“Meet Tricia,” Alex said, and Tricia wailed louder, dripping tears onto her flowered slip dress no matter how fast Alex passed her Kleenexes.
“What did you do to her?” Nina asked him, trying not to notice how great he looked in dress pants and a tailored shirt again, even with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie loose. Really, he cleaned up very nicely.
Alex glared at her. “I didn’t do anything to her. I took her to dinner. I showed her a video.” Nina narrowed her eyes and he added, “Young Frankenstein. Get your mind out of the gutter. Then I kissed her. That’s it. I swear to God.” He crossed his arms in front of him, looking disgusted with her and Tricia, and his forearms flexed, and Nina lost her train of thought. He had great arms. He had great everything.
And all of it was too young for her.
“He’s never going to marry me,” Tricia wailed.
“Marry you?” Nina blinked at Alex. “How long have you been dating?”
Alex checked his watch. “We’re at the three-hour mark now.”
“This is your first date?” Nina stopped patting Tricia. “I’m missing something here.”
Tricia looked up at her, her face a sodden mask of misery under her riot of blond curls. “It’s all my fault. I told him I wanted to sleep with him. And now he’ll never marry me.”
Nina raised an eyebrow at Tricia, trying to ignore the spurt of dislike she felt for her. “Gee, I’d think that’d be a good line to take with him.”
Tricia shook her head, snuffling. “He said no. He said no!”
Irrationally cheered, Nina looked at Alex who looked as if he wished he were dead. “Tricia enjoyed the wine at dinner,” he said in a pathetic attempt at tact.
“And now he thinks I’m a drunk, too,” Tricia wailed.
“Well,” Nina said, patting faster as she tried to think of a way to convince Tricia to stop crying.
“And I really want to marry a doctor,” Tricia finished wetly.
Nina stopped patting again and glared at her. How could anybody look at Alex and just see his medical degree? Even aside from the fact that he was gorgeous, he was also sweet and funny and…Shut up, she told herself. Don’t do this to yourself. She stood up. “Well, I think it’s time we all called it a night. Alex is going to take you home now. Go get the car, Alex.”
“We’ll all go,” Alex said. “Fred needs the fresh air.”
“Who’s Fred?” Tricia said. “Is he a doctor?”
Half an hour later, with Tricia deposited at her door, Nina was still fuming. “I can’t believe she was going out with you because she wants to marry a doctor.”
Alex grinned at her, relaxed behind the wheel now that Tricia was just a soggy memory. “Well, face it—the women I date are not going out with me because of the fancy places I can take them to. I’m an ER specialist with about ten years of loans to pay off. I’m poor. So they plan for the future.”
Nina frowned at him, trying not to appreciate the careless way his fingers draped over the wheel, and the way his long body lounged in the seat. Carelessly confident, that was Alex. Not a focused bone in his body. Don’t think about his body. She tried to find her place in the conversation. “Women should be going out with you because you’re terrific.”
“Thank you,” Alex said. “I’ll tell them you said so.”
In the back seat, his head hanging out the window, Fred snorted the wind out of his nose.
“Who asked you?” Alex said to him.
“I can’t believe she’d be so mercenary,” Nina fumed on, grateful to have something to distract her.
“Oh, come on,” Alex said. “Why’d you marry Guy the Stiff? Because he was a rich lawyer, right?”
“No, because he was the first man I ever slept with,” Nina said. “I was raised strict.”
Alex was silent for a moment. “So, how many guys have you slept with?”
“One. Guy.” Nina laughed shortly, embarrassed by her lack of an interesting past.
“Okay, smartass, how many men have you slept with?”
“I told you,” Nina said. “One. Guy. I met him in college and slept with him, and as far as I was concerned, that was it.”
Alex turned to stare at her in the dim light of the front seat. “You’re kidding.”
