by Talia Quinn
I got off the phone feeling vaguely mournful. He’d sounded baffled at first, like he hadn’t known what role he was supposed to play, but his light French accent had become thicker by the end of the conversation, as if in preparation for his hospital visit. Was anything in Persephone’s life real?
When I went back into the room, Dylan had broken free of Persephone. She dozed in her nest of tubes and monitors. The pulse-ox on her finger glowed red. Dylan had his back to the door and seemed to be staring moodily out at the 59th Street Bridge and the Roosevelt Island tram half a mile south of us. The night was illuminated by clouds catching and reflecting the city lights. I wished I could see his face. I wished I could touch him, comfort him. I wished—
I wished I didn’t care.
I turned away. “I should go.”
“Don’t.” Dylan turned toward me. “Please.”
So I stayed with him looking out at the nearby skyscrapers and town houses and the low-rise warehouses across the river in Queens for what felt like forever. At one point, Dylan wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. I stiffened briefly. This was sex, this wasn’t anything like love; I shouldn’t let him get the two confused, shouldn’t let him blur the lines…
But I could feel his heart against my ear, his warmth against my chest, and smell his particular scent like warmth and goodness with an undertone of lust. And so I stayed. After a while, I even relaxed. I could allow myself this momentary indulgence.
Persephone woke up when her no-longer-ex-boyfriend walked into the room, as if she’d been faking sleep so she could become Sleeping Beauty awaking for her true-love-for-now. And Laurent, with his now-strong French accent, a hugely extravagant bouquet of deep red roses, and the cashmere scarf carelessly wrapped around his neck—he looked like the star of his own indie movie, with wind-chapped cheeks and sparkling gray eyes.
They embraced extravagantly, with many murmurings of “My darling, oh! I’m so terribly sorry,” from him and “I missed you so!” from her. When he scooped her into his arms and kissed her far too thoroughly for a woman who’d just tumbled off a motorcycle, I nudged my shoulder against Dylan and gestured toward the door. We weren’t needed. She’d moved on.
~*~
After we left the hospital, Dylan went looking for a liquor store. He found one two long blocks away. He bought a bottle of scotch. I could understand the impulse. As we exited onto the sidewalk, Dylan stepped into the street and waved down an oncoming cab. He opened the door, then paused.
I gave him a little nod meant as good-bye. “I guess this is it.”
“Let me give you a ride.”
“I live in Brooklyn.” I pointed my thumb toward the bridge behind us. “I’ll take the subway.”
The cabbie peered out at us. “Are you planning to get into this taxicab or not?” Dark skin and turban aside, his querulous tone could have been my grandfather’s.
I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets, feeling anything but sexy. “So. Been fun. Let’s do it again.”
Dylan ran his hand over the edge of the car door. “Let’s.”
And yet he didn’t get into the cab. And I didn’t seem able to motivate myself to walk away. I kept sending my legs the signal to move, but nothing doing. I’d have to stand here until he zoomed off.
Except that he wasn’t zooming.
Oh hell. “I can come back to your place. For a little while. If you want.”
Dylan bowed. “After you.” A tiny, sad smile played around the corners of his mouth.
This was the right thing to do.
In the cab, he squeezed my knee but said nothing, just pulled the scotch out of the paper bag and took a swig. When he offered me the bottle, I shook my head. He drank in silence.
I gazed out the window at the dark silhouettes of trees flashing past the low wall dividing the road from the rest of Central Park. “Persephone is right.”
“About what?”
“You’re a good man, like she said. And one day you’ll be over her. She’ll be a distant memory that won’t even hurt anymore, and you’ll meet someone who deserves you. Someone as good as you are.”
He laced his hand through mine. “I don’t want someone like that.”
A shiver ran through me, sparked by his touch. I stared resolutely out the window. “You will. You’re not thinking straight right now.”
As the cab emerged from the park and whisked us past the stately red stone fortress of the Museum of Natural History, Dylan let go of my hand and slid his fingers down my thigh, leaving a trail of goose bumps. He leaned into me, whispering in my ear. “What if I’m not good? Did you think of that? What if Persephone was simply taking all the risks, creating all the drama for both of us?” His hand slipped under my skirt and crept up my bare leg. “I’m the one who booked an escort, after all.”
