Bigger Rock

by Lauren Blakely

  Whoa. I frown in confusion. “What?”

  “Well, you usually date older women, right?”

  And the truth is . . . she’s right. Maybe not usually, and certainly not all the time, but J. Cameron was ten years older, and the woman I dated before that was an entertainment executive in her mid-thirties, and as a sophomore in college I went out with a senior. Come to think of it, the woman who took my V-card was five years older than me.

  Hello, pattern.

  Fine. Evidently, I’ve been known to appreciate not only women my age, but those who are fine wine, too. Let me just say, though, one of the best ways to learn what women like in bed is to date older women. Those ladies know how to communicate. They teach you, tell you to go faster, harder, slower, softer, there, right, yes, yes, right fucking there.

  Maybe Harper’s right, but I want to tell her that just because I’ve dated older women doesn’t mean I don’t like her. There’s no point saying that, though, since she doesn’t feel the same. If she did, she’d be tongue-tied and twisted with me like she was with Simon.

  And shit. That reality check slams into me like a piano dropped from the sky. Harper may be off-limits, but I still want her to want me. She doesn’t though. Instead, she wants me to help her. I straighten my shoulders and focus on that consolation prize.

  “And Nick,” she continues, softening her voice, stripping away that layer of humor she wields so well, “there’s no one else I can turn to. I can’t ask one of my girlfriends for help, because they’ll all just tell me I’m fine and fabulous. But is this too strange a thing to ask?” Her voice rises, as if she’s anxious for my answer. That mix of nerves and hopefulness in her question reinforces my hunch that her request isn’t about how to get laid or how to land a hot date. It’s about how to connect with another person.

  Best friend’s sister or not, Harper needs help, and I’m the only one she’s comfortable asking. “It’s not strange. And my answer is yes. I’ll help you figure out how to date.”

  “Thank you.” She drops her hand to my forearm and squeezes. “But you better promise you won’t tell Spencer I asked for your help. He’d never let me live this down.”

  “I promise,” I say, and I don’t feel bad in the least keeping him in the dark on this matter. No way am I telling him I’m becoming his little sister’s love guru.

  “Tell me what to say to Simon, then. Can that be my first lesson?” she asks, sitting up straighter, all eager to learn.

  I stretch my neck side to side, roll up my sleeves, and slide right into coach mode. Hell, maybe coaching her through adventures with other men will cure me of wanting to get naked with her. Nothing can dampen desire faster than knowing she’s into someone else, right? This is going to be just what I need to get her out of my system. A win-win for both of us. “Actually, your first lesson is you need to push him off another week or so. You’re not ready to see him yet. He gets you too flustered. You need to learn the ropes with someone else first.”

  She looks confused. “Okay. But who?”

  “Jason. He’s into you.”

  “But I’m not thinking of him that way.”

  “Even better.”

  “So I should learn the ropes with him, even if I don’t think of him like that?”

  I nod. “Sure. You might wind up liking him. You’re not Princess Awkward around him. It’ll be good training.”

  She raises an eyebrow. I can’t resist. I lean forward, run a finger across it, and brush it back into place. “Don’t raise that eyebrow at me. You are in need of some serious training, and Jason is perfect. You like him as a friend, so that’s enough for now. I won’t let you lead him on too far. I promise, Okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. Trust me. We’re not going to yank him around. We’re just going to practice your . . . conversational skills,” I say diplomatically.

  She laughs and then draws a deep breath. “Let’s conversate.”

  “Do as I say. Open Facebook.”

  She takes out her phone and taps the app.

  “Accept his friend request.”

  She nods and slides her thumb over the screen. “Done.”

  “Now, post on his wall.”

  She draws another breath and gives a crisp nod. “What do I say?”

  “So great seeing you tonight. Exclamation point.”

  She types, posts, and turns the phone to me, like a proud student eager to show her teacher the assignment.

  I pat her shoulder. “You did good. Now, if my calculations are correct,” I say, pretending to look at a wristwatch, “you’ll get a message from him in about twenty minutes.”

