You Give Love a Bad Name

by Marilyn Brant

  “Mmm,” I moaned. Deliciousness.

  He leaned closer to me. “Good, isn’t it?”

  “Heavenly.”

  “It’s only gonna get better,” he assured me. And damned if he wasn’t right.

  Every bite of our dinner—straight through to the rum-soaked tiramisu for dessert—was scrumptious. The red wine flowed as fast as the conversation that followed and went down just as smoothly and easily.

  Surprisingly, there was no real awkwardness.

  No wishing I were back at home reading my Austen/sci-fi novel instead.

  And, aside from those early moments of nervousness and doubt, there was no distrust of Blake. He’d successfully and capably reeled me in and disarmed all of my well-honed defenses.

  Even when we left the restaurant and shifted over to the dance club, the spell he’d cast persisted. The Crypt was so named because it was in the basement of the building, and we had to descend a lengthy flight of stairs to get inside. On the way down, Blake once again reassured me that we could leave anytime.

  “So don’t worry, Vicky. I’m not gonna jump you. No one’s even gonna force you to dance, if you don’t want to.” He laughed. “Just let loose and try to enjoy the music.”

  I took him at his word and, for the rest of the night, just let go of all expectation.

  And we did dance.

  He asked. I said, “Yes.” He led me to the floor.

  Within two minutes, he’d left me utterly breathless, and not just from the physical exertion.

  We only had one drink each at the club, and our wine from dinner was wearing off, so it wasn’t the alcohol either.

  It was freedom.

  Freedom from judgment—my own.

  Somewhere in the middle of that sparkling dance floor, with Nineties-era club music intermixed with current hits, all playing loud and insistently, I recognized just how much self-recrimination was a part of my daily routine. How often I’d chastise myself for the relationship mistakes of my past. And I didn’t need that tonight.

  So, I followed Blake’s directive. I let loose. I enjoyed the music. And I danced, face-to-face with him, arms swinging and, occasionally, clinging. But, mostly, we were just free...together. At one with the ever-changing melodies and the flashes of colored light.

  True to his word, he didn’t jump me. And when the clock struck midnight and this little Cinderella wanted to go home, he didn’t persuade me to stay a moment longer. He just said, “No problem. Let’s get you back to Mirabelle Harbor.”

  Which was why, when he told me he was going to walk me up to my apartment, I didn’t think twice or try to parry the idea. I’d forgotten that “later” was, in fact, “now.”

  “It’s 12:30, Blake,” I said when we reached my doorway. “I need to get to bed.”

  He nodded. “I know. I’m still planning to kiss you goodnight, though. Unless you tell me otherwise.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to resist that.

  But I procrastinated just a little. “It’ll probably be a quick kiss, though, right? I mean, you have to get home to Winston.”

  “Nope. Derek and Olivia are dog sitting him tonight. I told them I had plans. Late evening plans.”

  “Oh,” I murmured and then just stood there staring at him.

  Still, he waited patiently until I actually rolled my eyes and said the words aloud. “Fine, Blake. I’m not saying no to a kiss from you, okay?”

  At that, he grinned and motioned toward the door. “Do you want your neighbors to watch us—however briefly? If not, maybe we should step inside.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”

  It was a sneaky tactic, but an effective one. Blake knew I didn’t have exhibitionist tendencies.

  I unlocked my door and ushered him into my apartment. Then I closed the door. Firmly.

  “We’re talking just a kiss, right?” A totally lame clarification, but I wanted to be clear.

  “Unless you tell me otherwise,” he said again. Then he licked his lips.

  A wolf. That was who he was. And I was no longer Cinderella. I was Little Red Riding Hood, lost in the forest and in big trouble.

  Napoleon was nowhere in sight, but I trusted that my cat was fine. One glance at his bowl told me he’d eaten a good dinner. And the apartment looked exactly as we’d left it. No break-ins. No appliance malfunctions. Basically, there was no excuse I could use to distract Blake from his mission. And, honestly, I didn’t really want to try.

