by Anne Calhoun
He leaned against the door frame and scowled at her, but she could see a satisfied set to his shoulders. “I underestimated you.”
“You certainly did,” she said.
“You won. What do I lose?”
She sat up, found her panties on the floor by the foot of the bed, and pulled them on. “Come over for dinner,” she said.
“I lost so you’re going to cook me dinner?”
“Somehow I doubt you get many home-cooked meals,” she said with a glance at his apartment. She could see what appeared to be training manuals stacked in the oven.
“Eating your food isn’t a penalty.”
“The penalty is that you cleanse your palate before you eat.”
His brows drew down. “You mean some kind of crazy detox diet? I transport one or two of those a month. They’re hell on your system and a really bad idea.”
“Do I look like the kind of woman interested in detox diets? Not that palate. Don’t masturbate until you come over.”
He blinked. “What?”
She slid past him into a bathroom so tiny, she had to all but step into the shower to wash her hands in the sink. When she looked in the mirror she saw his broad back and his profile as he peered over his shoulder at her. Intrigued. Against his will. He lost with a fair bit of grace; not a bad characteristic.
“That’s what I claim as my winnings,” she said as she twirled her hair into a knot and snapped the elastic off her wrist. “I want you to want the next time we do this. If you manage it, you set the pace for our next encounter. If you don’t, I win again.”
“We agreed on a forfeit, not torture,” he said.
“You’re being dramatic. Think of it as a chance to redeem yourself after a loss.”
“You’re not the one going without for days.”
She patted his chest as she scooted past him and found her clogs, kicked off by the door. “I’ll play, too. Neither of us gets off until we see each other again.”
“This can’t be much of a sacrifice for you if you’re willing to go along with it.”
“That’s the first sex I’ve had in . . .” Thinking about it reminded her of the darker reason that had brought her to New York. To distract herself she tried to count the days and got lost in months. This was exactly what she needed, and after what she’d gone through for two years, a little spring fling wouldn’t hurt. “A very long time, and it was top ten, easily. Top five, maybe. I’d have to think about it. No, I wouldn’t. Top five. Anyway, I could go again right now, so this won’t be easy for me, either.”
Long fingers wrapped around her upper arm. “I bet I can get top three. Who’s number one?”
Heat eddied through her, because his voice was as scratchy and raw and demanding as his stubble on her cheek. “I dated a soldier who deployed to Afghanistan. His first weekend home on leave we holed up in a tent near the beach in Point Reyes. Sunshine and the ocean after six months of celibacy. I know what it means to ache for it, and I know how good it feels when you get it.”
He stroked the soft inner flesh of her arm, not-so-coincidentally running the backs of his fingers against the swell of her breast. “I’m not waiting six months for dinner.”
“Neither am I. Saturday night? My roommate’s going to her first weekend at her beach house.”
“I haven’t eaten dinner yet today.”
She laughed and hunkered down by her messenger bag to find her phone. “We wait. What’s your number?” He rattled off a 212 number. She keyed it into her phone, sent him a quick text to give him her number, then picked up her messenger bag.
“Sarah.”
She stopped. She didn’t mean to, but there was an edge of command in his voice, a rough, masculine power that hinted that while he’d underestimated her, he’d also been holding back. There was nothing hotter than six-plus feet of blond, bearded man at her command.
“I won’t underestimate you again,” he said.
“Good,” she said, and unlocked the door.
“One more thing. Did you feed strays?”
“No. My mother said it was best not to encourage them. We trapped them and took them to the shelter. I play to win, Tim.”
***
Sarah clattered down the narrow stairwell to the door leading to the street and hoped no one in the building worked the night shift. Her favorite Dansko clogs in a fire engine–red patent leather saved her legs during long shifts on her feet, but they weren’t exactly stealth shoes. When she reached the street, she stopped and took her bearings, adding Tim’s exact address to his contact in her phone, and the cross streets for good measure. Manhattan wasn’t difficult to navigate on the grid above Houston, but below that, the streets were a lopsided warren with odd names and no discernible rhyme or reason to naming.