“No.” Nina frowned at his incredulity. He probably thought she was dull and frumpy. Well, the hell with him. So she didn’t have much of a past. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to have a terrific future. Don’t make assumptions, Norma had said. Norma was right. She didn’t need to give up men entirely; she just had to give up marrying them. “I was backward then, but I’m not anymore,” she told him and stuck her chin out. “I’m going to have an affair.” It was a brand-new idea, but with Alex beside her, it sounded like a good one.
Alex didn’t look impressed. Or happy, for that matter. “With whom?”
“I have no idea.” Nina leaned her head back as the cool night air rushed in her window. She half closed her eyes and tried to look mature and depraved. “I’m still looking.”
Alex grinned at her. “Well, put me on the shortlist.”
Hello. Nina swallowed. He was kidding. If she took him seriously and made a pass at him, he’d be embarrassed. Look at how he’d been with Tricia. “Very funny,” she said and changed the subject. “I can’t believe Tricia was dumb enough to think that offering to sleep with you would turn you off.”
“No, she was right about that.” Alex turned the car into the alley behind the apartment house and backed it into his parking space.
“What?” Nina stared at him, disbelieving.
“I wouldn’t want somebody who would sleep with me on the first date.” Alex turned off the ignition. “I have some standards.”
“Oh.” Nina tried to digest this. It was a damn good thing she’d decided not to make a pass at him. Not only would he have thought she was too old, he’d have thought she was too easy. She regrouped. “Well, that’s good. I suppose it shows moral fiber on your part that you turned her down.”
“I turned her down because she was drunk,” Alex corrected her. “If she’d been sober, I’d have slept with her.”
“But you just said—”
“I wouldn’t have asked her out again, but I would have slept with her.” Nina glared at him and he shrugged. “Hey, I did not seduce her. In fact, I was trying to sober her up. I have cups of coffee on my table upstairs to prove it. But if she’s going to make an offer while of sound mind, I’m going to take her up on it, or I wouldn’t be of sound mind.”
“Did you ever think of showing some moral restraint?” she asked him icily.
“No,” Alex said. “I’m male.”
He certainly was. That was the problem. She was sitting next to him in a dark car, and he was the most masculine male she’d been with for a long time. Forever, actually. And she should be angry with him for saying he would have slept with Tricia if she’d been sober, but it was hard to be angry and turned on at the same time, and the fact was, whenever he came around, she got a nice little buzz going that didn’t fade until he was long gone.
This was bad.
Get out of this car, Nina told herself and opened the door. “I’m going to let the next one cry all over you.” She climbed out of the car and opened the back door for Fred. “Stay away from him, Fred. He’s a bad influence on you.”
Fred gathered himself together and leaped for the ground, staggering a little on impact.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Alex said to Nina, but she was already leading Fred through the gate into the backyard, and there was no way she was going to stop and continue the conversation.
The last thing she needed to do was discuss sex with Alex Moore.
“WHAT DO YOU DO when a woman you want shows no interest in you?” Alex asked Max the next day in the hospital cafeteria.
Max looked at him with contempt over his eggs and hash browns. “That never happens.”
Alex pushed his own plate away. “I don’t think I’m…sophisti
cated enough for this woman. I think she’s used to rich, older guys. I think she thinks I’m a kid.”
Max shoved his fork into his breakfast. “You been wearing that beanie with the propeller again?”
Alex frowned at him. “I’m serious, Max.”
Max raised an eyebrow, distracted from his food for a moment. “You? Serious about a woman?”
Alex thought about it. “I don’t know. Probably not. I’m definitely serious about getting her into bed.”
Max nodded and went back to his eggs. “That’s more like it.”
Alex shook his head. “But it’s not going to happen.”
Max shook his head and spoke around bites of egg and potato. “You don’t know that. Spend some time with her. Charm her socks off. Be debonair.”
“Oh, yeah.” Alex leaned back. “Debonair. That’s the real me.”
Max shrugged. “Well, you’re the one who said she thought the real you was a Boy Scout.”
