“I teach,” she said.
“What grade and subject?”
“Sixth-grade science. Middle school.”
“Jesus. You’re hard-core. Going where no ordinary teacher will go.”
“No, I love it. Love science, love that age group.”
“What’s your favorite project?”
“What?”
“Your favorite science project you do with them.”
It was such a real question. Once most people found out she was a science teacher, it was all they needed to know. They had a frame of reference for what a science teacher did, they all remembered their own awful science teachers, and they weren’t interested in finding out what it was like from her perspective. That was the thing about most people. They were happy to stay up at ground level, where things were safe and clean. They didn’t want to know you.
“You can’t beat Elephant’s Toothpaste for sheer fun.” She smiled, thinking about it. “You mix it in a giant test tube, and it foams up and shoots out like toothpaste from a tube. Hydrogen peroxide, yeast, and dish soap, and if you get some food coloring involved, you can make it look like Aquafresh. I like to do it when the fifth-grade parents come to school for information night, at the end of the year before they have to send their babies off to middle school. They’re all worried, tight-faced, and then I do this experiment and whoosh! Bright colors, and fun, and instantly reassured parents.”
He was quiet, so she filled the empty space. “In general, I like anything that gets the kids excited. I like them to leave class and go tell the other kids what they did. I know I did my job right if they’re talking about it in the hallway afterward, and not in a ‘Ms. Hart sucks’ way.”
“I can see that. I can picture it. I don’t know you that well, but—”
But I want you to, she wished she could tell him. What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything. Everything.
“—it makes sense you’d be good at that. You have so much energy, and you’re funny and warm.”
It was like a gift. He couldn’t have said anything that pleased her more. It was who she wanted to be, how she wanted to see herself. The person she was always trying to send out in public. The person who’d been unable to get out of bed for days and days after Henry’s assault on her confidence, even though she’d sent a ghost of her former self out to do her job and function in the world.
“Are you the best teacher in the school?”
Oddly, she blushed. “I do get good evaluations.”
“You’re modest. They love you, right?”
“Most of the time, except when we do the personal-health unit—aka sex ed. Then I get the riled-up parents who think we should stick with abstinence education. But even with the parents getting ticked off, I really enjoy that section. We do it co-ed, and all the other science teachers hate it. The dread builds up all fall—the kids get squirrelly, the parents bitch. But I like it. We have great discussions, and by the end they’ve mostly stopped acting like Beavis and Butt-Head.”
Unlike me. I will apparently never outgrow that streak.
“Co-ed, huh? And you cover all the usual stuff with them?”
“What factors go into choosing birth control. The advantages of abstinence. When and why you should sleep with someone.”
“Huh.” He chuckled. “Out of curiosity, since I have the expert on hand, when should you sleep with someone?”
You should have slept with me on New Year’s Eve. But now you are a thousand miles away.
She felt the pivot point in the conversation, a moment of opportunity, a chance to ask questions and outline next steps and swing things, hard, toward where she wanted them to be.
But she wanted other things, too. She wanted to know what he’d been thinking on New Year’s Eve. What he’d thought about that night after he’d gone home. Whether he’d thought of her as he’d lain in bed, and whether he’d done anything about it. Whether he’d wanted to get in touch with her, whether he’d tried to get in touch. Whether he’d wanted to talk to her in the months since New Year’s, or whether he’d accepted with perfect equanimity that those fifteen minutes would always stand alone, like a column of light, in his history.
She wanted to know those big things and a thousand little things about him.
“Well, what I tell them is that you should be in a committed relationship or marriage, you should love the person, and you should use protection. And then I usually say, you should only sleep with someone when you know them well enough to be certain your feelings and your body are safe with them. And you need to be old enough to know what it means to you to be safe.”
Of course, she had felt safe with Henry. She had felt secure in his arms. She had felt singular and loved and cherished.
And she’d felt so terribly, terribly foolish to discover how far astray her gut had led her. Her cracked pride as sharp a pain as a broken bone.
“That’s very wise,” Miles said.
He didn’t try to maneuver them back toward the pivot point he’d created. Instead, he said, “Tell me things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“All kinds of things. About you. Where you were born. Your favorite food, your favorite color. How many siblings you have. What foods you like.”
So they were going to do this. They were going to get to know each other.
She wanted to ask him what this was a prelude to. Where this was leading. Instead, she asked, “If I tell you, will you tell me?”
Again, the crackle over the line of the double entendre, of their shared chemistry.
“Yeah,” he said. Rumbly and dark.
So she began, and they took turns.
Chapter 5
During their second conversation, they relived their middle- and high-school dating fiascos. Until she was snort-laughing.
“I can top that,” she said, when she caught her breath.
