by Meg Maguire
The barman delivered Kate’s beer. She drew it close, sucking the foam off the top before picking up the glass, gazing over the rim at Ty with indulgent cruelty. Maybe it was his own maddening hunger, but every time she did that Ty couldn’t help but imagine it was the sort of look she’d give a man right after she tossed the handcuff keys all the way across the room.
She groaned with obscene satisfaction. “Damn, that’s good.”
“I’ll bet.” Ty offered her a smile that said he wasn’t finding her the least bit cute. And that was sort of true. She wasn’t cute. She was dead sexy.
Ty squinted at her as her French fries arrived. People called Kate cute all the time. She was petite, with the clearest, most luminous skin Ty had ever seen, like a face wash model. And shoulder-length dark brown hair, straighter and shinier than even a shampoo ad would dare to promise. Sure, she looked cute. Much the way a rabid kitten might seem adorable, right up until you made the mistake of petting it.
“What are you staring at, Ty? Do I have ketchup on my face?” She wiped a thumb over the corners of her mouth.
Cute… Ty knew better. He saw Kate when no one else was around, at all hours of the day and night, at her best and her worst. In dresses and heels at cocktail parties and in his own boxers and undershirt while her filthy clothes were drying by a bonfire in some godforsaken stretch of remote wilderness. Sexy. Sexy when she chased him down to exact her revenge for a well-aimed snowball to the face, sexy when she greeted him half-asleep, grudging smile framed behind the chain-lock of her motel room door at 3 a.m.
Kate’s burger arrived and she luxuriated in it, a cat in a sunbeam.
“I hate you,” Ty murmured, mouth watering for more than just the burger.
“Oh man, this is amazing. So juicy.”
“I hope you get food poisoning.”
“I suppose I’m overdue,” she said through a bite.
That was true enough. The number of times she’d smoothed Ty’s hair off his forehead and rubbed his back while he suffered through the consequences of an ill-advised meal out in the woods… She’d said she was prepared to do anything as a PA, no matter how unglitzy, but she couldn’t have meant all this. One day she was going to reach her limit, and though it’d kill Ty to lose her, at least he’d finally be able to make good on those threats his body issued whenever he came within two breaths of kissing her. Such as now, for instance.
“Do you want my pickle?” she asked with sickly sweet innocence. “I could toss it out into the snow. That wouldn’t be cheating. You’d still technically be foraging.”
“I’m going to break into your room when you’re showering and flush the toilet on you.”
She grinned, eyes narrowing. “Maybe I should order dessert,” she whispered, and took another bite.
“Evil.” Evil for more than this food flaunting—for flirting back when Ty knew she’d never go there with him as long as they were professional partners. Kate put her job above everything, surely far above any attraction she might feel for him. If they ever got their moment, it’d have to come after the show was canceled. On especially long nights, when he and Kate were the only humans for miles around and he lay awake listening to her steady breathing in a dark tent or the back of the van, Ty prayed for bad ratings.
“What would you have right now, if you could, Ty?” Kate’s eyes darted to the chalkboard menu behind the bar. “Steak?” she guessed, perusing the fare. “Fried chicken and mashed potatoes?”
He offered his best Sean-Connery-as-Bond accent. “Don’t toy with me, Moneypenny.”
“Something not on the menu?” Kate asked with raised eyebrows, a distinct challenge. Get a drink or two in this girl and she turned into a flirting machine.
Ty rose to the dare she was posing, licking his lips. “Such as…?”
She leaned in closer, fixing her eyes on his. “I know exactly what you want,” she said. She was only teasing, but Ty’s body responded nonetheless.
“What do I want, Katie?”
“Ooh, I’m thinking…crab,” she concluded. “Legs. With lots of melted butter and new potatoes.” She did know what he liked. She knew him better than she probably even realized, and that’s what made Ty’s attraction tougher and tougher to write off the longer they worked together. She gave a last wiggle of her eyebrows before she sat up straight again.
“I could fire you, you know.”