Alex stared blankly across the crowded cafeteria, thinking about Nina and how Nina had looked in the dark front seat of his car, how Nina’s perfume had come to him faint and erotic in the dimness, how Nina’s skin had gleamed when they’d passed a streetlight. She’d been so warm and so close…
“The thing about Nina,” he told Max when he’d come back to earth, “is that when I’m with her, I forget everything but her, so I can’t pretend to be somebody else. The only person I can be with Nina is me.”
Max froze, his fork poised over his plate. “Don’t talk like that. It sounds serious.”
“It’s not serious,” Alex said. “She’s just my neighbor. It’s no big deal.”
“Right.” Max pointed his fork at him. “You be careful, boy. Stay away from her.”
“Right,” Alex said, wondering if Nina liked videos and what excuse he could use to invite himself up to share her VCR.
IN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, Nina finished editing the twit’s memoirs and two books of literary criticism, gave Charity a contract for a book described as “a feminist memoir” and spent six amazingly pleasant and comfortable nights watching old movies with Alex on her TV.
“You get better reception than I do,” Alex had told her the first night. He’d knocked on her door and handed her a gallon of skim milk and a large package of Oreos. “You don’t mind, do you?”
And she’d said no because she didn’t mind at all. In fact, she was flat out delighted even though she’d warned herself not to be. There was something warm and right about Alex sitting on her floor, his back propped up against her couch, Fred draped over his lap thinking intense Oreo thoughts, while people screamed and laughed and cried on the screen in front of them. She’d taken to curling up on the couch behind them, watching the movies over Alex’s shoulder, absentmindedly reaching for the cookies or pretzels in his lap while she rediscovered old movies she’d loved like Real Genius and Avanti and American Dreamer.
And sometimes when the movie was over, they just talked, first about the movie and then about other things. Alex talked about the ER and his family, how much he loved his work and the good times he had with his brother, Max, and Nina told him about the troubles at her work, Jessica and the twit’s memoirs and Charity and her book.
Alex had been incredulous when he’d first heard of the project. “She’s writing a book about her dates?”
“Charity doesn’t have dates,” Nina told him, reaching over his shoulder for pretzels, trying not to inhale the scent of his soap on his skin. “She has disasters with cab fare. Like this guy Carlton, the grad student she dated when she was a sophomore. He was really anal retentive about relationships. Charity said even sex had to be by the book.”
“What book?” Alex straightened with interest. “There’s a book?”
“She calls that chapter ‘Sex: The Cliff Notes.’” Nina wanted to reach out and pull him back against the couch, closer to her. Dumb idea. “Jessica’s going to go cardiac when she reads the chapter titles.”
Alex collapsed back against the couch. “Don’t say ‘cardiac.’”
“Then there’s chapter five,” Nina went on, happy again now that he was close. “Wilson. He had an impotence problem.”
Alex shook his head. “Don’t say ‘impotence.’”
Nina reached for another pretzel. “She called that chapter ‘Try Hard and Try Harder.’”
“Ouch.” Alex winced. “Your friend has a mean streak.”
Nina frowned, the pretzel still in her hand. Charity’s chapters were a little harsh. In fact, some of them were downright bitter, but they were funny and sexy, so she’d told Charity that it might be a good idea to lighten things up as the book went along so the reader got the feeling that Jane was making progress and that things were getting better for her. Charity had seemed doubtful, so Nina hadn’t pressed the point. The last thing an author needed to hear while she was writing her first draft was criticism.
“I’m sure she’ll lighten up in the rewrite,” she told Alex. “And chapter six is pretty funny. It’s about Ron, this traveling salesman she dated.”
Alex closed his eyes. “Let me guess. He slept around.”
Nina nodded. “Around forty-eight states. She’s calling his chapter ‘Mobile Dick.’ We’re going to have to change that one.”
“I can’t wait to meet Charity,” Alex said. “She sounds like a real sweet woman.”
Jessica was interested in Charity, too.
