She wrinkled her nose. “Thanks, but I’m going to go downstairs and grab some lunch,” she said. “Want to come?”
“Twist my arm,” he said, jokingly holding out said arm. She surprised him by taking it as if they were in a PBS costume drama or walking down the aisle at a wedding. Well, what the hell. He escorted her out to the elevators and held the door for her when it arrived. “My lady,” he said, running with the whole Downton Abbey theme.
She grinned but didn’t take his arm again as she punched the button for the subterranean food court that lay beneath the skyscraper. “Actually, one of the Boy Geniuses asked me out.”
“What?” Okay, that was too vehement a reaction. He cleared his throat. “Which one?”
“Steve?” she said. He wasn’t sure why she was phrasing it like a question.
“Well, there’s nothing going on between us, so why not Steve?” The minute the idiotic sentence was out of his mouth, he knew it was a mistake. It wasn’t like she needed his permission to go on a date. Because there was nothing going on between them.
“Oh, so we made out a few times and now I need your blessing to go out with Steve?” she shot back.
Yes, cue the righteous indignation. But this time, he deserved it.
“Of course not,” he said. “You don’t owe me anything.” Then, hoping to get them off this uncomfortable subject, he said, “And did you accept?”
“I did. I hesitated, but then I thought, what the heck do I have to lose? The Boy Geniuses all seem like nice enough guys. And how much do I suck that I always think of them as a unit—the Boy Geniuses—and not as individuated human beings?”
“When is this date?”
She eyed him for a moment as if she was thinking of saying something more, but then she just said, “Tonight, in fact. Which is weird, because I don’t think Steve is here today.”
Steve had, in fact, called in sick. Which meant Steve was home barfing with anticipation, preparing for the best night of his life, the night Amy Morrison deigned to be seen with him in public.
“I just hope Steve understands that I’m not in the mode for anything serious,” Amy said, stepping off the elevator and making a beeline for the soup place in the food court. He didn’t want soup, but he followed her anyway.
Dax waited until Amy had placed her order for cream of broccoli soup before casually asking, “So, what? You’re not going be Steve’s girlfriend, but you’re going to sleep with him?” As if there was any way to casually ask that. And why the hell didn’t he just shut up? This was not his business.
But she didn’t seem offended, just picked up her soup and said, “Oh, God, no. I’m not stupid enough to mix it up with someone I’d see at work every day.”
Right. No one was that stupid. If he hadn’t already decided that he and Amy were a no-go, that would have been one more reason to stay the hell away from her.
“Steve is just fun. Totally not sleeping with him. But I am going to sleep with this guy on Saturday night.”
She’d whipped out her phone and was showing him a picture of a guy who looked like Mason, the Sequel. Or like an ad for Crest Whitestrips. He grabbed it from her and focused on the context surrounding the picture. “Is this Tinder? You are not on Tinder.”
“I am.” She took the phone back. “I told you, I’m looking for casual. I was in a relationship for seven years, and where did that get me? I’m all about fun now.” She led him to a table and plunked her tray down. He followed suit. Apparently, he’d ordered a bowl of minestrone while on autopilot. “Wait,” she paused in the middle of opening a package of crackers. “Are you on Tinder?”
He wasn’t on Tinder. He admired it from a development perspective, though.
“You totally should be.” She’d pulled out the phone again. “Look. It knows where I am, and it pulls up potential matches within the geographic radius I set.” She called up a picture of a smirking, muscle-shirt-wearing dude with a crew cut. “Gross.” She swiped the phone. “See, I swipe left if it’s a no.” She swiped left though a few more shots, though it seemed like she was going too fast to actually even see the guys she was rejecting. Then she stopped at a floppy-haired guy in a suit with his tie loosened. “Then, if I’m interested, I swipe right.” She swiped right. “And if the guy is, too, it sets up a chat.”
“How could you right-swipe that guy? Gross. He looks like a total player. Like he should be in a Versace ad from the 1980s.”