  I leave a twenty on the bar as a tip for Julia, and we head out into a warm October night.

  “Nice night. I’ll walk you home,” I say.

  “That sounds perfect.”

  Twenty minutes later, we round the corner onto her block, and she nearly smacks into a tall dude wearing a Columbia T-shirt and laughing at something his goateed buddy says. I grab her elbow and yank her closer before the guy walks into her.

  “Oh, sorry!” The apology comes from the T-shirt guy, who’s about my height. “Totally didn’t see you. My bad.”

  “It’s all good,” Harper says with a quick smile. My arm is around her back still.

  The guy swings his eyes to me, furrows his brow, then points at my face. Something like recognition dawns in his expression. “Wait . . . wait . . . you’re . . .”

  His friend cuts in, a huge fan-boy grin forming. “Mister Orgasm.”

  “That’s me,” I say casually.

  “Holy shit. Your show rocks,” the tall guy says. “I went to a fan meetup you did a couple years ago. Dude, I followed your show back when it was just an online strip.”

  With my free hand, we knock fists. “Love hearing that.”

  “I can’t believe I just bumped into you walking around the city. I would ask you to sign my T-shirt, but that’d be weird, so let’s pretend I didn’t say that, but you’re awesome,” he says, practically bouncing.

  “What he said,” his friend chimes in.

  “He’s the best.” Harper beams, taking her turn on the compliment train.

  “You guys rock. Really appreciate the support. Great meeting you,” I say, and we continue on our way.

  Once the guys are out of earshot, Harper turns to me, her eyes lit up. “I’ve just witnessed a Mister Orgasm sighting in the wild, and it was kind of amazing. Does that happen often?”

  I shake my head, laughing lightly. “Once or twice a year. I swear it’s not that frequent.”

  She can’t stop grinning. “And they love you. They think you’re a stud.”

  “They’re obviously right,” I deadpan, and she bumps her shoulder into mine. When we reach her building, her phone beeps. She grabs it from her purse, and I say, “I bet that’s the Jason reply.”

  She slides open the screen, clicks on the message from Jason, and shows it to me. Hey Harper. So great seeing you! Want to get a cup of coffee?

  I mime dunking a basketball. Nothing but net. “It’s a gift. Really it is,” I say, as we stop near the stoop of her building.

  “You’re good, Nick. You know just what to do and how to behave. This is why you attract women in droves.”

  I kind of want to protest. I feel like she has this impression of me that I don’t necessarily want her to have, but I’m not sure how to deflect this. “Because I have a gift?”

  “That and several other reasons.” She waves broadly at my arms. It’s October, but it’s not chilly tonight so I don’t have a jacket on. “First, there are the arms. All that ink and muscle.”

  She roams her eyes over my biceps. “I mean, your ink is awesome,” she says, pointing to the shapes and swirls I designed myself. The tattoos are abstract lines and curves, but inside them there’s a sun, a moon, and stars, because those were the first things I realized I was good at drawing.

  “Then, the body. Mr. Men’s Health-I’m-so-fit,” she s
ays in this mocking tone, but it’s not me she’s making fun of. It’s the article.

  “You read it?”

  “I read everything. I devour information,” she says, and we’re right back to that place I seem to inhabit with her, where she compliments me, but she could be saying it like I’m a car she’s considering buying. And this one has one hundred seventy horsepower.

  “And then, there’s your face, and you have all this awesome scruff on it.”

  I run a hand over my jaw, and the neat, trim beard that’s like an additional sex toy I can bring to the bedroom. “Chicks dig the beard,” I say, with a lopsided grin.

  “I bet they do,” she says under her breath. She doesn’t say anything else right away. She presses her teeth into the corner of her lip and then speaks, more softly than before. “Can I feel it?”

  FUCK, YES.

  7

  She raises her hand and touches my jaw. My breath hitches as she runs her thumb across the light bristles. I’m keenly aware of every second that passes, one ticking into the next as she touches me, stroking my jawline like she’s mesmerized by the texture.