“And acted as one tonight.” It came out as a hiccuped breath. He was doing it to me again. His touch turned me on, as always, but there was something aggressive about it, something disconnected about the way his hands spread over my skin, blindly seeking, sliding his hands into intimate crevices. As if he wasn’t touching me—rather, I was just a convenient warm body.
Walking through the fancy lobby this time was entirely different from the first time. The doorman nodded politely at us. Dylan wrapped his arm around me, tucking me close. Making me stutter in my stride.
This time, the mirrored elevator showed both of us. Showed him leaning into me, kissing me, unzipping my bodice.
I pushed him away. “What if someone gets on?”
“They won’t. Nobody goes from floor to floor, only from the lobby up.” He unzipped my bodice the rest of the way with a hard gleam in his gaze. “You make me feel reckless. You’re my bad girl.”
I pulled away. “I’m not.”
“You’re my hooker.” His expression was wild, his eyes unfocused. “Mine.”
“I’m not.” I yanked my bodice closed. This was getting weird. This was hands and grasping and all wrong.
He rubbed his face and stumbled back against the elevator wall, shaking his head at himself. “I shouldn’t have said that. You’re not available; you’re not mine. You’re not even really here.” He sounded distracted.
The door opened on his floor. Someone stood waiting. An older man, pudgy and effeminate, with a tiny dog in his arms. He blinked at us as we got off the elevator, taking in my half-dressed state—my hands ineffectively clutching my bodice—and Dylan’s off-kilter intensity.
“Miss, do you need my help?”
Dylan turned, and his neighbor’s plucked eyebrows shot up. The next co-op meeting would be a doozy. “Mr. Krause. I didn’t realize…”
“I think I’d better go.” But he looked like a wreck. And even though he’d just pawed at me as if I was his own private sex toy, it felt odd to leave him like this. “Unless you want me to stay.”
“No, go. Please go. I can do enough damage on my own.” Dylan leaned against the elevator door to keep it from closing and fished in his pocket for his wallet.
“Don’t.”
“Money for the cab home.”
“I’m in Greenpoint. I’ll take the subway.”
He smiled, grim. “I can afford the cab fare.” He handed me a twenty. I shouldn’t take it, but dammit, I wasn’t ready to deal with the train, not like this. I took it. He took a backward step out of the elevator, looking like he was about to say something, but the door slid closed between us and that was that.
“Are you okay? If something happened…” The man’s tone was kind, his eyes kinder.
I fumbled with my oversize buttons on my jacket, covering the half-open bustier as best I could. “Thanks, but he didn’t do anything to me I didn’t want. It’s just been a rough night.”
Dylan’s neighbor nodded wisely. “Relationships can be tough.” He grazed the top of his dog’s head with his knuckles. “Worth it, though.” The dog scrabbled in his arms, and he put it down on the floor. “She’s a fussy one.” He smiled at me. “
Like me.”
I smiled back, feeling a little better.
When the elevator got to the lobby, I waved good-bye to Dylan’s neighbor and his petite dog, who was so eager to get outside she was straining at the lead, then I found a secluded corner by the elevator shaft. I opened my jacket, button by oversize button, then hooked my leather bustier’s zipper and zipped it up. Shielded. Secure. Ready to return to Brooklyn and down a pint of rum raisin ice cream with a chaser of regret.
Chapter Eleven
When I got home, I walked in on a poker party. So much for comfort food and mindless TV.
Jeanine was curled up on the couch under a colorful throw her mother had brought back from her last trip to Mumbai, peering intently at a fanned-out set of playing cards in her hand. A half-empty beer bottle rested by her elbow on the coffee table.
Our friend Annie sat on the floor, her knees up, her back propped against the bookcase. She held playing cards too, and nursed a mostly full bottle of beer. She wasn’t so much studying the cards as gazing into them as if they could tell her fortune. From her expression, they had nothing good to report.
