
“What’s this?”
“Your dating profile.”
“My what?”
“You heard me. Unless there’s so much dirt built up in your ears that you can’t hear.”
“Fuck you.”
That was two words, too.
Mike snapped the laptop shut. “Not now,” he said, walking out of the living room.
“Where are you going?” Dylan watched as Mike peeled his shirt off, his bare back visible before he turned and walked into the bathroom.
“Shower.” Slam! The bathroom door shut with a violent shudder.
“Fuuuuck,” Dylan hissed under his breath. At least he got Mike to take care of basic hygiene. These two off-seasons since Jill had died were miserable for Mike. Snow meant he kept busy. Nice weather meant he sulked and moped around the house watching nature shows and running constantly.
Dylan opened the laptop and pondered the profile.
