Mating Theory

by Skye Warren

  “Hell,” he says, tight and broken.

  “I think you did know, but you walked away.”

  He looks furious. And despairing. “It was never simple between us.”

  “So don’t you dare show up now and tell me who I can touch. If I want to let him press me up against the wall, if he gets down on his knees and puts his mouth on me until everyone on this floor knows what we’re doing, that’s my business. You had your chance.”

  My body heats at the words, at the remembered pleasure of Sutton’s mouth on my sex. Christopher looks down at me, as if he can feel the heat emanating from between my legs. His expression turns stark, as if he’s in pain. That’s only fair, because I’m in pain too.

  “You deserve better than that,” Christopher says, but there’s no way to pretend he’s talking about Sutton. He’s talking about himself and we both know it.

  “He gives me what I want, which is something you might try next time you like a girl.”

  “It wasn’t that,” he says, harsh again.

  “No?” I step forward and place a hand on his chest, feeling the way his heart beats strong and fast. He may want to be unaffected by me, but he isn’t. I tilt my face up toward him. “You didn’t imagine me naked in the cabin later?”

  He sucks in a breath. “You were too young then.”

  My words come out as a whisper. “What about now? Will you do what Sutton said—imagine me in this dress when you go home after this?”

  “It’s not fucking decent,” he says, even though the silk covers every part of me. It’s a perfectly respectable dress, when it’s not hitched up around my waist.

  “You can thank Sutton for this,” I say, because it’s true. He’s the only reason I lean forward and place my lips against Christopher’s, touching them in some terrible attempt to show him what he gave up, to prove to myself that I don’t care about either of them.

  Christopher sucks in a breath. For a second I think he’s going to pull away. He stiffens and grasps my hair with his fist. Easy enough for him to stop the kiss. Instead he dips my head back and deepens it, exploring my mouth with his teeth, his tongue. Opening me wider until I whimper. Pulling me close until I can feel how hard he is beneath his slacks.

  His other hand fists in the gauze of my dress, and I realize he’s holding me with both hands clenched—one in my hair and one in my clothes. I don’t know whether he’s doing it so he doesn’t have to touch me or because it’s a way to control me without bruising me. He uses both hands to tug me closer; I’m pressed so tightly I can’t imagine getting away.

  Where Sutton had been raw sensuality and playfulness, Christopher is pure determination. He kisses me like he’s a conquering army, like I’m made of gold he has to grasp—or lose forever.

  I push away from him with a pained cry, because I want to stay in his arms. I want to let Christopher take me to bed and show me how much he can conquer, his way made slick by my arousal for another man. “You should go.”

  He pants, his pupils large and dark. “Let me stay. I want to taste you.”

  The words are like a cold splash of water on top of my head. Taste me, like Sutton did in the hallway. Taste me after Sutton challenged him that way. Am I only a competition between two business partners, who probably compete over more than women?

  This is exactly what I always wanted, having Christopher beg for a night with me. Exactly what I always dreamed, but I can’t trust it. Not when I wanted him to find out about this. Maybe not by walking into the hallway, but I knew he’d eventually find out I kissed Sutton.

  Some female part of me knew exactly what I was doing, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself. Now it’s worked, and it’s a hollow victory. Like giving him a love potion and then preening when he falls for me. It isn’t real. None of this is real.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I manage to say. “Bright and early. We can work like people who need money and not from a trust fund. Like people who didn’t almost have sex the night before.”

  He flinches, which is what I wanted. For him to feel as cold as I do. “Harper.”

  “No,” I cry, losing my tenuous grip on composure. “You had your chance with me. Now you don’t want me to be with someone else?”

  “It’s not about that,” he says, but he’s a liar. Like the man on the plane with a secret girlfriend in New York all those years ago. And like Daddy.

  That’s what men know how to do: make money and lie to women.

  “Get out,” I say, turning away. I’m not even angry with Christopher. I’m mad at myself for letting him in the room. For letting Sutton walk me here. For trusting them even when I don’t have any reason to. Because that’s something women are good at: loving men we shouldn’t.

  I open my eyes and stare at the chandelier lit by sunrise, wondering where the hell I am and why I’m awake. Then the hotel room phone rings again. Briefly I fantasize about throwing it across the room. Or maybe attempting to flush it down the toilet.

  Instead I answer with a sleepy, “Hello.”

  “Mademoiselle St. Claire, this is your requested wake-up call,” says a voice in lightly accented French. It makes me wonder if L’Etoile hired him only for that accent. They do love ambiance. “At six o’clock. Would you like us to send breakfast?”

  “Coffee,” I manage to croak before letting the receiver roll out of my hand. It hangs over the side of the bed, because I’m too exhausted to pick it up.

  In my defense I’ve been a college student and an artist for the past few years. Being Instagram famous doesn’t exactly require waking up early. I know without asking that the men will be awake early, regardless of what happened last night, and I’m determined to pull my weight, to actually earn the money they’re damn well going to pay me.

  I drag myself out of bed and into the shower, where a spray of hot water finally lures me into consciousness. While I’m inside, I hear the room service knocking.