She dropped her phone into her purse and dipped her spoon into her soup. “Unlike you, I suppose? Anyway, I’m surprised you didn’t know about Tinder.”
“I do know about Tinder. The way they mine Facebook profiles is genius. But it’s not really my thing from a user standpoint.”
“But you’re a total womanizer. And this is womanizing—or manizing—stripped down to its essence.”
“I have historically enjoyed female company, that’s true.” He ignored her snort. “But I like to meet women in person.”
“So you can put your magic moves on them?”
She wasn’t wrong, exactly, but there was a better way to put it. “Call me old-fashioned, but I just don’t think a snap judgment based on a photo and maybe one sentence of a bio is going to be reliable. Even if you’re only looking for a hookup, there’s something to be said for chemistry.”
“Ah, I see. You’re a romantic.” She grinned. “Kind of.”
They ate in silence for a minute, him still feeling the urge to defend himself but also feeling that to do so would amount to protesting too much. Because, she was right—he wasn’t a romantic.
“What are you doing this weekend?” Amy asked.
Finally, a subject that wasn’t a minefield. “At the risk of having you mock me mercilessly, I’ll tell you that I’m going to a revival of the Godfather movies at the Royal Cinema.”
“Oh, that sounds great, actually. I love the Godfather—though I’ve only seen the first one.”
“Come with me—it starts Saturday at four.” That was fine, right? They were supposed to be friends. Friends went to the movies together.
“Can’t.” She slurped her soup. “I’m going on the Tinder date.”
“Right.” He slurped right back at her in order to cover a spark of annoyance. “So what’s this guy’s deal?”
“I don’t really know. That’s the beauty of Tinder.” She pulled out her phone. “It doesn’t matter anyway.” She wagged her eyebrows at him. “That’s also the beauty of Tinder.” A few taps and she turned her phone toward him, displaying another picture of the Mason-esque toothpaste ad dude. He looked…
Nice.
Like a nice version of Mason. Which might be exactly what Amy needed. Obviously, there had to have been something real between them for their relationship to last seven years. She thought she wanted casual, but it was clear as day that she was incapable of casual. Which was why he was steering clear. So if she could find someone who had the good qualities of Mason but also didn’t take her for granted…well, that would be her best-case scenario, wouldn’t it?
“So you guys have corresponded beyond Tinder? You know he’s not a psychopath?”
“Yeah, we’ve emailed a bit, exchanged some pictures.”
The idea of this guy with pictures of Amy on his phone did not sit well with Dax. Not at all. But he was done opining on matters that didn’t concern him. “I gotta get back.” He stood and replaced the lid on the soup he never wanted in the first place.
“Me, too.” Amy mirrored his actions. “That McQuade deal is heating up. I have meetings all afternoon.”
He’d been trying to lose her, but he could hardly object when she followed him to the elevators that would take them to their common destination. A bunch of people got on with them, and the elevator stopped every few floors, disgorging lunchers back into their offices. Amy was on the other side of the elevator from him, and she’d taken her phone out. It was crowded enough that he couldn’t quite tell what she was doing. Was she tapping? Scrolling?
Swiping?
The forty-ninth floor was only four short of the top, so by thirty-nine the last two passengers besides them got off. Amy didn’t notice, so engrossed was she with her goddamned phone. He watched the display tick past forty.
Forty-one.
She right-swiped. There was no mistaking it.
So he crossed the empty space between them, snatched the motherfucking phone out of her hand, and kissed her, bringing his lips down on her surprised gasp.
She didn’t seem to be objecting, though. After a moment of passivity—no doubt he’d shocked her—her hands came to his chest and pushed. Hard. But not like she wanted him to stop because she also tilted her head back and loosened her jaw, letting his tongue invade her mouth. So he let himself be propelled backward until his back hit the side of the elevator. There were mirrors on the back wall, and when he glanced to his side, he could see them from behind, her pressed up against him, the purple dress riding up as she lifted up onto her tiptoes and hooked one leg around him, her foot winding around his calf.
