So better to just leave it alone.
Which was why it made no sense that he stopped in front of his target and said, “Or we could go here.”
She looked up and read the sign. “New Yorker Deli. I’ve never eaten here. I think it’s pretty much your basic knockoff of a New York…”
He watched comprehension kick in. She opened her mouth all the way, like she was stretching her jaw, then closed it and pulled her bottom lip under her top teeth, scraping it in a way that made him want to replace her teeth with his.
“Jane doesn’t have to know,” he said, as if that was the only, or even the primary, reason why what he was suggesting was a Very Bad Idea.
“I don’t think this is wise.” She was, of course, correct. He was about to agree, but she kept talking. “What are we going to do, go in there, order a lox bagel, and then get it on in the bathroom?”
The litigator in him saw an opening—she was wavering. The decent man in him didn’t take it. “You’re right. Anyway, veal parm sounds much better than lox on a bagel. I don’t know what came over me.”
He did know, though. You. You came over me.
Her eyes darted around, like she had been expecting a fight and didn’t quite trust the notion that he wasn’t going to press her.
He smiled and took her hand. Which was a stupid, pointless thing to do. It wasn’t going to get him into her pants—or her hot pink shorts. It wasn’t going to alleviate any of those goddamned secret yearnings. It had nothing to do with his mission to see her home safely. It didn’t achieve anything.
It just felt good.
Damn, it felt good.
Even with all the uncertainty between them, all the impossibility, there was something amazing about the simple act of walking down the street on a summer evening when the sun was just beginning to set, holding hands with a pretty girl who could run circles around you.
To his great surprise, she didn’t pull away. Maybe she felt it, too.
And eff him if he didn’t then start swinging her hand, like they were in a goddamn musical.
They were halfway down the block when she stopped. “Or…” She did the lip-scraping thing again. “We could get takeout.” When he didn’t answer right away—he was trying to gauge if she meant what he thought she did—she added, “From the New York place. We could get food there, bring it to my place, and it would be kind of like…”
“It would be kind of like a little bit of New York in your apartment.” He spun them around and towed her back up the street faster than was probably seemly. He was going to hell, but he didn’t care. He pulled a couple of twenties out of the pocket in his running shorts and handed them to her. “I’ll have what you’re having—and I’ll get us a taxi.”
* * *
A person had to have pretty well-developed denial skills to justify what was about to happen, Wendy thought as they rode the elevator up to her condo in silence.
Which, apparently, she did.
It was just that when the opportunity to sleep with Noah one more time presented itself, she could not walk away. Even though she knew it wouldn’t be good for her heart. He was just so delicious, sweaty from the run and worked up from that charged confrontation with that skateboarder.
So certain other parts had told her brain to take a hike. Noah had the bag from the New Yorker Deli in one of his hands. In his other, he held one of hers. After she’d come out of the restaurant with a couple of grilled Reubens and a tub of potato salad, he had a taxi waiting. They could have walked—her place wasn’t that much farther—but there seemed to be an unspoken haste to the proceedings, like they needed to rush before their suspended disbelief on the whole New York illusion came crashing down. Or her brain got back from its hike.
The most astonishing thing was, after they got out of the cab, he took her hand again. Earlier, she could maybe chalk up the hand holding to an odd runner’s high. Their run had been such fun, and the evening so lovely, it had felt natural to let him grab her hand. Well, not natural—this was still Noah, after all—but somehow an organic extension of the evening.
But now? There was no reason to hold hands. They’d basically just negotiated the fact that they were going to have casual sex again, which was about as far from hand-holding, aw-shucks romance as you could get.
But there it was, his big, warm, stupid hand engulfing hers as soon as she slid out of the taxi. Like they were a normal couple arriving home with takeout.
And, holy shit, now he was lifting their entwined hands to his mouth so he could kiss her wrist without letting go of her hand.
What the hell? Even though she could admit to herself that her emotions were hopelessly tangled up in what was about to happen, she needed him to keep things compartmentalized. It was too confusing otherwise. Too potentially heartbreaking.
The elevator dinged for her floor. She moved to exit, pulling against his grip in a “drop my hand” sort of way, but he didn’t let go. He didn’t even seem to notice. They reached her door. Okay, this was the moment. She needed both her hands to unzip the hidden pocket in her running shorts and extract her key. So she tugged on her trapped hand, eyebrows raised.
He still didn’t let go, just gazed at her with his eyes twinkling, like he was thinking about a secret joke. She managed, awkwardly, to get the door open one-handed and lead him inside.
“You want to eat…” How could she put this delicately? Well, there really wasn’t a way, so screw delicacy. “You want to eat first?”
“I do not.” Still holding her hand, he used it to pull her against his chest. “You don’t like holding hands, do you?”
She ignored the question as she tried to squirm out of his grasp, though she wasn’t sure why, as that was counterintuitive to the spirit of this encounter. She succeeded only in twisting in his arms, so she was facing away from him, her back to his front. “What happened to gnawing your own leg off?” She gave an ineffectual yank, which only caused him to band his free arm around her torso.