She plugged her Brooklyn Heights address into the maps app on her phone and waited while it calculated a walking route. It would take her an hour, but that suited her. The day was fine, sunny and not too warm, and the best way to learn a city was on foot. She set off toward the Brooklyn Bridge, moving quickly, following the New York habit of walking with the lights and jaywalking when traffic allowed it. Her knees firmed by the time she climbed the ramp to the pedestrian path of the bridge, but the quiver in her thighs and the slick heat between them didn’t subside with movement.
Occasionally she turned back to study the skyline, One World Trade Center rising over lower Manhattan. Trish could tell her which banks and investment houses occupied which building on Wall Street, point out Goldman Sachs and the space where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. The Brooklyn Bridge loomed over her, a silent presence she hadn’t quite come to terms with. The bridge, while unique, lacked the Golden Gate Bridge’s stately grandeur and charm. She’d walked that bridge hundreds of times, fascinated by how San Francisco changed with the weather. Fog, sunshine, cloudy days, fog, rain, occasional sleet, and more fog. Alcatraz in the middle of the bay, sailboats tacking with the wind, Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid, and the Marin Headlands rolling to the west. The light. Sunlight filtered through the Bay Area’s micro-ecosystems and diffused over the city in a way she’d never seen anywhere else in the world. Not Paris. Not Rome. Not New York.
This wasn’t her city yet, not like San Francisco was. She found New York unapproachable, and only time would tell whether a little shoe leather and a lot of noshing her way through neighborhoods would make the city her own.
She may not be able to find much of anything in Manhattan yet, but once she crossed the bridge she could find her way to the apartment she shared with Trish. She unlocked the yellow door to the building and clomped up the stairs.
“Shoes!” their downstairs neighbor called from behind her door on the second floor.
“Sorry, Mrs. Hyland!” Sarah called back. She paused and slipped her clogs off, picked them up by the heels, and continued up the stairs to the top-floor apartment she shared with Trish. Inside the door she wiped her bare feet on the mat, dropped her clogs and messenger bag just inside the door, and heaved a sigh of relief.
“Twenty pounds of brown rice, another twenty of white, we need limes . . . Do we need limes?” Trish muttered from her chair near the window. She cast a quick glance at Sarah. “Thank God you’re home. Help!”
“No problem. Let me shower first, okay?”
“I’ll open some wine.”
Sarah took a quick shower and dressed in yoga pants and a thin hoodie, then joined Trish in the living room. The East River glittered in the setting sun, and the Manhattan skyline rose in the distance, untouchable and arrogant.
Trish was curled up in one of the enormous squashy chairs facing the windows, iPad, Mac, and phone spread around her, with the more old-fashioned tools of a cookbook and a legal pad opened haphazardly on the table. She sipped a glass of white wine and looked Sarah over.
“Did you . . .”
With a sigh Sarah settled into the other chair and wiggled her toes. The view of Manhattan was intimidating, the su
n setting behind the skyline making it seem very far away. “I did,” she said.
“It was ridiculous. Crazy. What were you thinking? You barely know him. Two meals at the truck and you go back to his place? Why?”
Despite the rapid-fire questions, there was no judgment in Trish’s tone, just idle curiosity and a healthy dose of amusement. “Because he asked, with a self-deprecating sense of humor that appealed to me, and I wanted to. Besides, I’ve been here three weeks, and in that time I’ve met two guys you picked up at the bar in the kitchen, scarfing down Greek yogurt on muesli and reading the Economist. One of them had to look at the address label to remember your name!”
Trish scoffed. “Of course I’ve brought home guys I’ve picked up at the bar, but it’s the bar. At night. You’ve waxed what needs to be waxed and done your hair and makeup and you’re wearing sexy clothes and you’ve been drinking. Everyone picks up guys at the bar and takes them home. But in broad damn daylight, stone cold sober? You smelled like black beans and cayenne pepper! What were you thinking?”