Tinder, his ass. With her, it was a five-alarm fire. A goddamned inferno. They probably only had a few seconds before the elevator arrived at their floor, so he threw caution and good judgment to the wind and pulled her more firmly against him, reveling in the feeling of her soft breasts against his chest, tangling his fingers in her hair, and inhaling the maddening strawberry scent of her.
When she made a soft little moan, he was about to hit the emergency stop button. But he wasn’t fast enough. On a ding, the elevator ground to a halt and the doors opened.
She reared back, stepping away as if he were radioactive. They stared at each other, panting. He hoped his eyes weren’t as wide and lust-glazed as hers.
“Ahem.”
He turned. Shit. It was Jack Winter along with Marcus Rosemann, the CEO of the eponymous ad agency that, along with Dax’s and Jack’s companies, rounded out the forty-ninth floor of the Lakefront Centre.
“You two getting off here?” His friend—and Amy’s boss—smirked. “In a manner of speaking, I mean.”
Marcus, normally a serious-minded workaholic who wouldn’t know a joke if it bit him in the ass, let loose a peal of laughter.
Amy touched a palm to her forehead for a moment. She was clearly mortified. But she summoned a bright smile and stepped off the elevator, and he followed, holding the door for the still-smirking Jack to enter.
They stood there staring at each other as the doors closed on Jack. She licked her lips. She was probably waiting for him to apologize. Or at least to say something meaningful to make sense of that lapse. He searched his brain.
“Enjoy your dates this weekend.”
…
Amy did not enjoy her dates that weekend. Date number one was like having a conversation in the kitchen at work, except the conversation never ended. It turned out she could only converse so much about Doctor Who, food court cuisine, and Game of Thrones—the books, not the TV show—before she was just…bored.
It wasn’t Steve’s fault. He was sweet and cute and obviously trying very, very hard. It was just that she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, and she’d already ruled out sleeping with him. Even though she was looking for casual, after all the weirdness with Dax, she wasn’t stupid enough to mix it up with someone from the forty-ninth floor. After all, she still had to have kitchen conversations about Doctor Who, food court cuisine, and Game of Thrones—the books, not the movies.
So what was she doing? They didn’t have any chemistry. Not even friend-chemistry.
“So what do you like to do outside work?” See? Steve was trying.
She thought about it. “You know what? If I’m being honest, I’d have to say that what I do outside work is look at real estate ads. Go to open houses.” She winced, facing the fact that she was a one-trick pony. “I’m sort of working on developing new interests.” She fiddled with the stem of her empty wineglass. “Wait! I did recently go stand-up paddleboarding. I loved it! I think I’ll be doing more of that.”
“Dax is into that.”
“Yeah. He’s the one who took me.”
Steve cocked his head. “I thought you two hated each other.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve come to a truce of sorts.”
“Amy, can I ask you a serious question? And you answer honestly, even if you think I’m not going to like the answer?”
She sat up straight, startled by the abrupt question. “Okay.”
“I have no chance with you, do I?”
She blinked and could feel herself starting to flush.
“Please tell me the truth.”
Steve really was a good guy. Tall and dark, he had pale skin, probably from all the time he spent inside coding. But the effect was nice—kind of vampiric, but in a good way. And he was nice. Polite and interested in her. She owed him the truth. “No. I’m sorry.” But then she rushed to soften the blow. “It’s not you. It’s me. I’m just out of this long relationship, as you know.” Heck, he’d been at the wedding and so had witnessed her humiliation. “So I’m not even sure what I want right now.”
“Maybe what you want is Dax.”
“What? No!” Why was everyone always trying to push them together? “Dax is a total player.”
Steve shrugged. “I guess so.” But the way he said it made her think he didn’t really believe it. “We should probably go.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, wishing she had a gaggle of girlfriends so she could set up Steve with one of them.
He smiled then and offered her a hand. “Don’t be. And don’t be offended when I tell you this, but getting you to go out with me also won me a bet with the other guys.”
“What?” She was wary, not sure she wanted to know any more.
