Working With Heat

by Anne Calhoun

  Kaitlin nudged Milla. “Pretty spectacular gift,” she said with a nod at Charlie’s box.

  Milla’s fingers strayed to the box, tucked carefully into her pannier at her feet. “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you think he’s planning to sell those?”

  “No idea,” Milla said. But she planned to find out.

  The quizmaster took the stage again and announced the next quiz: Romantics, then and now. “Anyone know anything about seventeenth-century poets?” Elsa asked.

  “Just enough to know the Romantics are nineteenth-century poets,” Billy said.

  Kaitlin groaned.

  * * *

  They played a few more rounds, but Billy’s knowledge only boosted them to a top third showing. Elsa was thumbing away at her phone. “A friend has tickets to see Enter Shikari at the Roundhouse. Want to go? Should be a pretty good show.”

  Milla knew she should go. She loved music and always had a good time with Elsa’s cooking school friends. But Charlie looked knackered, to steal a British phrase, and something about the noise felt wrong to her. “I’m pretty tired,” Milla said.

  “I’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” Charlie said. “I’m out.”

  Elsa and Kaitlin headed for the Tube. Charlie and Milla waited until they were safely inside, then set off through the long summer twilight, Milla riding slowly in the street, Charlie seemingly content to walk on the narrow sidewalk, his hands in his pockets, watching her dip and circle along the street, pedaling away from him, then turning back to circle behind him.

  “You’re always in motion,” he said.

  “I was a high-energy child,” she said as she rode at his side for a few seconds before pushing hard on the pedals to make a high arc around the Victorian figure in metallic makeup poised to scare tourists posing for pictures.

  “No wonder your dad set you to writing a blog,” Charlie said.

  “In hindsight, Dad was pretty smart. I used to get so sad, because every time I got used to a new base, a new school, we moved. It gave me something to do when we were transferred,” she said, pedaling alongside him. “Kids are resilient, but moving every eighteen months, on average, takes a toll. Exploring and blogging about each new place taught me how to find my way around, how to trust my instincts, kept me busy and from being too homesick. Now it’s automatic, the way I process the world. Like art is for you.”

  He looked at her strangely, as if he’d never considered why she did what she did, then held out his hand and beckoned.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Give me your phone.”

  She handed over her phone, resisting the urge to show him how to use the camera, the video option, opting instead to enjoy the sensation of being pleasantly tipsy and riding a bike through the East End. She was, she realized, happy. Not blissfully, not blindingly, just slipping through the lingering gold in the air, coasting from moment to moment without effort. She was vaguely aware of Charlie holding the phone up as he walked, but for once the mechanics of the shot, the angle, the view faded into the background. She just rode on the bricks, weaving from one side of the street to the other, enjoying the dip and sway of the bike.

  “Are you all right?” she asked when they rounded the corner to Charlie’s street.

  “Yeah,” he said, and tapped the screen to stop the video, then lowered the phone. “I haven’t been this wired in years. I want to work all the time. All the time. I’ve been sleeping on the hot shop floor because it’s just pouring out of me.”

  “That’s great,” Milla said. “Really great. Are you making lots of the cleats? Is that what you’re going to start selling?”

  The question sounded awkward, and immature, as if Milla was talking about something she didn’t understand. Charlie didn’t bristle at the question, just shook his head. “I’m not ready to talk about it,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” Milla said as she dodged a crowd of tourists. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  But she did want him to talk about it. She didn’t want to just be his secret. She wanted to share his secrets. But she liked what was happening between them too much to risk upsetting the balance by demanding he reveal more than he wanted to. She’d just have to keep quiet until he was ready.

  They came back together in front of the house. Milla slipped from the seat to push her bike to the steps. “I’ve got that,” Charlie said, and hoisted it over his shoulder to carry it up the stairs and into the entryway.

  Milla watched the play of muscles in his back and shoulders under his T-shirt. When he’d notched the frame onto the rack, she stepped forward and pressed a kiss to the nape of his neck.

  He froze.

  The hair there curled so endearingly, and a faint scent of sweat rose from his skin, warm despite the gooseflesh that rippled and disappeared. She did it again, this time touching the tip of her tongue to the knobs of bone arcing to her lips when he bent his head. Her hands curved under his arms to curl around his shoulders, and he reached back blindly until his hand cupped her head. A scrape of teeth, and he shuddered and turned to bear her back into the wall on the opposite side of the entryway.

  His beard, she discovered, had reached the soft, curling stage. She stroked it with her palms as his mouth coaxed hers open, savoring the sensation of smooth, hot tongue contrasted with the denser, soft hair around his lips. She wrapped one leg around his calf and pulled him closer.

  “You were teasing me,” she murmured against his mouth.

  “When?”

  “Playing footsie under the table.”

