He managed to get up and pull off the condom, grab a pair of boxer briefs. The last thing I remember of that night was watching him pull them on and thinking that he looked exactly like an underwear model.
* * *
I woke up the next morning to his arm around me. The light shone in from the window, and a truck rumbled by loudly. I was still wearing only my shirt, under a thin blanket that I guess he’d pulled over me. I really had slept like a log. I hadn’t had a night like that in… ever.
A morning of cuddling sounded fantastic, but then I realized what day it was. Monday. I quickly glanced around, but I didn’t see a clock anywhere. Who doesn’t have a clock? Fighters, I guessed.
He was still entirely asleep, and I tried to slip out of bed without him noticing. I grabbed my purse and pulled out my phone. No missed calls or texts or anything. But then I saw the time.
Ten fifteen.
I start work at nine every morning, Monday to Friday. My eyes darted around the room. I saw my panties and pants in a pile in one corner, and my bra on the floor next to the bed. I pulled on the bottoms, then went for the bra. Snapped my boobs into place, and then he spoke.
“Leaving already?”
I looked at him, and he was still pretty unconscious. “Yep,” I said. “Gotta go. I’m late for work.”
“You can’t go like that,” he said.
I glanced at myself in the mirror. He was right. My hair was insane. That’s what I get for not brushing it before bed. And my makeup was smeared all over the place. “Could I use your shower?” I asked.
“Sure thing,” he said. “It’s just down the hall. Use all the hot water you want.”
“Thanks,” I said. I quickly walked down the hall, freeing my breasts once again and dropping my pants. I peed.
The bathroom wasn’t the cleanest I’d ever been in, but it wasn’t bad for a man who lived on his own. I got up and looked at myself in the mirror. Naked. Exposed. All of my curves and rolls there for the eye to behold. But for some reason, for the first time in a very long time, I thought I looked good. Damn good. I was sexy. The curves weren’t gross, I thought. They were womanly.
I got into the shower. There was a solitary bar of soap with which to clean myself. I turned the water on, almost all the way hot, and I let it run down my body. Every part of me felt amazing. Like my whole life now took place in a jacuzzi. The room steamed up, and I let my hair get soaked. That was the only way to deal with it when it got this wet.
The water felt so good on my body. I had a shower every morning, and it never really felt like anything special. But this time it felt different. Maybe it was the fact that I was in a stranger’s bathroom. Or the amazing sex I’d had the night before. Or maybe the water was hotter. All I knew was that it felt good. Just a regular shower felt good after what Malcolm had done to me.
I rinsed myself off, soaped myself up, and then rinsed off again. I stepped out onto the dry mat and grabbed a towel. Dried myself off as well as possible, and then got dressed. I wiped the steam off the mirror, and looked at myself. Something really was different. My eyes looked wider. My smile looked happier. I walked out of the bathroom, on my way to my car.
But then I walked past the kitchen, and there he was. Still wearing nothing but the boxer briefs. Standing over the stove top, where a few eggs were sizzling. The toaster was buzzing feintly. He turned to look at me. “Stay for breakfast?” he asked.
That answer should have been no. I should have said no and then walked out, and driven to work. Hopefully getting there less than two hours late. But instead, and maybe it was because of the sexy, scantily clad man in front of me, I said, “Sure.”
I put my purse down and sat at the table. It was a horrid yellow color, and I saw that his plates and cups were all made of plastic. He served up a couple eggs tossed on a bit of salt, and then spread some strawberry jam on the toast and tossed it down in front of me.
“Something to drink?” he offered.
“Yes,” I said, biting into the toast. “Coffee please.”
He inhaled sharply. “Shit. I should have known you would say that.”
I stared at him. “Do you not have any coffee?”
“Nope,” he said. “I don’t drink it. And I don’t entertain much.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Seriously, no coffee.”
“I meant the other part.”
“What?”
“You must bring girls home all the time.”
He looked at me. He sat down across from me. “What makes you say that?”
He sat comfortable, almost entirely naked. He wasn’t ashamed of any part of his body, and it made sense. He had nothing to be ashamed of.
“A guy like you,” I said. “I’ve known you for twelve hours, and I’ve seen how many girls hit on you.”
“And how many of them did I bring home?”
“One?”
“Zero,” he corrected. “You didn’t hit on me.”
“So you’re telling me that you don’t bring home a different girl every night?”
“Fuck no,” he said. “Pardon me. No, I do not bring home a different girl every night.”
I just kept looking at him while I ate my eggs.
“I mean, I used to. For a while. A few months. It’s true, I don’t have any trouble finding someone who’s interested in coming back to my place. But it was never any good.”
“Unlucky?”
“No, I mean there wasn’t ever anything between me and whoever it was. No real connection. We didn’t care about each other at all. And so the sex was just, like, a really complicated way of masturbating. That often ended in bad feelings. Unrequited love. That kind of thing.”
“So you think we have some sort of connection?” I asked.
He stood up, having already cleaned his plate. “Maybe. Sure felt like it. And that’s why I was scared. Scared to confirm that feeling.” He stood by the sink where he tossed his dishes. “So you should probably go.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you say you had a job?”