  “Coffee,” I tell the shower wall, and it echoes the word back at me, sounding relieved.

  I’m in my towel when I open the door.

  Sutton looks ridiculously fresh and awake at this ungodly hour, his suit crisp across his broad shoulders, narrow at the waist. His only saving grace is the cup of coffee he holds, the white lid and green stirrer keeping the heat and steam inside. It’s not from the hotel, this one.

  “Bless you,” I tell him fervently, taking the coffee and backing up.

  He steps inside with a grin, with absolutely zero shame in his blue eyes as he takes in the tops of my breasts above the towel. “A very good morning.”

  My body responds as if he just stood up after kneeling at my feet, his hands on my thighs, his mouth on my clit. Sparks between my legs. Heat in my breasts. My nipples turning hard against thick cotton. “How did you know I’d be awake?”

  “I was hoping to find you still in bed,” he admits. “I would have joined you.”

  “You’re only a few minutes late for that.”

  It’s a struggle to take the little green stirrer out without letting the towel drop, but naturally he doesn’t help me whatsoever. He’s not quite a gentleman.

  Not when it means he can see my skin covered in droplets.

  “There’s always tomorrow,” he says. “I was going to drive you over to the library, so you can see what’s there before I show you the plans.”

  The coffee burns down my throat, the perfect blend of sharp and sweet. “If you bring me coffee like this, you can take me anywhere you want.”

  A knock comes at the door. “Room service.”

  Sutton gives my body one last look, his blue eyes tinged with regret. “You should probably get dressed. I’ll get the door.”

  It’s with a sense of disappointment that I retreat to the walk-in closet, quickly dropping the towel and sorting through the clothes that are in my luggage. It would be nice to have a power suit or something equally professional, but instead I’ll have to settle for a flowing sage green skirt and a white T-shirt that says, Yo
u should see my active bitch face.

  A quick brush of powder covers some of the freckles that make me look twelve years old. And there’s nothing to be done about my hair, which falls damp and sea-blown no matter what I do. There’s a mirror on the door, and I look at my hazel eyes, wondering what Sutton sees in them.

  Sutton uses people. That’s what Christopher said, as if I didn’t know what men want from women. Even if I’ve never had sex before, that doesn’t mean I’m totally naive to their ways. I’ve been to plenty of frat parties. Walked in on one of my professors and his student, once.

  And there was that husband of my mother’s, the one who climbed into my bed.

  I know what men want from women; I’m only surprised that a man like Sutton wants it from me. Does he think I have more experience than I do? It might be a disappointment when he finds out I can paint a siren better than I can be one.

  Sutton reclines on the armchair in the corner, scrolling through his phone. There are probably a hundred emails in his inbox. Phone calls to return. Or maybe he’s looking at his bank balance, counting the money. That seems like something an ambitious man would do.

  He looks up, and nothing about his expression changes. At least not that I can discern, but there’s a sense of amusement glinting in his eyes. “You are the most interesting woman I’ve ever met, Harper St. Claire.”

  “Oh good,” I say, picking up the coffee he brought me. It’s infinitely stronger than whatever the hotel has in that silver carafe. “I thought you wanted me to be sexy, which was nerve-racking. The interesting thing I’ve been doing for years.”

  His lips press together like he’s holding something inside, which I’ve already figured out is an unusual look for him. He says what he’s thinking.

  “What?” I say, looking down at my shirt. “Too much?”

  He barks a laugh. “God, woman. You’ll be the death of me.”

  “Now you’re just being cruel.” I grab my clutch from the nightstand. “Let’s go.”

  He follows me, muttering to himself and shaking his head. “Not sexy? If you were any more sexy, I would come in my goddamn boxers.”

  I expected a hollowed-out building, maybe one of those abandoned spaces where the earth has started reclaiming the land with ivy grown over cracked concrete. There are enough old places in the west side of Tanglewood for that to be possible.

  Instead I find a grand old building with cornices and ionic columns and a wide bank of brass doors set in thick wavy glass. Inside there’s a marble entranceway and a dome stained-glass ceiling. Only a few panes are broken, petals in the flowers that let in shards of sunlight, illuminating a wealth of dust floating in the air. The whole place is done in an art deco style, original work with brass cage light fixtures and stylized roses in the marble floors.

  High wooden countertops line the entrance, where intrepid old Tanglewood citizens would go to ask questions before you could ask Alexa anything on your Amazon Echo. Behind the counter is the focal point, a wall carving that’s two stories high—a collage of waves and sky, square-faced men wielding tools and working with the land. It’s a story of triumph, that carving. Even an inch deep in dust and with a bird’s nest hanging loosely off one of the men’s eyebrows, it takes my breath away to look at it.

  And through a great curved hallway, shelves and shelves of books.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Sutton says, sounding reluctantly impressed. “Apparently they ran out of funding to pay the librarians, so they just shut the doors one day. Didn’t bother to sell off anything inside or use the building for something else.”

  I wander over to a circular file which has little printed cards where people could write requests. There’s one sitting with a half-sized pencil, the words Crossing the Rubicon written on it. They really had locked the doors without any notice or closure.

  One day there was a functioning library. A center for knowledge and community.