  “I shouldn’t,” he said. His body pressed against hers from chest to hips, his hands sliding under her loose top to find the skin at her waist. “I shouldn’t, and I know I shouldn’t...”

  It was hard to hear him over the weight of his body, the strength and heat of his erect cock against her belly. “Why not?” she whispered.

  “We’re friends,” he growled, his forehead pressed to hers. “I don’t want to lose this.”

  “You’re not going to lose me,” Milla said. She gripped his hair in her fist and tugged gently until he looked at her. “You’re not going to lose me. Charlie. We will always be friends.”

  He looked at her, wary and wanting and absolutely burning from the inside out with some creative energy she’d only begun to sense. So far he’d let her into his house, into his bed, but not quite into that creativity that was the soul of Charlie Tanner.

  So she’d take what she could get, until he was ready to give her more.

  “Invite me up,” she said.

  It wasn’t an invitation, more a temptation to the kind of sin she couldn’t resist. His big, rough, strong hand wrapped so carefully around hers, he drew her up the stairs and into his flat. But rather than the bedroom, he led her to the bathroom and switched on the light over the medicine cabinet. Like the rest of the house, the room was redone in an eclectic mixture of reclaimed fixtures and modern conveniences, so the light fixture and reenameled claw-foot tub were retro, but the cabinet and sink were modern.

  Charlie opened the mirrored medicine cabinet and took down a set of barber’s scissors.

  “What are you doing?” Milla asked.

  His gaze met hers in the mirror. “Shaving. I don’t want to look like Ewan McGregor between films.”

  She laughed, then leaned against the door frame to watch him. Starting at his sideburns, he snipped away the excess hair, his hands deftly wielding the scissors. Desire simmered under the concentration in his eyes, reminding her that Charlie knew how to wait until substances were heated to a perfect temperature before working with them.

  “Let me do that,” she said.

  She half expected a laughing refusal. Instead he turned to face her and handed her the scissors.

  “These are interesting,” she said, giving them an experimental snick-snick, a glide of metal on metal that made her shiver in a really good way. “Antique?”

  “Yeah. I picked them up from an antique dealer in
the Brick Lane market. She claimed they’d been in her family for five generations.”

  She slid her first two fingers into the softly curling hair along his jaw. Best to practice on a flat, straight portion of his face before she got close to his lips or chin. The scissors were razor-sharp, slicing through the facial hair with the merest whisper.

  “Did you believe her?” she asked.

  “Didn’t matter,” he said after she made her next cut. The hair drifted to the floor at their feet as his hand came up to rest on her hip. “I remember my grandfather and father going to the same barber for fifty years. It’s part of East End history.”

  She made a soft humming noise, knowing there was something else to the conversation but at the moment very content to touch Charlie in this extraordinarily intimate way. “Sit down,” she said.

  Charlie eased onto the closed toilet lid, looking rather piebald with his patchily cut beard, then tipped his face up to look at her. His pulse thumped visibly in his throat, and for a moment the vulnerability made her heart stutter. She smiled at him, then trimmed away the rest of the longish hair, taking extra care around his mouth, clipping little bits at a time, brushing her fingers over his lips, his cheeks, his jaw. She’d show him she could be careful as well as quick.

  By the time she’d finished, nightfall had leached the color from the room until all that remained were Charlie’s eyes, as dark as the twilight sky.

  “Want me to clean this up with your electric razor?” she asked, thinking he’d prefer the two-day stubble he usually wore.

  He shook his head, then reached up and retrieved a razor and shaving cream from the medicine cabinet. “I want you to finish what you started,” he said.

  Her pulse pounded in her temples, her throat, as sweet heat pooled between her thighs. She ran the water to hot, soaked a hand towel, then stoppered the sink. The shaving gel dispensed into her cupped hand, she rubbed her palms together to work up the lather. Then, as the late-summer twilight faded into night, she straddled his thighs and sat on his lap.

  The move brought their faces almost level. She kissed him once, let the heat of his mouth cool on hers as she smoothed the lightly scented shaving cream into the hair on his jaw and throat. While she waited for it to soften the hair, she dried her hands on a towel, then picked up the razor.

  “I’ve never done this for anyone before,” she said.

  “Hard to do much damage with a safety razor,” he said. Then he stretched out his arms and turned his head to the side. “Start here.”

  She did, drawing the razor through the foam, watching as a strip of skin, paler than his lightly tanned forehead and cheeks, appeared. A quick rinse and tap, then she tried again, leaving smooth skin on both sides of his jaw in her wake. A quick press of her fingertips turned his face from side to side, ensuring she’d trimmed his sideburns evenly. Emboldened, she moved on, ever so carefully removing his mustache, then drawing the razor over his chin.

  He shifted under her, snugging her more closely against the hard bulge in his jeans. Then he tipped his head back, offering his throat to her.

