by Sionna Fox
He chuckled. “Do you have siblings?”
“No, I think my parents took a much more liberal view on birth control than the rest of the family did. Plus, they were broke. They were probably smart not to make it worse by having more kids.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That seems cynical.”
“Maybe, but it’s true.” I sipped my wine.
What’s next, Jolene? Religion? Politics? We each took a few bites of our meals and drank some more wine before Matthew came to my rescue again and asked what I wanted to order for dessert. We decided to split a chocolate torte that was hands down, the best thing I had ever put in my mouth. We were both too busy licking our spoons to say anything possibly offensive.
The silence in the car on the way home felt companionable rather than awkward, and my heart fluttered in anticipation instead of panic. He caught me glancing at him and gave me a lopsided grin but didn’t say anything until he pulled up in front of my building. He got out and opened my door, offering his hand again as I stepped to the pavement. And again, that simple touch made my knees go weak. His hands were so warm, and so much larger than mine, and I wanted to feel them all over my bare skin.
He walked me to the door as I fished my keys out of my bag. I turned to find him standing very, very close to me. I breathed in the smell of him, cedar and warm spices, a touch of wood smoke and leather. Oh, he smelled good. I wanted to bury my face in his chest and stay there a while.
He looked down at me and gently tipped up my chin with a long finger. “Thank you for a lovely evening, Jolene.”
His face inched closer to mine until our lips softly met. He pulled away after a moment, and I wanted to pull him back to me and not let go. He looked at me and smiled before he put one large, warm hand on the back of my neck while the other arm wrapped around my waist, and he pulled my mouth to his.
I was on tiptoe, reaching for him as his tongue traced the seam of my lips before I opened my mouth to him. He tasted like wine and the dessert we’d shared. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and found his whole body radiated the same steady warmth as his hands.
He pressed me to him and the hand on my neck snuck up into my hair. Strong fingers cradled my scalp as he continued to explore and lay claim to my mouth. When we finally parted, I was breathless and shaky on my feet.
He gently turned me, one hand on my shoulder and the other on my hip as I fumbled to get the key into the lock. When I had the door open, he leaned down and brushed a kiss behind my ear, squeezing my hip as he did. A jolt of pleasure shot through me from head to toe and back before it settled in my belly.
“Goodnight, sweet Jolene. Get some sleep.”
I tipped my head around and whispered, “Goodnight, Matthew.”
I turned and closed the door behind me and stopped to lean against the wall for a moment to collect myself, then kicked off my shoes since my knees were still wobbly even in bare feet. I raced up the stairs and into my bedroom.
I glanced out the window and saw that he was still in the street. I flipped on the bedside light and waved. Apparently satisfied I had made it in safely, he climbed into his car and drove off. I flopped onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering what in the hell had just happened to me.
Much to my relief, Izzy was still on campus and I was spared her grilling about my date until I had more time to process. Once I got over the initial nervousness, the dinner had been nice. More than nice. Matthew was confident and gentlemanly, without coming off like a chauvinist. He had good taste in food and wine, he laughed at my jokes, and maybe it was the wine, but he wasn’t hard for me to talk to. And he was unbelievably smoking hot.
Oh, and the kissing. Nothing in my pervy dreams came anywhere close to that kiss on my doorstep. I’d been a breath away from saying to hell with it and inviting him up for a drink. Hopefully followed by hot, sweaty sex. I didn’t even know if he would want to see me again. Had I missed my opportunity? Should I have invited him up? Did he expect me to in return for dinner? Was that how these things worked? Shit. And before I was even aware of it, the hamster wheel of doom that masqueraded as my brain was off and squeaking.