“Oh, right.”
“The paper isn’t going to sell itself.”
“I guess not,” I said. I finished up what was on my plate, then stood up to leave.
“Look,” he said. “I know I’m sending mixed messages here. And I’m sorry about that. But the simple fact is, connection or no, we can’t be together. You need to leave, and you shouldn’t come back. And I need to take your business card and tear it up, just so that I don’t have your number anymore. Because I’ll call you if I get the chance.”
“But why?” I asked. I know it was what we agreed to, but it still didn’t feel quite right.
“I’m not a lover,” he said. “I’m a fighter. And I don’t want you to get dragged into this. It isn’t safe for someone like you. Especially if people start seeing you around someone like me.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked.
He paused, then simply said, “You’re late for work.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Jessica.” He said it in such a fatalistic way.
I walked through the house, out the front door, and then down the stairs to the road. I got in my car and drove off. Towards work. I spent the whole ride trying not to think about him. Trying not to think about what he’d done. It worked out horribly. Every memory I tried to blocked replayed itself in vivid, erotic detail. The sensation of his tongue between my legs. The feeling of him throbbing, deep inside of me. I swear I almost crashed a couple times just from the memories.
By the time I got to work, it was eleven o’clock and I was horny all over again. I wanted more of it. More of him. But I had heard what he said. We couldn’t be together. I needed to stay away. It wasn’t safe for us to be together.
Chapter 4
I sighed and headed into the office. Up the agonizingly long set of stairs to the fourth floor. My knees were still a little wobbly.
&
nbsp; As I walked I figured out what I was going to say. I was jetlagged from the trip. People would believe that. I had really gone on a trip. If that wasn’t enough, I’d mention something about having vomited. That would be enough. I was well liked around the office. No one was going to be that mad at me or anything.
“Hey,” came the cheery voice that greeted me every morning. Samantha. Probably my best friend in the office. The receptionist.
“Hey,” I said, walking up to her desk.
“How was your trip?”
I hesitated. My mind had been so far away from my trip ever since I got back. “Good,” I finally said. “Well, not that good.”
“Family shit?” she asked.
“Like usual.”
“Ah well. It’s good to have you back,” she said. “Did your flight just get in this morning?”
“No,” I said. “Uh, it was pretty late last night. I was super jetlagged this morning though. Couldn’t drag myself out of bed.”
She stared at me through her curly hair. “You don’t look jetlagged,” she said. She could see right through my lies. She stood up and leaned towards me. Boobs perking out of her shirt. “Why are you actually late?” she said in a quiet voice.
“I am actually jetlagged,” I said with the most irritated voice I could manage on her.
“Sure,” she said, sitting back down. “Absolutely you are.” She gave me a wink. I have no idea how she could read me so well.
I walked away, towards my desk. Plopped myself down without saying a thing.
“Good morning,” came the other voice that greeted me every morning. It was also a sweet voice, much in a more sickening way. “How was your trip?”
I looked up at Derek. “Fine,” I said. I didn’t much like talking to Derek. He’s not a terrible guy, by any stretch, but there’s one thing that everyone in the office knows about him. He has a crush on me. Not a grown-up crush. Not a let’s-go-for-coffee-sometime crush. But, like, a highschool crush. With the stupid flirting, and the nervousness. And the staring at my boobs.
“You’re a bit late,” he said.
“Yep,” I said. It’s amazing how oblivious to hints he is. I’ve been trying to shut him up for months now. Never letting our conversations go anywhere. And yet he continues to try.
“Don’t worry though. I kept everything under control while you were gone. Even if it was for a few more hours than expected.
“Thanks,” I said.
I opened up my mail program and started to work my way through it. So many unread messages. So much of it spam. So much of it important. No way to tell which is which until I’ve read it.
I go through them one by one, like I do every morning, but today I’m slower. Every now and then I just read something that sends my mind off on a tangent. People looking for the hard paper stock. Wondering if we offer overnight shipping. Hoping for some smooth, glossy paper. It seems like every word even remotely connected to last night brings back the whole flood of amazing memories.
Eventually the emails just got too boring. I was distracted. My mind was somewhere else entirely. My desk is in a position where no one can see my screen. So I opened up my browser and searched “Malcolm the beast”. Nothing that came up had anything to do with what I was looking for. I tried “Malcolm the beast thomson”. There were a couple electronic message board posts that might have been about the Malcolm I had been fucked by the night before, but it was hard to tell. Apparently he isn’t the first man on the planet to refer to himself as a beast.
Then I tried “Malcolm the beast thomson los angeles fighter”. And that brought up the kind of thing I was looking for. All the website still looked like they were from the nineties. But the first one I clicked on had a huge picture of Malcolm on the left hand side. On the right were his stats. Six feet tall. Two hundred pounds. Never lost a fight.
That last part I found a bit unbelievable. Like, I’d seen what he could do. It was understandable that no one had ever been able to beat him. But you’d like he would have told me about that. Tried to impress me with it.