“So tell me about Charity’s book,” she said to Nina one day in June over lunch. Jessica, as always, looked beige and polished and upper-class. She was the only woman Nina had ever met who had naturally beige hair. They were in Jessica’s equally beige office, eating yogurt and kiwi and discussing the changes that would have to be made to the twit’s memoir, when Nina had remarked that at least the feminist memoir Charity was working on wouldn’t be boring. Jessica had perked right up. One of the many good things about Jessica was that she wasn’t elitist or prudish. It didn’t bother her in the slightest that Charity ran a boutique instead of a college English department or that she was writing about her sex life.
“It’s a history of the changing roles of women,” Nina had told her when she’d gone to contract on the book. “An anecdotal, oral history of the sexual revolution.”
“Wonderful,” Jessica had said and okayed it without reading the proposal. “I trust you,” she’d told Nina, and Nina had felt a stab of guilt even though what she was doing was best for Jessica and Howard Press.
“Charity’s book?” Nina said now. “She’s more than half finished. Seven chapters on the varying expectations of sexual roles in high school in the seventies and college and young adulthood in the eighties. It’s fascinating. Chapter seven is on her first working experience.”
Jessica raised a plucked beige eyebrow. “Harassment?”
Nina frowned. “Sort of. Her boss seduced her, and then she found out he was a sexual compulsive.”
Jessica’s eyes widened. “Fascinating. Horrible, but fascinating.”
“Right,” Nina said, omitting to tell her that Charity called this chapter “He Was On Fire When I Lay Down On Him.”
“It wasn’t really harassment,” Charity had told Nina. “Presley just never thought about anything else. He probably had sex with his desk drawer when I wasn’t around. I finally had to get another job just so I could get some sleep.”
“It’s going to be an interesting book,” she promised Jessica. “A real money-maker.”
“That’s not what Howard Press is about,” Jessica said, but Nina could see the hope flare in her eyes. Jessica needed a money-maker soon, which meant Nina did, too, if she wanted to keep her job.
“It’s more than just a money-maker,” she reassured Jessica. “It’ll make women everywhere rethink their sex lives.”
It was certainly making Nina rethink hers. Whatever other problems Charity’s book had, her sex scenes were dynamite. As Nina worked her way through Charity’s explicit, erotic chapters, the year she’d been celibate bega
n to feel like ten. And Alex wasn’t helping things any. She was dreaming about him now, lovely sexy dreams of his hands and his mouth and his wonderful, long body. She’d seen that body in action the night before, when he’d come by and coaxed her out to go jogging after work. Fred had trotted along between them, disgusted, while they’d laughed and she’d watched Alex move. She thought longingly of the days when she’d lusted after Matthew Perry, safe on the other side of the television screen. Alex was just one flight down, entirely too real, entirely too young.
Not dating was not working. She was going to have to do something.
Two weeks later, after a dozen more frustrating nights with Alex and Ted Turner’s video library and at least that many frustrating jogs in the park, she did something.
“I have to start dating,” Nina told Charity. She’d gone downtown on her lunch hour to the boutique that Charity managed, and there, in the middle of a lot of red suede, purple spandex and black lace, she came clean. “I’m interested in Alex,” she said as they leaned against a display case full of silver chains. “Really interested. But it’s just because he’s the only man I see.” Charity opened her mouth, and Nina hurried to cut her off. “And Alex isn’t my only problem. Guy is calling again. He wants to have lunch and dinner and sex.”
“He asked you on the phone to have sex?” Charity said, intrigued.
“No, but it was in his voice,” Nina said. “And when I said I wasn’t interested, he pointed out that he knew I wasn’t dating because the only other man I ever talked about when he called was the kid downstairs. I need to get out more, rev up my image, see some other men. Help me.”
Charity frowned at her. “You want me to fix you up on a date.”
“No.” Nina sat down on one of the little black-enameled chairs that dotted Charity’s domain, depressed. “I have a date.”
Charity dropped into the chair beside her. “You’re kidding.”
Nina gave her an exasperated glare. “No. Is it so impossible that I’d have a date?”
“Yes,” Charity said. “I thought there for a while you were trying to grow your virginity back. Who is this guy?”
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