“Yeah right, Ty. You’d be lost without me.” She turned to watch the television mounted in the corner. A newscaster was droning about a late-season storm warning, but Ty thought Kate ought to be more concerned with the imminent threat her flirtation was causing. He watched her expression change as she turned to him again.
“You know, you and I are like everything except lovers,” she said.
The statement threw Ty for a momentary loop. Hope and lust jockeyed for his attention, warming him like whiskey, from the inside. “Yeah. Why? You looking to change that?”
She smirked at his tone, shook her head and took another sip of beer. “Nope.”
Ty’s body cooled with disappointment. “Why not?”
“Well, mainly because it’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
Ty rolled his eyes. “Brilliant. Thanks for even bringing it up, then.”
“But I was just thinking how it’s interesting, about you and me.” She wagged a French fry between them. “I mean, we’ve managed to make all this work for three whole seasons now, under the most stressful conditions possible. But we’re both still totally useless with relationships.”
“Oh, cheers. And wait—so, indulge my fragile male ego a moment, but why’s it such a rubbish idea, exactly?”
“Because if, no, when we screwed it all up, we’d both have nothing,” she said. “And I spent a lo-o-ong time having nothing, and it sucks. I don’t plan on going back to it. And definitely not over sex.”
“We’ve survived tropical storms and quicksand and network mergers together,” Ty said. “You don’t think we could survive maybe drinking a bit too much and waking up next to each other?”
“Not a chance I’m willing to take, Ty. Plus I wake up next to you all the time and trust me, it’s grossly overrated.”
He put a hand to his chest, faking a blow to his heart. “You are stone-cold, Katie.”
She shrugged, eyes drifting to the TV above the bar. “It’s Saskatchewan.”
Ty leaned into the bar, mirroring her body. He made sure he kept the flirtation over-the-top, joking, always their way. “What if it was really good sex?”
Kate smirked and shook her head again.
“You don’t know what we might be missing out on.”
“I’ll live. And anyhow, I’d get strung up by tall women everywhere for poaching in their rightful territory.”
Ty switched tracks. “What if we weren’t all those other things? What if the show got canceled tomorrow?”
He saw thoughts forming, gears ticking behind Kate’s unfocused eyes as she chose what bones to throw him, picked whether to tease him or pull him up short. In the end she did both. “I dunno, Ty. And I don’t intend to find out… But if that day does ever come, and we can still stand the sight of each other, you have permission to make a pass at me—a real one. But not a moment before.”
She sat up straight and aimed her attention back at her food. Ten minutes later she slid her half-full second glass of beer back across the counter. Ty watched the barman take it away as if it were his firstborn being wrenched from his arms. Damn, he’d kill for a beer right about now. He let that craving replace the one that had taken up residence between his thighs.
“Bedtime,” Kate said with a satisfied yawn—a postcoital yawn if ever he’d heard one.
They walked side by side back to the motor court, hugging their bodies against the bone-deep cold. They mounted the outside steps to the second level of rooms and bid one another good-night under the yellow glow of the parking lot’s lights. Ty watched Kate’s softly swishing hips carry her a few paces
to her door, watched her find her key and disappear into her room with a final smile over her shoulder.
He’d be good tonight. He was tired. He could make it—what, six hours? Ty searched his pockets for his own key and heard Kate’s dead bolt click. He knew already he’d hear it again before long, sliding back open to let him in. Who was he trying to kid, anyhow?
WHEN THE INEVITABLE KNOCK came at her door, Kate rolled over to groggily scan the digital screen of her trusty travel alarm clock. Three twenty-eight…dear God in Heaven. Already knowing what this would be about, she resigned herself to leaving the warm cocoon of the sheets and shuffled to the door.
She squinted into the jaundiced light. “Morning, Ty.”
A frigid breeze seeped in behind him. “Invite me in?”
“Yup. Knock yourself out.”
Kate had long ago learned that having a handsome, strapping man with an exotic accent turn up on her doorstep in the dead of night didn’t necessary mean what one might hope. She’d also learned to sleep with a bra on if Ty was staying in the same motel as her. It just saved a lot of time and modesty not having to scramble for one night after night.