I ended up lying awake half the night replaying every moment of dinner, of the ride back to my place, of the kiss on the front step, on an infinite loop in my mind, trying to figure out where I went wrong. I shouldn’t have teased about his family and their white picket fence. Or talked about my family. God, I had really brought up my parents’ theoretical views on birth control, hadn’t I? Fucking awesome. There was no way he was going to call me. He had kissed me. Though I was so out of practice at even kissing, that might have been merely a polite way of saying thanks for an awkward evening, let’s never talk again. It was a letting her down easy kiss. A give the poor girl something to dream about in the lonely nights ahead kiss.
I fell asleep, mentally and physically exhausted, sometime around three. I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed forever when my alarm started going off three short hours later. I knew if I stayed home, I would only drive myself off the deep end, analyzing every word, gesture, silence, blink from the night before between bouts of staring at my phone willing Matthew to contact me to tell me I was a hopeless waste of his time and gorgeousness. Or, hope against hope, tell me he wanted to see me again. I couldn’t allow myself to dwell on that sliver, though, or I would end up gutted when I didn’t hear from him.
I knew my thought processes were ridiculous. It wasn’t as if I believed all the crap that ran through my head, but I had never found a way of successfully shutting up the running monologue of anxiety that took up so much of my consciousness. It was always there.
That’s the thing about generalized anxiety disorder. It doesn’t sound so bad, except it means I’m generally anxious about generally everything. I’d tried medication, meditation, yoga—I even tried to take up running once—a whole litany of things thrown at or suggested to the chronically nervous. I had medication for panic attacks, when I truly had one and wasn’t only panicking about having a panic attack, and medication to help me sleep if I’d gone a few nights without. But it’s hard to function on a steady diet of tranquilizers, lovely as the temporary peace and quiet inside my head could be.
I had always coped instead by avoiding the things that made me nervous, which meant I spent a lot of time at home alone where my brain could potentially run riot, but at least I didn’t have to face, you know, other human beings. I didn’t want to be the girl hiding away from the world anymore, that was supposed to be the whole fucking point of moving—new town, new Mouse. I had to get out of the apartment.
I pulled myself out of bed and trudged into the office on leaden feet. In the interest of sanity, I turned off my phone and put it in a desk drawer, so I couldn’t check for new messages every ten seconds. I still knew it was there—it called to me all day—but better to be driven crazy by wanting to turn on the phone than be straining for the beep of a new message for eight hours. Such were the bargains I made with my anxieties.
I almost caved at lunch, but I talked myself out of it, reminding myself that even if Matthew was going to contact me, he was at work too, and unlikely to take time from the lab to send me messages. Or even think about me. I probably wouldn’t hear from him for several days, if at all. He was doing important research; he didn’t have time to moon over girls and send them messages asking them out again. Or texts saying they should just be friends. Or never see each other again, ever, please lose my number.
By mid-afternoon, I was looking forward to taking a sleeping pill later, desperate to get off the hamster wheel. I was already sorely tempted to crawl under my desk and have a pity party followed by a nap. When I left work, I was so tired and annoyed with myself I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry, then sleep for three days.
I forced myself to wait until I got back to the apartment and had changed out of my work clothes into fuzzy pj’s before I turned my phone back on. My stomach took up residence in my throat as I waited for it to power up.
It dropped somewhere around my knees when the phone chirped. I had a message from Matthew Ward.
Matthew: I’d like to see you again. I’ll pick you up Saturday at 6. Casual dress is appropriate.
There may have been happy dancing. Maybe. I didn’t completely and utterly fuck up! Except now I had roughly forty-eight hours, too many of them without work to distract me, during which I could obsess over the three simple sentences, the seventeen words of his message.
The directive nature of it was clear. He didn’t expect to be questioned, simply obeyed. Cocky fucking bastard. He wasn’t doing anything to dispel my first impression, that was for sure. But even as part of me scoffed and wanted to resist for the sake of it, my body went all warm and gooey over the attitude. It was just…nice to have clear, concise directions that weren’t filtered through “I guess” and “if you want.” To not have to worry and wonder, to attempt to construct tone from a text and pray I wasn’t misinterpreting the message. It felt like being taken care of.