  He waited only until he knew he had my full attention, but he didn’t just swoop in—mouth to mouth.

  No. He was too good at seduction for that.

  He placed the tip of his thumb at my temple and traced the side of my face with agonizing slowness. He didn’t stop until he could cup my chin and draw me closer to him. But, still, he didn’t kiss my lips. He dipped his head to my neck and worked his way upward until I was straining for his touch—my head against the door, the rest of me completely open to him.

  By the time our lips finally met, I couldn’t take the anticipation for a second longer. I wanted the heat of his mouth to warm mine. I wanted to taste him and to lose all thought in the warring chaos of sensation.

  Blake wasn’t in complete control anymore, but it wasn’t as if I held much control either. There was no mental filter between my desires and my actions. None of the usual arguments telling me to behave myself or warning me of all the things that could go wrong. An absence of the tickertape of red flags that I typically kept tabs on so my heart wouldn’t get crushed again.

  These lack of worries brought with them a delicious freedom.

  He stripped off my jeans. I didn’t stop him because I was too busy unbuttoning his blue shirt and pushing away the fabric so I’d have clear access to his torso.

  I kissed his chest, put my mouth around one hard male nipple, then the other.

  Blake groaned and responded by yanking down my panties, tensing his hands around my hips, and squeezing until the space between his palms and my flesh was nonexistent. Then, keeping the connection between us airtight, he slid one of his hands toward my belly, the tips of his fingers brushing against my clit, pressing and sliding and teasing until I fully opened that part of myself to him, too. He thrust two of his fingers deep within me, kissing me fiercely at the same time, so when I cried out his name, the sound was muffled.

  He pulled back and grinned, unable to disguise his look of pride.

  “Now, aren’t you glad we weren’t standing out in your hallway, huh?” he whispered in my ear with a wicked little chuckle.

  I chuckled, too. I should have felt embarrassed...or anxious...or some other unfortunate though familiar emotion. But I didn’t. I felt only the pleasure of his touch. Undiluted excitement. The divine weightlessness of my limbs.

  Perhaps the embarrassment and the anxiety would flood my body later, but I was conscious of the fact that it hadn’t happened yet. I felt the strangest sense of clarity.

  I wanted him.

  I wanted Blake Michaelsen.

  Completely and utterly and without any strings or expectations.

  And this was okay because it was exactly what he wanted. We were two consenting adults. If we both chose to have a fling, who could stop us, right?

  I wasn’t sure how, precisely, I expressed my invitation to him to stay the night, but I was fully cognizant of what I was doing.

  For his part, Blake was wholeheartedly willing but undeniably surprised.

  “You sure, Vicky?”

  “What? You need your propositions to be engraved in gold leaf or something?” I said with a laugh.

  He shook his head. “I’m just a little stunned that you didn’t make me work harder to get the green light. I was prepared to launch a full initiative. I’d barely gotten started here.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Ah. I see. Your one- or two-night stands are only truly successful if you win them by skill of seduction, eh? It doesn’t count if, say, a woman simply makes a decision that she wants you for the night...with none of the
game-playing bullshit.”

  He stared at me, mute.

  I reached into his back pocket and withdrew his wallet. I pressed the leather against his chest. “There’s got to be a condom somewhere in there, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. Find it.” Then I pulled off my shirt, unhooked my bra, and threw them both on the floor. “I’m getting into bed. You coming?”

  Blake’s jaw dropped and there was a long moment of complete silence. I kept to my course of action and just wandered—totally naked—into my bedroom and without looking back. I was, oddly, at peace with my sudden and unanticipated decision, and I would remain so whether Blake followed me in here or not. Though I desperately hoped for the former.

  The problems I’d had with relationships in the past had been all because of over-expectation. That wasn’t the case this time.

  Not. At. All.

  Blake had already and insistently admitted that he didn’t do the love thing. That his feelings were all in the lust department. And that his attentions to me weren’t romantic but strategic. He just wanted to sleep with me...to get laid and, then, to let me go. I had no reason not to trust this truth.