All the other sites I could find about him said the same though. A lot of the compared him to another fighter, from New York. He had an even more intimidating fighter-name. He was Terry ‘The God’ Fletcher. The God. He also had a perfect record, I found. And he was known for harassing his opponents before the fight. Making them go crazy so that they’d be easy targets.
I was glad that Terry was so far away. But I did find a ton of message board conversations about who would win, The Beast or The God. It was split pretty evenly. I didn’t find any evidence that the fight would ever actually happen though, so that was good.
The next thing I knew, an hour had flown by and it was lunch time. Samantha walked past me and tapped me on the shoulder. I stood and followed her. Into the break room, past the crowd up people, and into our own little corner. We always sat next to each other on the little loveseat and ate our lunches off of our laps.
“So,” she said in a voice quiet enough that no one else would hear her. “Spill. Tell me everything. Was he cute?”
I could tell that she was just fishing. Pretending that she knew things that she obviously didn’t. But I could also tell that she wasn’t going to give up. She’d find out what I’d been up to whether I wanted her to or not. “Yes,” I said. “But I’d probably go with hot, not cute.”
“Fuck yeah,” she said, a little too loud. She turned her volume back down for, “So details! How’d you meet?”
“On the plane ride home. But don’t get your hopes up. This was a one time thing. I don’t have a boyfriend now.”
“Sure,” she said.
“He’s a fighter. As his job, I think. And it’s dangerous. He said that he cares about me too much, doesn’t want me to get hurt. So we can’t be together.”
“Aw,” said Samantha, making the syllable last for as long as possible. “That’s kinda sweet. But do you think it’ll actually happen?”
“What?”
“You two staying apart. Like, for good.”
“I think so,” I said. “It’ll take me a while to get all the things he did to me out of my head, but it’ll happen.”
“Sure,” said Samantha. “Does he have your number?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He’ll call.”
“I don’t think so.”
“After a night with you? Any guy would be a total fool not to call.”
I smiled.
“So what’s the news?” asked Derek. He awkwardly sat himself down on the armrest.
“No news,” I said.
“Just catching up a bit,” said Samantha.
“Cool,” said Derek, who then smiled and stared off into the distance.
I looked at Samantha and we sighed in unison. Our chat was over. But she winked at me again. She liked doing that. Leaving the interpretation of the winks up to me.
* * *
After work, I was back in my car, driving towards my place. But then I took an unexpected turn off of the freeway. I guess some part of my brain meant to do it, but I certainly wasn’t aware of the plan.
I drove past the warehouse. In the daylight, it looked exactly like the rest of them. There were no cars parked out front. No sign of anyone inside. No crowd. No booze. Just a regular warehouse. Really the only way I could tell it was the same place was the punching bag hanging from one side.
After that I carried on, trying to trace the path that Malcolm had driven the night before. It had been dark, and he had driven fast, so I think part of me was worried that I wouldn’t be able to find his place if I tried. But after fifteen minutes, I was parked outside of it. I knew where it was. I didn’t need to worry about that.
I had no way to tell if he was home. The place had big windows, but I couldn’t see any lights on inside. Not that he would have needed lights on, though, given the big windows. There wasn’t a car parked outside, other than my own, but that didn’t mean anything either. Maybe he had a car that he just
hadn’t taken to the airport. But I had no way of knowing.
Part of me wanted to just go up and knock. But then I remembered what we’d agreed to. It was a one night stand. And I didn’t want to be in danger. So I drove home, taking a bit of a scenic route.
Once I was home, I made myself some dinner. Then I pulled out my phone. Zero missed calls. I know that the card I gave him had my cell number on it. That’s how devoted I was to selling paper. And yet he hadn’t called.
I left it on the coffee table as I flicked on the TV and put on some distraction. Normally I’d read a book, but my favorite genre has always been romance. And when emails about paper get me going because of recent memories, I can’t imagine what some of the stuff I read would do. I might just go insane.
So I sat there, watching TV. But really I was only pretending to watch TV. Really I was watching my phone. Watching how it wasn’t going off. No one was calling me. Malcolm wasn’t calling me like Samantha thought he would.
Maybe he’d actually done it. Maybe he’d torn up my business card without looking at the number. That’s how much he wanted us to stay apart. It was a weird sort of romantic idea - that he’d keep us apart because he cared about me.
But it sure didn’t feel romantic. It felt like I was being stood up, almost. Not quite though. Like a man said, “Hey, go see this movie that you really want to see with me. I won’t be there, but please wait outside the theatre for me to show up.”
By the time ten o’clock rolled around, I was dead tired. It wasn’t until I was lying down in nothing but a pair of panties that I noticed something.
I hadn’t had a cup of coffee all day. Not even a drip. I had always thought I was hopelessly addicted. That I’d fall asleep if I didn’t get my dose. But here I was. A full day of consciousness, no caffeine necessary. It was weird. It was like he had been a stimulant that I’d been wired on all day. And now it was time for the crash.
I checked my phone one last time before falling asleep. I hadn’t missed any calls. No text messages. He really wasn’t going to try and contact me.
Never Choose Flight (A Fighter Romance Novel) Page 3