  “Soft,” she whispers, almost in wonder as she stares at my chin. My heart starts hammering, and I fight to stay still. When she says, “But kind of hard, too,” I swear, I don’t know how I manage not to cup her cheeks, back her up against the stone wall, and just kiss the hell out of her. Kiss, touch, grind, and then some. I want to yank that lush body against mine, let her feel how much she turns me on, and find out if I do the same thing to her. The way her breath barely catches sends my mind spinning and lust spiraling tight in me. I can’t help but hope she wants what I do, and it feels like she could, going by the way she touches my face. It truly fucking does, and maybe that’s why her name takes shape in my throat like a warning.

  So she knows she’s playing with fire if she touches me like this again.

  Then I remember. This is Harper, and she probably has no idea of the effect she has on me. I’ve never known someone like her. Here she is saying all these sweet, sexy things, and probably not even realizing what it can do to a man.

  Makes it hard to resist, and right now I don’t want to. Fuck resistance. Let her play with me for a few minutes. “Anything else you want to feel up?” I ask, hoping she’ll take me up on my extremely generous offer to be her test subject. “The arms are available. The chest is on duty, too. Even the hair is fair game.” I tip my forehead toward her, inviting.

  In a second, her hand is in my hair. She’s slow and measured, and takes her time running her fingers through the strands. My mind goes haywire, picturing every other kind of scenario where her hands might thread through my hair, pulling me close. Ones where she kisses me hungrily, consuming my lips with the kind of greedy touch that leads to clothes yanked halfway off in a fevered frenzy. That turns into slammed doors and hot up-against-the-wall sex, her panties falling to her knees. Or to one of my favorites, one of my fallbacks, one of my simplest and yet hottest fantasies—her legs wrapped tight around my head as I taste her on my lips. As I send her soaring with my tongue.

  The next day, I’d walk past her, brush a strand of hair away from her ear and whisper I can still taste you. She’d shudder, then run her hands through my hair again, needing more.

  Like she’s doing on the street right now. For a sliver of a second, her hand stops and rests against me. I can feel her soft breath on my face. I meet her eyes, and try to read her, to find that flicker in her blue irises that would match the flame inside me.

  “Kiss the girl, Mister Orgasm!”

  I jerk my head at the same time Harper does. The two guys are now across the street, cheering me on from the edge of the sidewalk. They probably think we’re together.

  “Do it!” the other one chimes in. “Like the Kissing Virus episode.”

  Harper turns back to me, her lips curving up in a playful grin. “He had to kiss her to cure her,” she whispers, as if I could forget that little element in the storyline. “Can’t disappoint the fans.”

  I barely have time to register how the hell this is happening, but she’s swaying closer. My brain is full of noise and static, and I don’t know if this is a double-dog-dare until she mouths, For the fan-boys right?

  And hell, if the fan-boys make this possible, I should send them a signed collector’s edition of every panel. “Let’s give them a show,” I say, my throat dry as it becomes clear that she’s not messing around.

  “Hurry! Or the virus will spread!” one of the guys shouts, and Harper shudders, clasping her hand to her chest as she whispers, “You’re the only one who can save me.”

  The very line the damsel in distress uttered in that episode.

  She’s letting them egg us on. Harper loves games. She loves entertainment; she loves performing. This is the magician in her, taking the trick from its setup through to the payoff.

  She runs her thumb along my jawline, and my breath hitches.

  There’s no time to process, no time to analyze. And since she just had her hands all over me, it’s only fair that I get to return the favor.

  Possibility hums in me. I slide my right hand into her hair, letting the soft strands fall through my fingers, nice and slow, as I watch her expression flip from that daring playfulness to something entirely new.

  Something unguarded.

  It’s so enticing. That look makes me long for her even more.

  Up close, her blue eyes are even brighter, like island waters, and I can smell the hint of something like oranges from her shampoo. It’s heady, and my mouth waters, wanting to taste her, inhale her.