As her guest strolled past in track pants and a bawdy T-shirt he’d purchased with her in Tijuana, Kate flipped the television on. She checked their channel’s Canadian sister just in case their show was on in reruns, but it was mired in infomercials. She heard Ty’s flip-flops land on the carpet and the rustling of the sheets as he made a space for himself on her bed. Those sounds shouldn’t still give her a charge after all this time, but they always did. And actually, why shouldn’t they? Everything she’d said in the bar still stood—she wouldn’t ever complicate what they had by throwing sex into the mix. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t think about it.
She sat on the edge of the bed, setting the remote by Ty’s elbow. He stretched out on his stomach, facing the screen, and Kate ran her hands through his messy hair, trying to establish some kind of order. This was allowed, another extension of their nearly all-encompassing whatevership, but God knew why. Unspoken understanding allowed them to do a lot of things that they both knew they’d better knock off if one of them started seeing someone else. Not inherently incriminating things, but ones no significant other could ever reasonably be expected to put up with.
She sighed. “You couldn’t wait another hour, Ty?”
“Can’t sleep over there. There’s a rattle in the heating vent or something.”
“Sure there is.”
He always had an excuse for turning up. Ty was a terrible sleeper, practically an insomniac, but Kate didn’t fully understand her own role in these predictable intrusions. Experience had taught her that Ty was useless at any activity that required him to remain still for longer than thirty seconds, but why keeping her awake seemed to cure his sleeping disorder remained an inconvenient mystery.
He groaned happily, settling in. That sound… It brought back memories Kate could have done without. It had been two years now since she’d accidentally walked in on him having sex with his then-girlfriend, but the images of it were clear as day. Blissfully, Ty was still none the wiser.
Back in L.A., Ty lived in an apartment Kate had found for him after the first season wrapped, one far more to her taste than his. She suspected he’d be happy in some craphole studio by the freeway, but she’d snagged him what she felt an up-and-coming TV personality should have. He’d hated the wall-to-wall carpeting on sight, but to this day Kate said a little thank-you prayer whenever she laid eyes on it.
She’d had keys to his place and had gotten in the habit of coming by unannounced to go over rough cuts of the show or to drop off papers for him. She’d since gotten out of this habit.
When she came by that traumatic evening she’d let herself in as usual and followed the sounds of the television to Ty’s living room, just as she’d done a dozen times before. The hall light had been off and the maligned carpeting hadn’t given away her footsteps, so by the time she reached the threshold she’d given the two preoccupied bodies on the couch no reason to halt their happy activities. For a half a minute Kate had stood there, frozen.
From across the room she’d watched the long expanse of Ty’s bare back, elegant muscles writhing, his sculpted ass and hips pumping hard, flanked on either side by two svelte, female legs. Kate had smelled it, too, that raw, hot, sex smell. She’d heard Ty over the murmur of the TV, his animal moans and grunts blending with the woman’s. Kate had slunk back out of the apartment unnoticed. Her blood ran hot at the memory, the sight of another woman’s hands on Ty’s bare body.
He spoke, snapping Kate from her trance. “What are you thinking about?”
She blinked, felt a blush warm her face and thanked God it was dark. “Do you remember Angie?”
“Of course. I dated her for almost a month. That’s like a record.”
“I was thinking about her,” Kate said, casual. Thinking about her freakishly long legs wrapped around your waist. “I don’t get why you two broke up. She was like the female equivalent of you.”
“That should be your reason, right there.”
“She seemed nice enough,” Kate offered, feeling him out.
“She was lovely,” he confirmed. “I think she’s a hosiery model now. Bit of a waste…she was a smart one, dating choices aside.”
Kate had been out to dinner with the pair of them a few times and was always left feeling like Ty’s kid sister. If a tigress like Angie couldn’t keep Ty occupied then a comparable mouse like Kate was dead in the water. Not that she was looking to, of course. Definitely not.
“But Angie was odd, too,” Ty offered, making Kate’s dangerous train of thought jump its tracks. “She had that daft little yappy dog. And she paid to have her eyelashes dyed. What is it with L.A. women?” He yawned and settled them on a channel rebroadcasting a trashy talk show. Folding his arms under his chin, Ty got comfortable, setting the remote by Kate’s leg.