“Cannot,” he said. “I put my smutty love note in the wrong locker, but not just any wrong locker: the wrong locker belonging to a girl who actually had a crush on me. I defy you to top that.”
“I broke up with my boyfriend at the beginning of senior year. And the high school psychologist found me and took me aside and asked me to get back together with him because I was going to hurt his chances of getting into his first-choice college.”
“You made that up.”
“Swear to God, it’s true. I was standing next to my friend Sia at the time, and if you need corroboration, I’ll have her email you.”
“That’s … that’s—there are no words. What did you say to him?”
“I was totally flummoxed. I stammered something and slunk away.”
“Did you report him?”
“I did, but nothing happened. He’s probably still there, getting himself overly involved in seventeen-year-olds’ romantic lives.” She shuddered.
“Did you get back together with your boyfriend?”
“No. But he did get into his first-choice college. And I did email the school psychologist to point that out.”
He laughed. “You’re not scared of anything, are you?” No reason that should please her so much.
No reason at all. “I’m scared of some things.”
She was scared of making the same mistake she’d made with Henry. Of hanging on too long, trusting too much, expecting enough that she could be knocked down a notch.
“Not many, though, right?”
She was scared of the tenuousness of their connection, their voices floating through the ether, linked only by a series of cell towers. He might decide not to take her calls, not to lie awake with her at night, not to laugh at her stories or admire the things about her she loved best.
It was a good kind of fear, something like how she imagined it might feel to hang-glide in the dark.
“Not many,” she agreed.
During their third conversation, they talked about the cities they loved. Nora had lived in more—a different one every two or three years since gradu
ating from college, partly because most schools had a last-hired/first-fired policy that had made it hard for her to sustain jobs, but also because she loved the thrill of a new place and new people. Miles had lived in the Cleveland area for almost a decade, but his work for the nonprofit had taken him all over the country.
“What’s your favorite?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t have a favorite.”
“How can you not have a favorite?”
“I just don’t. Wherever I am, that’s my favorite.”
“I’m not sure you’re for real,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said. “They stuck electrodes in your brain at that New Year’s Eve party, and I’m computer programmed to implant sense data in your head to make you think I’m a real person.”
“It’s a very convincing computer program. And whoever programmed it knew how to keep me coming back for more.”
His words sparked along her nerves, but she kept it light. “The electrodes tell us your likes and dislikes, and the program reacts rapidly to create new scenarios that are pleasing to you. It’s working?”
“It’s working,” he confirmed.
She lay back on the couch so his voice, a purr, could twine itself around her and she could luxuriate in the sensation of it.
“Do you seriously not have a favorite city?” he asked.
“They all have people in them,” she said. “I like people.”
“A favorite restaurant, then.”
She had to think about it. There were so many good ones. It wasn’t a lot easier than picking her favorite city. “Wild Ginger in Seattle.”
“Is that Thai?”
“Pan-Asian, technically, I think. What about you? Do you have a favorite?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Sally’s Apizza in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s this little hole in the wall that hasn’t changed in fifty years, but it has the best clam pizza on earth. I’m not exaggerating. We’ll go there sometime.”
“Did you just ask me on a date?”
“Uh-huh. I did.” She could hear the smile in his voice.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m looking up flights right now.”
“You are not.”
“I am. I can meet you there in—okay, wait a second. Damn. The ticket is five hundred dollars.”
“That’s a little pricey.”
“Okay, yeah, not in the budget. But sometime. Sometime I’m taking you to Sally’s.”
She let it feel like a promise, lodged warm and snug in her chest.
During their fourth conversation, he asked her to send him some photos of herself. He sent her some of himself. He was grinning in most of them.
“You smile a lot.”
“I guess I used to,” he said.
“Are you more serious now for some reason?”
“I guess I am.”
She hesitated, on the edge of asking him why. She felt she knew him well, but not that well. Not quite.
“You smile a lot, too,” he said.
“I do.”
“Are you smiling now?”
“Yeah.”
She’d been smiling almost constantly since Owen had found her on Twitter.
“Nora?”
The way he said it made her hopeful. Wary. “What?”
“I wish you were here. Right now.” His voice was all rough edges.
Her face got hot. Her hands, too. Actually, she was hot all over. “I wish I were there, too.”
“Maybe you can act as my proxy. Since I’m not there.”
Breath huffed out of her. She wanted to do this. She wanted to lean back on the couch and slide her hand between her legs, feel the damp heat rising off her body. She wanted to squeeze her thighs together around her hand and ask him what he was wearing and tell him lies about what she was wearing; she wanted to hear his voice rumble against her ear and jaw, the vibrations running out along her nerve endings and jazzing her up.