His directions regarding the dress code could have been him—correctly—assuming I would be the type to worry about it, or he could be the kind of asshole who wanted to dictate what I wore. I dismissed that notion outright. Maybe I was blinded by the hotness, but while confident and a touch commanding felt like the right words for him, I firmly rejected domineering, controlling, and asshole. Izzy was probably right. I needed to get laid and right now, deluding myself about the nature and origins of his commands was fine by me.
I was giddy that he wanted to see me again, but the hamster wheel was still squeaking along at full speed. I climbed into bed and fished a sleeping pill out of the nightstand. It was the only way I was going to get any rest that night, despite how tired I was. I downed the pill and put on cartoons to distract me while I gave the meds time to go to work and carry me off to a dreamless, quiet sleep.
Chapter Three
The hours between seeing his message and six o’clock Saturday were a form of slow torture. I considered staying late Friday afternoon, to eat up unoccupied brain time, but I realized if I kept working, I would have even more hours to pad on Monday by using the slowest possible means to complete tasks. Better to save the limited distractions of work for when I needed them to keep me from replaying…whatever was going to happen on Saturday. God, I hoped there would be something to replay that wasn’t me epically striking out. I packed up and went home at five.
Izzy was at her studio painting late, so I cobbled together some dinner and nestled into the couch with a book. The words on the page blurred repeatedly as I fantasized about what was going to happen and I got caught at the crossroads of extremely turned on and incredibly anxious. It didn’t take me long to give up and slip myself a sleeping pill, curl up with some old faithful TV, and fall asleep before ten o’clock. At least I would be well-rested for him.
I usually didn’t dream when I took a pill, shutting up my mind was kind of the point, but I woke sometime in the small hours, panting and sweating, almost painfully aroused. All that was left was a jumble of images. Strong hands pinning my body, stinging skin, the feel of teeth on my neck and my breasts, with Matthew bare-chested and smirking, the architect of it all. I’d liked a bit of rough sex as much as the next girl, but this was something else, something more. I wanted it to hurt. And I wanted Matthew to do it. What was it about him that did this to me?
I spent the better part of Saturday preparing myself for the night I hoped to hell was coming. If he wanted to take me home, I was damn well going to be ready for it. I showered, carefully shaved my legs, and tidied my bush. I hadn’t had sex in actual years, and that level of commitment to personal grooming had long since gone the way of the dinosaur, but I knew I would feel self-conscious if nakedness ensued and I still had a full seventies’ porn muff. Especially if he got anywhere near me with his mouth. And oh, I wanted him to get near me with his mouth.
I tweezed my eyebrows and hunted down the rogue hairs you make your friends promise to tell you about if they ever spot them before you do. I blow-dried my hair for the first time since I could remember and put on a minimal amount of makeup. I didn’t want to risk leaving face prints on his pillows if I could help it. Not that my fantasies involved being shoved facedown in his pillows. Nope. Not at all.
I put on my favorite bra, one that hoisted and shaped my boobs into a fairly impressive display of cleavage, along with the matching panties. I felt like a knight preparing for battle, performing ablutions, donning my boob-hiking armor, the black jersey knit skirt and pale pink silky camisole were my sword and shield.
I drew out each task in a bid to keep my mind occupied on the present, lest I end up a quivering, panic-stricken mess by the time Matthew arrived to pick me up. The snail’s pace kept me busy until almost six, but I still had time to fret and reconsider my outfit fifteen thousand times. When the door finally rang, the pile of clothes I had pulled out of my closet and rejected had taken over most of my bed, and I had to change my cardigan because I already had sweat marks under my armpits.
I ran out of my room, slipped on flats and a jacket, and flew down the stairs. I forced myself to slow down on the last couple of steps and tried to stroll down the hallway at a stately pace, not wanting to broadcast my nerves at full blast. I paused at the door for a steadying breath before I opened it.
“Hi.” Okay, that came out a little breathless.
Matthew took my hand and leaned forward to kiss my cheek. “Jolene. You look lovely.”