  I bring my right hand to her chin, gently tipping her face up toward me. My heart rate quickens, and I lick my lips as our gazes lock. Her eyes shimmer with desire that looks so damn authentic. I tug her close, and her lips part, a soft breath escaping as our eyes close. Judging from her reaction, it sure as hell feels like she wants this in a way that goes well beyond the reason we’re play acting. But then I stop thinking of reasons at all, as I slant my mouth to hers. The world slows, and I kiss Harper as the pair of fans across the street hoot and holler, shouting “woohoo” and “hell, yeah” and finally a victorious, “She’s saved!”

  This is the payoff, and what a payoff it is.

  I want to high-five them for goading her, or goading me, or whatever happened to make this moment possible.

  Because this is exhilarating.

  Our lips graze. There’s a hint of lip gloss, and the faintest taste of the Long-Distance Lover she drank at the bar. I brush my lips across hers, a barely-there caress that’s full of promise, a hint of what it could become if it were real, without the audience.

  Whatever this kiss is, it possesses its own pulse, its own frequency, as if the air around us is charged and vibrating with sensual energy.

  Or maybe it’s just me, because my body is humming. My skin tingles, and this whisper of a kiss lights me up all over, making my mind gallop far beyond the payoff.

  “Your lips are so soft,” I whisper against her, and she gasps in response, then presses her mouth to me once more, murmuring, “Yours, too.”

  We’ve pulled off the ruse with aplomb, but when her lips sweep across mine one more time, it feels way more than necessary for the kiss-the-girl dare to be authentic.

  It feels like it’s slipped into more.

  But just as the lingering build becomes almost unbearable and I’m ready to slide my tongue between her lips, the guys shout and clap, beginning a chorus of “Mister O!” that kills the mood.

  We snap apart.

  Harper blinks, stares down, then slides her gaze back up. The look in her eyes is guilty, like she feels bad that we locked lips. “Well,” she says brightly, as if she’s trying to smooth over an awkward moment, “good thing Mister O gave the girl the right dosage for the kissing virus.”

  I clear my throat, trying to make sense of what she just said. Of what just happened. Of how we basically reenacted a scene from my show. How I’m the hero, and
she’s the girl I rescued from doom.

  “I mean, they totally expected you to do that,” she adds, like she needs to justify our kiss.

  “Yeah, definitely,” I say, going along with her, because my brain is swimming in a sea of endorphins, and agreeing is way easier than anything else. I glance across the street and give the duo a quick thumbs up.

  “She’s all good,” I tell them, as Mister O said in the show.

  Harper joins in, waving, too. She turns back to me and parks her hand on my shoulder. “Those guys worship you and the ladies’ man character you created.”

  I scrunch my brow, wishing we weren’t talking about fictional shit right now, because that felt really fucking real to me. But I have no idea if she liked that kiss as much as I did.

  “I’m all about the show,” I say, seconding her, as the peanut gallery heads off into the night.

  She laughs, then her expression shifts, and it’s earnest again, like when she first opened up at the bar. “I really appreciate your help with this whole dating thing,” she says, and the kiss has vanished into the night. The trick is over, and the magician and the show creator have left the stage. We’re just Harper and Nick now, buddies with a secret project.

  “Of course. I’m happy to do it. And, like I told you, Jason is really into you,” I say, since it’s so much easier for me to make sense of the other dude right now than to sort out the tangled mess in my head.

  She shrugs and quirks up the corner of her lips. “Yeah?”

  “Absolutely. You should go for it with him,” I say, mustering false enthusiasm as I try to return to being her dating tutor, even though I might be a candidate for a split personality study since we just kissed, and now I’m telling her to go all-out for another guy. Maybe I caught some new strain of her babble-around-someone-I’m-into virus with that kiss.

  “You think so?” she asks, with an inquisitive tilt of her head.

  “Definitely. He might be the man of your dreams.” Yup. A full-blown case of it.

  She shoots me a skeptical look, then shrugs. “Would you meet me after I go out with him, so I can tell you everything while it’s fresh in my mind?” she asks, placing her palms together. I’m about to say no, when she adds, “After all, I did 1919 White Sox for you.”