Sarah ran her fingers through her damp hair. “I was thinking we had wicked chemistry and he looked like he’d be Superman in bed.”
Trish threw her head back and laughed. “Well? Was he?”
Yes. Without moving a muscle until the very end, he was Superman and Batman and Wolverine all rolled into one. A tremor ran through her at the thought of what he’d be like when allowed free reign with those big, long-fingered hands. “He was,” she said lightly, and sipped her wine again.
“Worth having to do all the prep tomorrow?”
“That and more. What’s on the menu?”
“Back to the beef?”
“We don’t have enough, unless you don’t mind running out halfway through the rush.”
“I’ll add that to the order for Friday,” Trish said. “It might be good marketing, advertising it then tweeting that it disappeared really quickly.”
Sarah breathed a small sigh of relief. Some business partners could be incredibly touchy when presented with order failures or unexpected costs, but Trish handled everything as data, nothing more, nothing less. “It’s fine with me,” Sarah said.
“The brown rice and beans did surprisingly well,” Trish said. She handed Sarah the order paperwork and started tabbing between windows on her laptop. “A bigger profit margin than the bowls with chicken or beef.”
“Beans are cheap and sell well, and you can add lots of flavor to them. But I really think the secret is in the sauces. I want to keep experimenting with those. Tim liked the habanero one we tried today.”
“I’ll set up a vote option on the Facebook page and run promo tweets for the new sauces,” Trish said, her eyes flickering over spreadsheet columns. “You must really be ready to live again to go home with a guy you’ve just met.”
She was ready to live again. The afternoon in Tim’s bed just confirmed it, leaving her with a sweet sense of satisfaction she’d only just begun to walk off crossing the bridge. She made a noncommittal noise and stretched through the delicious ache in her muscles.
“A firefighter, though,” Trish added. “That’s interesting.”
“He’s a paramedic.”
“The uniforms all look the same to me. Are you going to see him again?”
“Dinner Saturday night,” Sarah said. No need to torture herself and tell Trish about the challenge. The less she thought about it, talked about it, the better.
“Where does he live?”
“Lower East Side, just around the corner from Seward Park. He has an efficiency apartment. It’s got a Murphy bed, which I found quaint.”
“Charming quaint or tired quaint?”
“IKEA quaint, and pin neat. It was quiet, too.”
“It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Of course it was quiet.”
Sarah burrowed a little deeper into Trish’s big squashy chair and focused on the order sheet. Remnants of sweet heat spangled over her nerve endings. “Perfect timing, as far as I’m concerned.”
***
Still on for Saturday night? What time should I come over?
I’ll be around all day. Text when you leave. Any allergies or loathed foods?
No allergies. No Brussels sprouts or spinach.
Good to know.
Sarah slid her phone back into her messenger bag. She didn’t ask how he was doing with their challenge. He didn’t tell her.
***
Tim hunkered on his heels and watched Casey try to find a vein in an elderly, somewhat dehydrated patient. Another few seconds and he’d do it himself, but the only way to learn to insert an IV was to insert a bunch of IVs. Every organism with a circulatory system had arteries and veins, but no two were exactly the same. There was no standard routine, just a procedure practiced often enough to become second nature.
And the thing was . . . he followed a pretty standard routine with women, too, one that had started to feel like going through the motions. Get her number, ask her out, get her into bed. With Sarah, he’d done exactly that, and far more efficiently than he usually did, only to have it spin sideways like hot tires on black ice when she pulled off casual with a shocking, unexpected intensity that set him back on his heels.
Christ, what she’d done to him. She’d bared him just enough to fuck him, which set his blood boiling and left him wanting more. But he knew when he was being played, when a woman showed up with a set of rules she was following about who called whom and when, how many days to wait before calling or texting, when to have sex, when not to have sex.
There wasn’t an artificial bone in Sarah’s curvy body.
“I can’t get the vein, LT.”
“He’s never been sick a day in his life,” the wife fretted, hovering in the background, watching them try to stabilize her husband.