“I find I’d rather gnaw something else.” He lowered his head to the back of her neck and lightly scraped his teeth against her skin.
Goosebumps rose, quick and sure, over her entire body, and she shuddered. He must have been distracted by her reaction because she managed to wrench herself out of his grasp. She turned, facing him with her hands in front of her face like they were opponents sparring in a boxing ring.
“No,” she said, seized with the inexplicable desire to be contrary just for the sake of it, like she needed to disavow the obvious signs of pleasure he could no doubt read on her body. “To answer your previous question, I don’t like holding hands.”
“What’s wrong with holding hands?”
“It’s not called for in this context.”
He let loose a big guffaw as he took a step closer. “In this context? What, pray tell, is this context?”
He was coming closer, so she moved back to compensate. “Well, you know…” God, did she have to spell it out? If they had to invent elaborate rules about only having sex in New York, the whole point of that sex was that it wasn’t relationship sex. It wasn’t hand-holding sex.
He was trying not to laugh, and not really succeeding, judging by the snort that escaped. Fine. She would spell it out for him. Maybe that would sober him up. “Meaningless fucking—you know, your favorite phrase? That thing you don’t like to do? That is the context.”
He nodded, his face a parody of seriousness as he kept advancing on her. “Ah. I see. So hand holding in the context of meaningless fucking offends your sense of order.”
That was exactly right. But she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of agreeing so easily. Also, it was kind of funny when stated like that. She pressed her lips together. If she wasn’t going to agree with him, she certainly wasn’t going to laugh.
Grinning, he lunged for her. She was still holding her hands out as if to ward him off, but he moved so fast, he managed to grab them and lace his fingers through hers.
&nbs
p; “Ooh, I got you now! Double hand hold!”
She struggled laughingly, but in truth his hands had some kind of magic power. He might as well have grabbed her boobs, or gone straight for the prize, because she’d gone tight and achy all over.
“Oh no!” he taunted. “Are you not going to have meaningless sex with me now that I’m holding both your hands?” He propelled her down the hall as he spoke, him walking forward and her walking backward.
“Shut up,” she said, no longer trying to hide the fact that she was cracking up.
“Ooh. Shut up. What a profound and articulate argument! You must be a really good lawyer. I bet ‘shut up’ wows them in court.”
In keeping with the whole “profound and articulate” thing, Wendy stuck out her tongue at him.
“Hold your horses.” Just as they were about to pass her bathroom, he stopped, pivoted, and steered her inside. When he let go of one of her hands to flip on the shower, it was more of a disappointment than it should have been. “It’s entirely possible that you, after running twelve miles at breakneck pace, smell like rainbows and lollipops. I, however, do not.”
She stood on her tiptoes and planted her nose as high as she could reach on his body, which was just above his sternum. He smelled like sweaty Christmas trees. She didn’t hate it. But…“Point taken.” She tugged her other hand out of his grasp—finally!—and pulled off her tank top. The bra was more of a problem. Removing a sports bra was not a dignified maneuver at the best of times. And now, with an audience? And with nipples that had grown almost painfully hard because of his proximity? She turned her back to him, crossed her arms over her chest, grabbed the hem on both sides, and started wrestling with the damned thing.
“I think you need to work on your striptease skills.”
His voice was so deadpan, she couldn’t help letting loose a peal of laughter. “Hey! Have you ever tried to take off a sweaty sports bra?”
It was weird, all this laughing and bantering. Their previous encounters had been dead serious. Dead sexy, but also dead serious. She wouldn’t have thought that Noah did silly. More than that, she wouldn’t have thought that silly could go so well with sexy.
“There’s a first time for everything.” He batted her hands out of the way and started to work the fabric up her torso.
The bra had not been designed to lure him. It was made out of one of those wicking fabrics, and it was damp with sweat. How mundane. How not sexy.
And yet.
There was something exquisitely intimate about what he was doing.
“Lift your arms.” His voice was lower than before, having shed its teasing tone, and oh, that voice.
She obeyed, and he worked the bra up over her arms and off. His hands made their way back to the sides of her torso, rubbing the indentations he found there, soothing them with a warm, firm touch.
She sighed, a big, relieved one that was out before she could control it. It was just that it felt so good. It shouldn’t be possible to store tension in the sides of your torso.
And yet.
His palms still resting on her sides, just under her breasts, he swung his fingers up and pressed them into the muscles under her shoulder blades where she definitely stored tension.
She hissed out a breath that was part pain, part relief.
“Damn, Wendy,” he rasped, his hands moving up to massage the tough ridges that connected her shoulders to her neck. “I think you need to work on your relaxation skills, too. These are like bricks.”
She tried to think of a witty rejoinder, but in addition to softening the tissue of her shoulders, the steady pressure of his strong hands had softened her brain.
So she just stood there and let him soften her.