All the words got stuck behind her tongue and wouldn’t shake loose. Instead, her heart pounded uselessly and she tasted adrenaline.
“Do you follow the advice you give your students? You told me the first time we talked that you tell them they should be in a committed relationship or marriage before they have sex.”
She tried to keep her breath under control, even as heat gathered between her legs. “Not always.”
“Oh, yeah?”
They might have been talking about the circumstances under which she believed it was prudent to carry an umbrella and wear rain boots; his voice was that steady. She wished desperately to see his face.
“I don’t see anything wrong with a little frolicking among consenting adults.”
Oh, God, she sounded like a granny. Or—a sex-ed teacher.
“Was that what we were doing at the party? Frolicking?”
He, on the other hand, had managed to make frolicking sound like a new sex technique, filthy and forbidden. Her nipples tightened. “I think that was foreplay to frolicking.”
“Yeah? If that was foreplay, the actual frolicking might kill me.”
More heat, low and dark in her belly. She leaned back on the couch and slid her palm down and rubbed it experimentally over the seam of her jeans. She was damp and hot there, and her body clenched at the contact. “Is this foreplay, too?”
“Like phone-sex foreplay?”
“Yeah.” She flattened her hand, a slow, easy back and forth, just enough friction to keep the buzz up.
“How do you distinguish foreplay from the main event in phone sex?”
She tried to keep her breathing even. “I don’t know. Good question. I guess the foreplay stops when you start touching yourself.”
“Nora?”
“Uh-huh?”
“The foreplay was over when you said the word ‘foreplay.’ At least on this end of the phone.”
“Um,” she said, because her brain was concerned with single syllables at the moment, like want and now. “Here, too.”
“I warn you, I’m not particularly good at this. Dirty talk.”
“Whatever you’re doing is working for me.” She raised her hips a little to meet the slow I’m-pretending-I’m-not-really-doing-this flirtation of her hand with the crotch of her jeans.
“What are you wearing?”
“Jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt.” Silence.
“I killed your libido,” she said.
“No. I was trying too hard to be funny, and my brain got knotted up.”
“What were you going to say, before you started thinking about trying to be funny?”
“ ‘That’s more for me to take off you, then.’ ”
He might not be good with words, but apparently it didn’t take many words, or particularly flowery ones, on his part to get her going. Possibly it was his voice, which even in wry reporting had this way of edging under her defenses.
“Here’s a better question,” she said. “What do you wish I were wearing?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. Something skimpy I could tear off you with my teeth.”
She was having trouble breathing, the muscles tightening in a cascade down her chest and belly to pull up in a sharp ache between her legs. Her hand worked a little faster, following the lead set by her quickening breath. “Do you know that kind of underwear that looks sort of like shorts, but they’re really, really short, with lots of lace? They’re called boy shorts?”
“Yeah. You would look really hot in those.”
“Red,” she told him. “And a matching lace bra.”
“It would be a big waste, though, because if I were there I would get you out of them as soon as possible.”
“I wish you were here,” she said.
“I wish I were, too. If I were there, I’d—” His voice trailed off, low and rough, wrapping around her core and tugging.
“You don’t suck at dirty talk,” she said.
“That wasn’t dirty.”
“It was so dirt
y. It was full of sex stuff you didn’t say but were thinking.”
He made a sound, an aborted groan.
“The trick is to say it out loud,” she instructed. “Finish the sentence.”
“If I were there, I’d—”
But again he stopped, and she had to picture it for herself. If he were here, she’d want him to lie on top of her and fit the bulge in his jeans to the notch between her thighs, and then she’d show him the exact speed and pressure she wanted…
“Or, you know, don’t finish the sentence,” she offered. “Just keep saying that, because it’s working fine for me.”
“You said that before. What exactly does that mean, ‘It’s working fine for me’?”
“It means,” she said, “it’s making me really wet.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the phone, but she didn’t assume it spelled doom, possibly because she could hear him breathing. Hard.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Lying on my back. Hand between my legs. Rubbing.”
A rough exhalation in her ear. “I’m standing in my kitchen,” he said, the words jagged. “I should get the hell out of here.”
“Are there a lot of windows?”
“No.”
“So … what’s the problem?”
“I’m standing in my kitchen with an epic hard-on—”
“Keep going.” She’d gone from damp to wet through her jeans.
He hesitated.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to make you self-conscious. You were doing great. I’ve got my hand over my jeans. The friction is amazing. Sometimes it’s better this way than under my jeans. I don’t think I could stop even if you ordered me to, it feels that good.”
He groaned in earnest. “Fuck, Nora.”
“So, you’re standing in your kitchen with an epic hard-on, and now you’re going to …” she prompted.
“I’m unbuttoning my jeans and unzipping them.”
Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 29