“You’ve only got about forty minutes before we need to be up and presentable,” she reminded him.
“I’ll take it.”
Kate offered another sigh, long and melodramatic. “You’re so weird.”
Ty could usually manage about three or four hours on his own during these trips before he crawled into Kate’s bed, demanding distraction or soothing. He transformed into a different man at night. Restless and moody and needy, so different from his on-camera self, that picture of confidence and charisma. Kate read in his body what he needed from her. She circled her palm between his shoulder blades.
“Mmm…”
“Yeah, yeah.” She pretended to be watching the TV, but as always, her mind wandered to Ty. She’d been without sex for a while—months now—and ignoring the firm contours of this happily moaning man’s warm back was an impossibility. Especially when she’d already seen what they could do.
“That feels so bloody good,” he groaned.
Kate heard in his voice that he was already poised to drop off to sleep. Beneath her palm, his muscles released the tension they’d arrived with. Kate siphoned away his restlessness and let herself get lost in idle thoughts.
This body was a ratings booster, no doubt about it, and Kate knew it intimately, almost every inch. Knowing it came with her job description as Woman Friday—someone to check skin for ticks, thorns, signs of illness, to disinfect cuts. Someone to pop dislocated joints back into place. Tend to fevers. To provide company in places so remote it drove a person mad just trying to comprehend it.
Her hand continued to circle its familiar, if borrowed, territory.
“Ty? Are you awake?”
He snored softly, as if in response.
“I don’t know why we bother getting separate rooms,” Kate said, knowing he wasn’t listening. “It’s a waste of money. We should just book a double. Or get adjoining rooms. Then at least you wouldn’t have to wake me up every damn night. You could just waltz on in and commandeer my bed like you always do.”
Kate had a fantasy about these
motel incidents, about Ty slipping in while she was asleep and rousing her as he slid under the covers beside her. She imagined his long body pressing into the length of hers, his mouth finding hers in the dark, as familiar and easy as their rapport. Her palms would race down his shoulders and back, over his hips, his ass, taking in all the shapes of him. She imagined slipping her hands inside his underwear, just as he rolled on top of her, his intention and his need unmistakable. Kate lived for feeling needed, and the idea set her body on fire. She imagined his sounds, as well, the same as the ones he made when he took his boots off at the end of a long stretch of hiking or ate a restaurant meal after three days with barely anything in his stomach. That’s how he’d sound when she wrapped her fingers around him, or her lips, or as he slid into her. Beautiful.
The motions of her hand on Ty’s back and her wayward thoughts hypnotized Kate, and she almost screamed with shock when the bedside alarm clock began to buzz. She fumbled before managing to switch off the screeching device, then prodded Ty back to lucidity. Oddly enough, once he’d fallen asleep in her bed, even that industrial-strength siren couldn’t reliably rouse him.
He groaned. “That was not forty minutes.”
“No, that was forty-three minutes. Come on.” She poked his butt with her finger. “Time to get up.” She abandoned him to head to the shower.
TY TURNED OVER AFTER the bathroom door clicked shut. He stared up at the texture of the cheap ceiling plaster, illuminated in rainbow fits and starts by the droning television. Kate’s water turned on and he heard her almighty yawn. There was a cold patch of skin on his back where her hand had been.
He thought back to the stupid conversation they’d had in the bar, about what they were to each other, everything but lovers. What he felt for Kate went far beyond familiarity and trust and partnership, beyond sexual attraction, too. It was wrapped up in how he felt around her. Calm, but alive. After growing up in the suffocating vacuum left in the wake of his sister’s death, Ty had emerged into adulthood starved for human energy. He’d found it in dozens of half-assed relationships with animated but hollow women—women who appeared dynamic but were really just terrified of being alone. But Kate…her energy ran deep. She was driven. She practically vibrated with passion, but it was contained. Focused. Sometimes Ty wanted to wrap himself around her and feel contained, too, for a change.