Casey didn’t let his emotions show in his voice, but they both knew success or failure on an entire call depended on how fast the paramedic found the vein. Tim would compliment him on his calm presence later, but now, he was already reaching for the needle. The patient was eighty-seven and on blood thinners; his future held quite a few sick days, probably growing progressively worse until he was hospitalized. Tim had seen this before.
He felt his way along the inner arm, found a vein not visible in the man’s thin skin, pulled the skin taut to anchor the vein, showed Casey the shallow angle of his needle, and slid the needle in. Bingo. He advanced the catheter while Casey watched carefully, all his attention focused on something Tim found so routine, he could get caught up in memories of the previous afternoon. Tim shouldered the bag while Casey jockeyed the gurney into the back of the bus. He trotted around to the driver’s seat and hoisted himself up while Tim stayed in the back.
“Shit. Move!” Casey hit the horn, his gaze focused on a narrow gap through traffic on First Avenue. He was flushed, and his voice had jumped half an octave. He was young, riding the adrenaline rush of learning everything he could. The day when this would become routine, just another day at the office, was far in the future.
Tim peered through the window into the driver’s compartment and pointed at the gap. “You’ll fit through there. Just keep it straight and lay on the horn.”
Muttering to himself, Casey set the heel of his hand to the horn and edged into the narrow space. Two inches on either side of the bus. Plenty of room.
Tim focused on the patient’s breathing and pulse. Steady. They cleared the traffic and edged into the ER entrance. They off-loaded the vic, transferred the gurney into the back of the bus. “Speed and skills. Work on both of them. Practice at home. When you’re watching TV, whatever, practice finding your own vein, and if you’ve got family members who will let you near them with a needle, practice on them,” Tim said as they swung up into the cab.
“I do,” Casey said, just a hint of wounded in his voice.
Tim sighed.
***
It took practice to get fast. Efficient. Untouchable. Casey would learn that soon enough.
Tim walked into his apartment and tossed his keys and wallet on the kitchen counter, then headed for the bathroom. While the water heated, he stripped off his uniform. As he bent to unlace his boots, a shock of pleasure coursed through him, undeterred this time by work. His cock lifted and pulsed when he shoved off pants, boxers, socks, and boots in one push. Ignoring it, he stepped into the tall, thin box of a shower and ducked his head to wet his hair. Dinner was twenty-four hours away. He could wait that long.
But her challenge threw off his sense of time, made him aware of its edges, the changes in current he’d learned to ride out. She made him think about what was coming, anticipate the future more than he had in a long time. Both sets of his grandparents lived in a six-block radius. They’d watched him grow from a long, gangly infant into a New York City paramedic, and he’d watched them decline from vitality into dementia and a host of age-related illnesses before slipping away. It happened. The joys of a long life came with the sorrows of decline; combined with what he saw on a daily basis, that was reason enough to stay in the present. His present—the job, a sweet, sexy girl with the same attitude, basketball games as the weather warmed up—was all he needed.
He remembered Sarah sitting on her heels at his feet as she unlaced his boots. Electric heat shot through his veins, pooling low in his pelvis. It was entirely possible he’d never be able to take off his boots again without thinking of Sarah at his feet, her hair losing the battle with gravity, her face serious and focused as her hands worked at his laces. Serene. That was the word. She looked serene, completely present, an attitude he would have entirely overlooked if he’d met her at a bar or in a more adrenaline-jacked situation, like the St. Patrick’s Day parade. But then she’d beaten him, using his own cocky attitude against him.
Losing, and slowly at that, was fucking hot.
Water coursed over his body. He followed its path with the soap, and a quick wash turned into a couple of slow strokes, working his thumb over the head. His balls tightened, lifted, the water warm, his shaft slick with soap and thickening in his grip.
He’d wanted her again mere moments after she left, and when it came down to it, fuck cleansing his palate. She couldn’t possibly be serious, couldn’t mean to deny him this, something as natural as breathing, as elemental as desire. Lost in the memories, he thought about the few things they’d done and the many, many things yet to do when he had the full use of his hands and body and mouth to turn her inside out.