  So, since he only cared about my body and not my heart, mind, or soul, I didn’t have to worry about losing anything significant—except, maybe, ending my long stretch of sexual frustration. And that was no great sacrifice.

  He slipped into the room. He’d gotten rid of his shoes, socks, jeans, and he was wearing just a pair of thin black boxers and waving the condom packet like it was a flag of surrender.

  “I’m entirely at your mercy,” he whispered, setting the packet down with great deliberateness on my nightstand and ditching the boxers before crawling into bed next to me.

  “I’ll be gentle,” I said.

  “Not too gentle, I hope.” He grinned. “I want you so much.”

  “I want you, too.” I didn’t wait for him to officially hand over the reins of leadership, I just took them. I pushed him to the mattress, covered his bare body with mine, and brought my lips to his.

  After that, everything just flowed from one moment to the next, like some wild river. Lost in his touch, time for me turned fluid.

  But aside from murmuring his name and hearing him murmur mine, Blake and I didn’t speak again for the longest time. Given how talkative he usually was, this should have surprised me. It didn’t, though. We were still communicating—just nonverbally—and that conversation was rich in subtext.

  The way he looked at me, pressed his lips against mine, moved deep inside me. It was question and response. Call and reply. Repeated and, yet, always new.

  I hadn’t expected that more than our bodies would connect. But we were fully together in these moments. He touched me, not just my skin, with a tenderness that stole my breath. A raw reality that I knew would haunt me.

  Maybe this was a typical kind of hookup for him, but it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t remotely like anything I’d experienced before with other men. This thing with Blake might be short-lived, but I already knew it wouldn’t be easy to forget.

  Conversation, using actual words, returned sometime later.

  I stretched in bed next to him, my limbs aching in a blissful way, a sheen of sweat on my chest, and a level of exhaustion that was hard to ignore. The red glow of the digital clock said it was 1:43 a.m., a couple of hours past my normal bedtime.

  Blake’s eyes were drooping, but there was a smile on his lips, which widened when he realized I was staring at him.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Deliciously tired.”

  “I like the sound of that.” He slung an arm around my waist, splaying his palm across the small of my back and drawing me to him like a slow-moving magnet. He devoured my mouth for several seconds. “Yep. Definitely delicious.”

  “And exhausted,” I repeated. “You wore me out.”

  “Excellent. We can take a nap until you’ve recharged and, then, go for round two.”

  “You’re insatiable.”

  “You won’t hear me denying it, Vicky. Not with you.”

  The hand on my back slid further down until he reached my bottom and started caressing me. I could feel the heat flaring up between us again, and I gasped for air.

  “Not sure I can take my hands off you,” he said. “I might find myself getting into trouble at the high school just so I can score a detention with you.”

  I laughed. “I don’t usually get assigned detention duty. You might end up alone in an empty classroom with Janice Keen, the lunchroom lady.”

  He made a comical face. “She’s still there? She’s gotta be, like, eighty-something now. That woman’s been scaring high-school students since I was a freshman.”

  “Hey, I like Mrs. Keen.”

  “You would.”

  I ran my fingers through his dark hair and nibbled sleepily on his earlobe. “Mmm. Well, it’s not like she’s really going to see us together. Nor will anyone else, for that matter. As it is, I’m probably going to have to avoid your sister at least until Christmas, or she might figure it out.”

  His hand stilled and his eyes opened wider. “You, uh, aren’t going to tell Shar we were...together?”

  “Are you insane? Of course not. That would be foolish, especially for just a night of lust and self-delusion.” I grinned at Blake. “I mean, c’mon. You know how she is. Within a half hour, she’ll have us married and living in a house on Cherry Street with three kids. Not wise. So I hope you don’t plan to tell her either.”

  “But you’re not ashamed of this, are you?” He motioned between us with his fingers. “Regretting it?”