  And the next day, nothing.

  I whirl on Sutton, remembering what he told me. “‘This is more of a teardown and rebuild.’ That’s what you said. Are you insane?”

  “There’s no money in a library,” he says, his voice gentle.

  It makes me think that maybe he mourns the loss of this place, too. Not enough to go easy on him, though. “No wonder Mrs. Rosemont was pissed at you. This is a travesty.”

  “That woman has enough money to have restored the library herself if she cared about it that much. It’s convenient that she’s worried about it now that I own the deed.”

  “You and Christopher,” I remind him. “You own it together.”

  He laughs. “If Christopher had his way, we would have had a wrecking crew already through here. He doesn’t see anything of value between these walls.”

  There’s an uncomfortable symmetry between this old building and me. “And what about you? Do you see any value here?”

  He looks up at the broken stained-glass windows, his handsome face in silhouette, revealing a place in his nose where it once must have broken. “It’s a beauty, that’s for sure. I thought it would be enough of a tribute to build something grand in its place.”

  “That’s not a tribute. That’s—that’s—”

  “A travesty,” he says, his voice dry. “You mentioned that. There was an option in the construction plans, an idea I had once to keep the walls and the doors. Even the old style, but most of this would still be cleared to make way for the stores.”

  “The stores.”

  “It’s going to be a mall. We may not understand the way society ladies work, but we know enough. If there’s a Jimmy Choos over where the picture books are, they’ll come shop.”

  “I resign,” I say, tossing the empty coffee cup into a trash that’s half full with crumpled paper. “And I’m joining the Tanglewood Historical Society.”

  Sutton doesn’t look alarmed by my declaration. Instead he seems pleased, maybe even a little smug. Typical man. “I knew you were the right person for the job.”

  “Because I’m quitting?”

  “Because you aren’t going to let us screw this up.”

  My skin prickles with that sense of a role reversal again, that Christopher is always trying to save me. That Sutton thinks I can save them both, instead. “I’m serious, though. This place is like magic. You can’t turn it into a mall.”

  “We aren’t a charity,” he reminds me, but his voice isn’t a reprimand. Instead it’s like we’re brainstorming, so I let him lead me deeper into the library. “This has to make money or we just took a two-million-dollar bath.”

  “No one needs to be that clean,” I agree, secretly shocked that they had poured that much money into this place. No wonder Christopher’s so bent on starting construction. It would take a serious overhaul to turn this place into a shiny mall with luxury shops.

  Sutton pauses to look at a row of plaques that has the names of old families. The brass is tarnished and green now. This is what’s become of their legacy.

  I walk past him to a great hall that contains books in rows and rows. The dust is dense here, without even the broken stained-glass windows to let in fresh air. It tickles my nose until I sneeze, disturbing the layer of gray on a book beside me. I touch the old cloth spines as I pass, taking away a smudge of dirt with my forefinger, leaving a trail where I’ve been.

  The rows are even enough to follow, but the signage less clear. There aren’t any signs above each row to say what’s inside. You’d have to ask one of the long-gone librarians to find anything. I keep walking, gradually coming to understand the system for things. Fiction and nonfiction. Memoirs and reference materials. There’s a large section on history, which is super meta considering this building has become a slice of the past.

  My finger touches books that haven’t been read in years, their pages silent in this tomb of a library. Books about the medieval times and the ancient Vikings.

  There’s a section about Greek and Roman history
. There are a few books I skimmed through in Smith College’s library. Ancient history doesn’t change that much.

  One catches my eye. The Goddess of Egypt, it says, with a stylized painting that could only be Cleopatra. At least they’ve drawn her without the asp wrapped around her arm, but she has the classic heavy eyeliner and seductive pose. The Mona Lisa smile.

  I flip it open, which sends a cloud of dust into my eyes. They’re watering by the time the page comes into focus. The text is small enough to need a magnifying glass, but a sentence in this random place jumps out to me.

  It’s a testament to female power that she was able to create a shadow of her own beside two men of incredible ambition and renown.

  Two men of incredible ambition. I have a little experience with that after last night, though I’m not sure how much of a shadow I create myself. I’m not sure I want much of a shadow, considering we know the tragic end that Cleopatra met. History wasn’t kind to women who held beauty and power. I’m not sure the present is much kinder.

  “What do you think?” comes a low voice behind me.

  I gasp in a mouthful of old air and cough. Sutton stands too close to me, his body warm and imposing, somehow making the aisle shrink. “I think you surprised me.”

  “You fit here, which is strange.”

  “Strange because I know how to read?” I ask tartly.

  “Strange because you’re the epitome of the modern woman, but you look so comfortable in this stuffy old library. I think you’d fit in anywhere, wouldn’t you?”

  “That comes from moving every few months,” I say, the words out before I can call them back. I don’t usually share that with anyone. Definitely not a man who thinks I’m beautiful and mysterious. “Not that I minded.”

  He looks grave. “Are you going to settle down in New York?”

  That’s where most of the people I know have moved. Or places farther away, like Milan or Bombay. Places to inspire an artist’s heart. I never told them that I long for something simpler. Something more like an old library that hasn’t been touched in forever.