“Get in,” he said after a minute, dropping his hands from her shoulders and tapping her on the butt. “Take off your shorts and get in the shower, and there’s more where that came from.”
A part of her wanted to not obey, just on the principle of the thing. To sass him. Because that’s what they did. She was comfortable with a perpetual state of semi-confrontation. Not so much with easy acquiescence.
And yet.
She took off her shorts and got in the shower.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hot damn.
Noah needed a moment to collect himself, so he paused outside the shower after stripping. His chest was strangely heavy, which was odd, considering that he’d spent much of the past few minutes either trying not to laugh or failing at trying not to laugh.
She was right. Their situation did not call for hand holding. Or shoulder massages. Or flirtatious joking.
But he couldn’t help himself. She was so easy to rile.
And, simultaneously, so in need of comfort.
And so impossibly sexy.
Also there was the part where he was in love with her.
It was a confusing combination. Too many physical and emotional responses were roiling through his body at the same time, some of them contradictory, all of them powerful.
“Hello?”
Her voice jolted him.
“Am I doing this by myself? Because if so, I’ll just get a move on washing my hair.”
Instead of answering, he stepped into the shower. She turned, drenched, her hair a black curtain plastered to her head. Her gaze flickered down his body, then back up. She smiled.
“Where’s the shampoo?” He looked around but did not see any bottles.
“Oh, I use a shampoo bar.”
“A shampoo what?”
She picked up what looked like a regular bar of soap. “Shampoo in solid format. Lasts longer, contains less toxic junk.” She rubbed the bar between her hands, then brought the resulting lather and the bar itself up to her head and started rubbing.
“Hey, now, that’s my job.” He took the bar from her and—ah! He knew this bar. It was round and red and chunky. He brought it to his nose, inhaled, and laughed. The cinnamon mystery object decoded at last!
She furrowed her brow. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I like this smell.”
The brow unfurrowed. It was like watching her usual expression in reverse. “I know! It’s the perfect not-too-girly scent. It’s kind of cranberry-ish, kind of spicy-ish.”
“Kind of Wendy-ish.”
The furrow came back. He ignored it, put his hands on her shoulders to spin her around, and mimicked her movements with the bar, creating a good lather on her head before setting it on the shower caddy.
She was so…wary. He’d seen flashes of vulnerability in her in recent days, but they’d just been little hints, papered over before he could fully take them in. Had she always been like this? He thought not, but he was questioning now how much he had really seen back when they were kids. Both Wendy and Jane had dropped bombs on him in Vegas, and he was still struggling to reconcile what they’d said with the women they’d become.
He dragged the pads of his fingers across her scalp, and she moaned like she had before when he was rubbing her shoulders.
“You and Jane had that Dead Dads Club, remember? You’d say it like it was a joke, but I think I’m correct in believing that it actually brought you both comfort?”
She tried to turn her body to face him—that had been a non sequitur, he supposed—but he brought his hands back down to her shoulders to show her he wanted her to stay in place. He needed the answer to the question, but he wasn’t sure he could bear it if she was looking at him with her skeptical litigator face while she spoke.
“We did.” Her tone was tinged with suspicion. “And you’re not wrong. Jane was the only one who really got how much my dad’s death affected me.”
“How did it affect you?” He’d missed everything that his sister had been going through back then, so he almost certainly had no idea what Wendy’s deal was, either.
There was a long silence, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer. If she didn’t do holding hands, she probably wasn’t about to spill her guts on long-buried grief, e
ither. But then, to his surprise, she said, “It changed everything.”
Realizing that he was standing there with his hands still in her hair, he resumed massaging her scalp. “What does that mean?” he asked softly.
Another long pause, then a sigh, a big one, like she was surrendering to something. “Well, I was nine. I still needed a dad.”
He nodded, though she couldn’t see it.
“But beyond that, it meant my mom had to be at the store all the time. We did okay, but the margins were low. She couldn’t afford to pay someone to take over his shifts, and the store was open eight to eleven, seven days a week. When we moved closer to the store, the idea, in theory anyway, was that I could more easily hang out there, but my mom didn’t really want me there. She was happy for me to just be at your house all the time.” She paused and huffed a small laugh. “You know how some parents desperately want their kids to take over the family business? Mine did not. She wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer, so she was always shooing me to your house to study. I know she did that because she loved me, and she wanted me to have a good life, but…”
“In a way, you lost both parents when your dad died.” He moved his fingers from her scalp and lathered up the length of her hair. He didn’t really know how to wash long hair—he’d never done this with a girlfriend before—but he wanted to prolong the activity as a way of keeping the conversation going.
“Yes.” Her voice was almost inaudible over the noise of the falling water. “In a way.”
And then she’d thought she was going to lose Jane. And her aunt. His throat tightened as he was flooded with emotion. Not pity. Wendy wasn’t the kind of person who inspired pity. It was sympathy, yes, but it was leavened with a big dose of respect. Awe, even. At Wendy, and at Jane. The Dead Dads Club.
It Takes Two Page 25