  “No. But I don’t want to be known around Mirabelle Harbor as one of your conquests, either.”

  He pulled away from me and sat up. “You make it sound like I’m not only a manwhore, but a damned untrustworthy one.” He looked hurt and, then, infuriated. Like I’d insulted him just because I’d remembered his “I don’t believe in love” argument with too much accuracy.

  “Blake, listen to me. I was paying attention to what you’ve been saying—in my classroom, at the park, in your apartment. You told me you were only interested in a fling. A one- or two-night stand. And I accepted this—” I motioned between us, mimicking his actions, “based on your terms, not mine. Your sister is one of my dearest friends, and when there was tension between you and me, she picked up on it right away and worried about us. And that was just for the Homecoming thing. If she knew about this, too, she’d freak out. I’m sure you don’t want that.”

  But Blake didn’t answer. He clenched his jaw, crossed his arms, and stared into the darkness of the room with an even darker expression on his face.

  “I don’t understand how you can be mad about this,” I whispered. “It’s what you said you wanted.”

  He shook his head.

  Okay, maybe I should have let it drop because, clearly, he was upset and we were both tired, but I was frustrated now and genuinely puzzled. “Explain this to me, Blake. How am I wrong here? How have I hurt you?”

  When he still refused to answer, I got pissed. “Seriously? Our relationship—such that it is—has been nothing but a big game to you since the beginning. Since our first meeting at the school. All of your flirting, your innuendos, your propositions—now you’re, what? Angry because I chose to have sex with you tonight with no strings attached rather than having sex with you because I got tricked into it by thinking you really cared about me? You’d prefer that I’d been fooled and seduced? Is that it?”

  “No!” he shouted finally. But I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  “Then what’s this really about?” I asked.

  “I can’t—” he began. “It’s just—just that you think so poorly of me, Vicky. I’m not ready for marriage or anything, okay? I never hid that. But it kills me that I’m nothing more than a dirty little secret to you.”

  I stared at him, mouth agape. “I never said that.”

  “Y
ou implied it.” He jumped out of bed, grabbed his boxers, and bolted out of the room.

  Napoleon meowed loudly from somewhere near the kitchen. Blake, wrestling with clothes and keys, banged into something—accidentally or deliberately, I couldn’t be sure—and my cat screeched in response.

  “Goodbye,” Blake called out before the front door slammed. Whether that was intended for me or my cat was just as unclear but, by the time I managed to find a long t-shirt to put on and get to the door, he was gone.

  What the hell had just happened here?

  ~Blake~

  Max’s Pub stayed open until three a.m. on Saturday nights. Thank God.

  And Gina was bartending, which helped. She’d poured me a few fingers of my favorite vodka before I even sat down.

  “You look like crap,” she observed, pushing the drink toward me from across the bar. “What happened?”

  I had no fucking idea.

  “I have no fucking idea, Gina, but I don’t want to talk about it,” I growled, swallowing about half the vodka in one gulp. It burned its way down my throat.

  She shrugged. “Whatever you say.” Then she went back to stacking glasses behind the counter.

  “There’s this woman—” I began.

  “With you, there’s always a woman,” Gina shot back.

  “Yeah, well, not one like her. She’s...different.”

  “Really? Someone I know?”

  I shook my head. Maybe Gina knew her, maybe she didn’t. Either way, I wasn’t gonna tell.

  “You don’t know her name?”

  “Of course I know her name,” I said, gulping some more vodka.

  “Ah.” Gina paused, crossed her arms, and smiled at me. “You aren’t going to kiss and tell with this lady, huh? Wow. She must be different.”

  “We slept together tonight,” I blurted. I hadn’t had nearly enough to drink—not yet—so I knew it wasn’t the alcohol talking. Guess I just wanted someone to listen to me.

  “It didn’t go well? Performance issues?”

  “WHAT? Jeez, Gina. No. Everything in that sense was fine. Great, actually.”

  “I’m not understanding the problem then, Blake. That’s usually a good thing, in your opinion, right?”