An unfamiliar dark-haired woman sat in my hand-me-down rocking chair. When I came into the living room, she set her cards facedown on her lap and smiled at me. “You must be Samantha. I’m Georgette. Jeanine and I are in the psych program at UCNY together. She speaks highly of you.”
“Does she?” I quirked an eyebrow at Jeanine. “Good to hear.”
Jeanine frowned. “What are you doing home? I didn’t expect you back till morning. Did Dylan kick you out of bed, or did you only shell out for the quickie rate?”
“Ouch.” I started across the room. It was the only way to get to my bedroom.
Annie gave me a wry smile as I went past her. “You had a bad date tonight too? Pull up a spot on the rug and help me feel like less of a loser.”
“I don’t want to intrude on your poker game.”
“There’s more cards.” Georgette ran her finger along the top of the deck, riffling the cards. “Or you could join us on the next deal. We’re celebrating my breakup.”
I stopped at this. “Breakup?” She sounded so cheerful, she couldn’t mean…
“I split up with my boyfriend tonight. By Skype, which was unfortunate, but he’s in London and won’t be back for a couple of weeks. I thought this way he’d have time to adjust to the idea. He didn’t take it well, I’m afraid. He says I have to be out before he gets back.”
“Maybe you can move in with me.” Jeanine gave me a sideways glance. “I might have an opening.”
“Jeanine is sadly mistaken. She and I are best friends and she thinks the world of me. I’m not moving out.” I sat on the arm of the couch, right by her.
She gave my hand a quick reassuring pat before tossing a chip on the coffee table. “I raise fifty cents.”
“Big spender.” I grinned at her.
“Don’t you know it.”
Georgette put her cards down. “Too rich for my blood. I fold. I’m ready for pizza.”
Annie frowned over her cards. “Wasn’t your friend bringing it by?”
“Alanna? She’s probably gone off on an unexpected adventure and forgotten about food. She’ll remember eventually. You don’t mind cold pizza, do you?” Georgette smiled gently, clearly amused at her friend’s foibles.
As Annie dealt me in on the next hand, she told us about her date gone sour. She’d gone out with Goofy Cowlick boy from the Greenpoint Pleasures party, and he was charmingly stumble-footed and geeky, and she’d laughed and enjoyed herself, “And I didn’t even think of-of anyone else, not even once. And then he kissed me, and it was… I don’t know. Nice.” She shook her head like she was relating a disaster. “Then he asked me if he could come in for a drink. And I froze.”
“Not interested?”
“Not even a little.” She set the cards down. “There was nothing wrong with him. Absolutely nothing. Which is exactly what I felt when he kissed me. Nothing. I’m never going to have sex again.”
“Join the club.” I stared at my miserable hand. “And I’m not even lucky at cards.” I discarded as many as I could.
Jeanine sat up, her blanket drifting onto the floor. “Seriously? You and Dylan have so much chemistry, you broke the thermometer. I saw how he was looking at you at the party. Like you were on the menu.”
Annie’s eyebrows shot up. “He’s that guy? I saw you two talking, and yeah. I agree. So what went wrong?”
“His ex-wife smashed up her motorcycle on the FDR, and she wasn’t wearing a helmet. She’s got a concussion and some broken bones. She’s lucky she’s not paralyzed for life, but she’s gushing over Dylan one minute and flirting with her new guy the next, all while lying in a hospital bed looking like a bruised and battered fairy princess. It’s enough to give anyone whiplash.”
“And he’s alone now?” My roommate shook her head at me. “Have I taught you nothing? The guy needs some comfort, not alone time.”
“He didn’t want comforting. He wanted mindless humping.”
Annie gazed thoughtfully at me over her cards. “Isn’t that what you’re always saying you want? Sex and nothing more? Did you not mean it after all?”
Ouch. I had to sit down tonight with the two people who could see through me, didn’t I?
Georgette picked up two cards from the pile. “Love’s complicated, isn’t it?”
“It’s not love. It’s not. It’s—the guy is—I like him. I thought we shared more than just…”
“Just sex?” Jeanine’s eyes gleamed.