“It’s nothing gross. Just that we had a little pool. Everyone put in ten bucks, and the pot was for the first guy who could get you to go out with him. They were all concocting elaborate schemes. Abdul was programming a video game in which the player shoots Mason look-alikes. Ken was trying to run into you in the kitchen so much that he pretty much set up a mobile workstation there.”
“I have seen Ken a lot lately!”
“Yeah, well, don’t take offense.” He ducked his head as if he was embarrassed. “We all just…really like you.”
“I’m not offended. I’m flattered!” It was the truth. It was also a shot of self-confidence that might serve her well on her date with the Tinder guy. “And you.” She took his arm as they started strolling toward the subway. “You just asked, no gimmicks!”
“Yeah. I thought maybe the direct way was best. More efficient.”
“You were right.” She shot him a grin. “But I have to say, I would like to see that video game of Abdul’s.”
Date number two was a whole different deal. Amy was nervous. She and her friends in college had gone on a few pub crawls where she’d ended up going home with a guy she’d been flirting with. Okay, twice. And then there’d been Mason. But she’d never gone out with the explicit aim of ending the evening…getting it on.
Gah, she couldn’t even say it in her head. She was going to have to work on that because she suspected that if she couldn’t say it, she might have some problems putting it into action.
Sex. She wanted to have sex with Dax.
No! She wanted to have sex with Mr. Tinder.
Mr. Tinder who had a name, which was Greg. Greg Lewis, with whom she did not work. Greg Lewis, who had never made a speech about how she didn’t owe him anything and then made out with her in an elevator.
Greg Lewis, who, so far, seemed like he was the perfect man for the “keeping things straightforwardly casual” job. He was handsome in an airbrushed sort of way. He had ridiculously nice teeth. If the other guy she’d shown Dax was Mr. Versace, this guy was Mr. Hilfiger. Wearing jeans and a blazer with a red-and-white-striped T-shirt underneath, he reminded her of a grown-up, updated version of Archie from the comics. He even had the slicked-back blond hair. Which looked like it had s
o much product in it, it was a little crunchy.
So, fine, she wouldn’t run her fingers through his hair. You can’t have everything.
More importantly, he was nice. He was interested in her job and was himself kind of a real estate hobbyist. He was a corporate lawyer, but he and his brother had recently flipped a house. They got a lot of mileage talking about that over dinner in Little Italy, where he lived.
The only problem she could foresee was that Greg might be too nice. She feared he wasn’t presuming this date was going to end the way she hoped it was. Under normal circumstances, she supposed a girl should appreciate that. But her post-Mason circumstances were…very specific.
She thought about Steve, responding to the “ask out Amy” challenge with the direct approach. Maybe he’d been right. “Um, Greg?” she ventured as they shared some tiramisu. “Can I level with you about something?”
“Sure.”
“I just got out of a relationship, as you know.” They’d done the basic getting-to-know-you conversation, both via email before the date and during it. She’d told him about Mason, though had left out the whole “jilted at the altar” part. “So I’m not really looking for anything serious.”
“Right.” He nodded. “I totally understand.”
“But I do…like you.” Gah! How did people do this? “If you, ah, know what I mean.”
He smiled. He knew what she meant.
“I’m just a ten-minute walk up Grace Street. You want to come over for a nightcap?”
Yes! This was how people did it. She just had to learn the code.
Fifteen minutes later—they’d stopped to analyze a house that was for sale along the way—they arrived at Greg’s place. As he fixed her a drink, she surreptitiously texted Cassie the address. When her friend had learned about Amy’s Tinder mission, she’d made her promise to do so if she went home with anyone.
As Greg showed her around the impeccably decorated main floor, he was very forthcoming with details about the house’s sale price ten years ago and the improvements he’d made since. The perfect foreplay for her—how thoughtful! She padded around after him, wine in hand, admiring the subway tile backsplash and eighteen-inch crown moldings. For some reason, an image of Dax’s charmingly disheveled cottage popped into her head.
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