He stepped back and, without a doubt, checked out my tits. Score one for my favorite bra. I grinned when he visibly forced his focus back up to my face. With my hand still in his, he led me to the curb and ushered me into the car.
“Where are we going?” I asked once we were moving.
“I thought I’d make you dinner.” He kept his eyes staring straight ahead at the road, but I detected the hint of a sheepish smile on his lips.
“Kidnapping is the second date?” Shit. I bit the inside of my lip lest anything else slip past my filter.
But he laughed and my belly fluttered at the sound. “It’s not kidnapping if I promise to let you go whenever you want to.”
“Uh-huh,” I said dubiously, wanting to keep the joke going. “What if I don’t trust you?”
“I can turn around and take you home right now,” he replied stonily. We’d gone from cracking jokes to deadly seriousness in a split second, and I had no idea why.
“No, take me to your lair. I trust you.”
We stopped at a light, and he looked at me for a long moment. “Good girl.”
Those two words sent a delicious shiver over my skin for no earthly reason I could name. I should have been insulted that he’d praised me like a dog or a small child, and yet I wanted nothing more than for him to say it again, to do something worthy of being called a good girl.
He lived close to the hospital he worked out of, and not unlike Izzy and I, in a nicer apartment than the average overeducated Bostonian, no doubt in some part thanks to his family. His one bedroom in a newly built high-rise wasn’t overly large or lavishly decorated, but he lived alone in a place that might otherwise have had two people sharing the bedroom and a third secretly living on the couch for good measure.
The mismatched furniture looked hand-me-down, but these were probably cast-offs from his parents, not thrift store or curbside finds with stains of dubious origins and sagging cushions. Nothing like the apartment I’d left behind in Vermont with its milk crate coffee table and the couch I hadn’t even bothered to try to sell when I moved. I actually kind of missed the plaid monstrosity. It was insanely comfortable, even if curling up on it had required a rather high level of cognitive dissonance about the origins of its stains.
Matthew didn’t give me a grand tour. We kicked off our shoes and jackets at the door, and he installed me on a stool at his breakfast bar while he did, in fact, make me dinner. I got a small taste of what he must be like in the lab. He followed the recipe exactly, measuring right down to the
quarter teaspoon of salt he added to the sautéing onions. He focused entirely on the task at hand. I doubted anything had ever burned in his kitchen with the hovering and setting timers. I wondered how he would react to watching me cook, with my much more haphazard a bit of this and that until it’s done approach.
We ate side by side at the breakfast bar. He talked about work, and I got to enjoy watching him thoroughly nerd out while trying to explain his research in more detail. He talked with his hands, waving his fork around and drawing shapes on the counter with his fingertips. His eyebrows scrunched as he searched for the right non-technical words to explain a concept, and I could see why he had faint crow’s feet the way his eyes crinkled with his huge smile when it clicked for me. He was patient, even if I understood a fraction of what he was trying to tell me about the mechanisms governing neuroplasticity and their relationships with neurobiological disorders. I was slightly awed and a little envious of his passion. Still, when he started to grab a notebook to diagram a rabbit hole about epigenetics and their role in the expression of symptoms following traumatic brain injuries, I had to stop him before my brain fuzzed out.
“Sorry, I get excited.” He smiled at me from under a hank of dark hair.
“No, it’s kind of adorable,” I blurted, and my cheeks heated. “I’m jealous, actually.”
He furrowed his eyebrows at me. “Jealous, why?”
“You care about what you’re doing. I wish I had that. The only reason I go to work every day is because I need the money.”
“What do you want to be doing?” he asked, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as though everyone out there was able to follow their dreams, paychecks be damned.
“I don’t know. I never had some sort of calling or anything. Not like you or Izzy. I didn’t spend a lot of time as a kid dreaming about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I sort of figured, you grow up, you get a job because you have to, and that’s that.” I toyed with a loose strand of hair.