“I—uh.” I stopped, started again. “I mean, okay, yeah, it’s not just sex, but it’s also not—” I snatched the new cards up, clutching them too tightly. “Isn’t there something in between? Friends with benefits, maybe? Where it matters but it also doesn’t have to mean anything big?”
All three of them were giving me skeptical looks now.
I grabbed Jeanine’s beer bottle and took a deep swig.
“Hey!” She reached for it.
“Sorry.” I handed it back. “Don’t expect me to make sense. It’s been a rough night. Dylan was… His ex has done a number on him, and seeing her in the hospital like that…”
“And you’re not there because…” Jeanine rubbed her shirtsleeve across the top of the bottle, wiping it clean.
“Because things got weird. Like I said.” That look in his eyes, voracious but not seeing me. Blind, almost.
“He visited his ex in the hospital and reacted strangely afterward? That’s not exactly a big shocker.”
Unsettled, I flicked my thumb through my new cards. “He was getting drunk. In the cab.” Which could account for some of his behavior, couldn’t it? “Dammit. I overreacted. I should go back. He shouldn’t be alone tonight.”
Jeanine grinned at me. “Look at you, being all empathetic and stuff.”
Georgette rearranged her cards. “Be careful. He’ll be vulnerable.” Her gaze was troubled. “You might find yourself in deeper than you anticipate.”
“Says the woman who never ventures into the deep end of the pool. Who broke up with her boyfriend over Skype.” Jeanine raised her eyebrows at Georgette.
“Ouch.” Georgette grimaced. “Point taken.”
Jeanine turned to me. “Don’t listen to her, Sam. Go for it. Dylan needs you tonight. Think of it as your own personal brand of therapy.” She winked at me.
I set my cards on the coffee table. “I’m folding.”
“More like you’re calling and raising the stakes.” It turned out Georgette had a dimple when she smiled.
Annie took a swig of beer. “More power to you. I need to borrow some of that courage.” She was obviously thinking about her professor crush.
“Isn’t he married?”
“Widowed.” She tossed two chips onto the table. “I’ll see you and raise you. Whoever’s still in the game.”
The doorbell rang. I went to open it. A woman a few years older than me stood there, holding two pi
zza boxes. Her blond hair was falling out of her clip. She blew it off her face. “Anyone hungry?” She smiled at me in greeting. “Alanna Woodruff. I come bearing food.”
“Samantha Lilly. I’m not here.” The pizza smelled enticing, the company welcoming, but I had somewhere to be. “Talk about a man like your heart is breaking, and you’ll fit right in.”
She blew again on her bangs and exchanged glances with Georgette. Something passed between them. Some story there. “Sounds like loads of fun. Anyone have a sledgehammer we can knock ourselves on the heads with after we’re done with that?”
~*~
I tried to glide through Dylan’s lobby like I belonged there. I didn’t entirely pull it off. The doorman called me back.
I gave him an airy wave. “Call up if you want, but he’s expecting me. You remember me from earlier, right?”
“You know where you’re going?”
“I do.” And that was all it took.
When I got off the elevator on his floor, I strode to Dylan’s end of the hallway and rang the bell without stopping to consider. Momentum, that was key.
“It’s open. Come in.” His deep voice was muffled by the thick door.
I swung the door open.
Dylan was seated at the dining table. He looked more disheveled than when I’d left. Hollowed out. He’d half-unbuttoned his shirt, and his feet were bare. A row of shot glasses lined the placemat in front of him, and he was carefully pouring a dollop of dark gold liquid into each. “Leave it by the door.”
I stepped in and closed the door.
He looked over. “You’re not sushi.”
“Should I go get some?”
“I ordered it half an hour ago.” He gulped down a shot. “Why are you here? You left. I was inappropriate or something.” As soon as he set the glass down, he picked up another one, raising it to me in an ironic salute. “Here’s to mixed messages.” He gulped it down and grabbed a third. “And here’s to complicated women.” He drank that down.
I shouldn’t have come. I gripped the still-open door for support. Standing in the doorway, neither in nor out. Undecided. Frozen.