  Her breath caught. It was such a profound act of trust; while it was unlikely she’d slit his throat with a Gillette, the sheer masculine confidence in the move, laden with desire, seduced her without so much of a touch of his finger. The air in the room seemed to flutter at her skin. She shifted herself, felt the slick heat between her thighs, watched a smile tug at the corners of his mouth.

  Switching the direction of the razor, she drew the blades up his throat to his jaw, moving in clean, adept strokes now. When she was finished, she laid the warm, wet towel against his skin and gently wiped away the remaining traces of shaving cream before dropping the towel on the tile floor.

  Then she bent her head and set her mouth to his pulse, ticking away under the hinge of his jaw, trying to tell him the only way he’d let her that he could trust her, that this meant more to her than a hookup between friends.

  A sound rumbled in his throat. She heard it and felt it through her lips even as he shifted again. This time he didn’t hold back, but wrapped one arm around her waist and snugged his cock into the notch of her thighs. She made a noise, soft, welcoming, and braced one hand against the wall behind his head while holding his throat with the other. The soft, smooth skin entranced her, so unfamiliar when she was kissing him. She drew her lips from his jaw to the corner of his mouth again and again, never quite giving him, or herself, the full kiss she was nearly desperate to have.

  “Oh, I like this,” she whispered. “Your skin...so smooth.”

  His arms tightened around her hips and he surged to his feet, carrying her into the bedroom. She laughed when he tumbled her back onto the bed and went up on her elbows to watch him strip. Then he loosened the tie on her silky top and tugged it over her head, then unfastened the button on her pants while she wriggled out of her bra.

  She expected a fast race to the finish. Instead, Charlie smoothed his lips and cheeks and tongue over her body, teasing her collarbones, the notch in her throat, her breasts, her belly until he settled between her legs and put his mouth to her slick sex. For one brief moment she registered the difference between his normally rough cheeks and the smooth, hot skin pressed against her, and then she stopped thinking at all.

  When she came, she forgot to muffle her cry. Little shudders worked their way through her body as Charlie kissed his way back up to her mouth. She lay there, dazed with pleasure, while he rummaged in his night table drawer for a condom.

  He paused before he tore open the packet. “Still with me?” he asked.

  Charlie. So dangerous. So sweet. “Yes. Definitely yes.”

  Braced on his elbows above her, heat steamed from his body, electrifying the scant distance between them. She could imagine the air beginning to glow as he aligned himself with her entrance and canted his hips forward, and slid in. Her skin seemed to absorb the heated air until he was embedded deep inside her and their bodies aligned, pressed together from thigh to breast. When he started to move, the boundary between her body and his disappeared. Sensitized from her climax, she was content to give him as much pleasure as she could, but she’d underestimated his ability to stay in a slow-spun moment. He kissed her, moved slowly, waited until her body passed through the aftershocks into a new, fresh swell of desire.

  One particularly well-angled thrust made her tighten and lift her hips to his. He chuckled, kissed her cheek, her ear, and did it again. Before long she had her fingernails embedded in his lower back and her heels dug into his thighs. His pace never quickened, the slow slap of slick flesh as rhythmic as her breathing was erratic, and that steady, relentless pace took her apart.

  With one deep thrust he buried himself inside her and came, retaining enough sense to tip her head into his shoulder to muffle her cries.

  “Are they home?” she asked long moments later.

  “No,” he said, then cleared his throat and repeated himself. “No. I just...wanted you close.”

  After dealing with the condom, he brought her a damp cloth to clean up. She curled up on her side and watched him pull on a pair of boxer shorts.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and gently tugged a few strands of hair free from her sweaty, hot cheek. “Thirsty?”

  “I’d love some water,” she said.

  When he went to the kitchen, she sat up and tugged the sheet up to her armpits. He brought her back a glass and a beer for himself. “Cheers,” he said and tapped his bottle against her glass. “It’s nice to see you.”

  “You, too,” she said after swallowing thirstily. “You’ve been holed up in your studio all week.”

  “Working,” he said, and there was so much satisfaction in that one word.

  “On cleats?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Maybe,” he said evasively, then cleared his throat. “What about you? How goes the Orient Express trip planning?”

  “I’m trying to decide between ro
utes,” she said. “There’s the Paris-Munich-Vienna-Budapest northern route, or the Paris-Milan-Venice-Belgrade southern route.”

  “Venice would be cool,” he said as he stretched out on his side, the beer bottle within easy reach. “Glassblowing really took off there.”

  “Yes,” she said. “The guidebooks mention that, but Vienna. Vienna would be amazing.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you could go wrong with either choice.”

  “I know,” she said. “Which makes it even harder to choose.”

  She was trying to sound normal, and failing, even to her own ears. Sitting here with Charlie, her body still tingling from his touch, felt wrong after she’d pried into his history.

  Observant Charlie caught an off note in her voice. “What’s going on, Milla? You looked different down the pub tonight. Did something happen on your date?”

  She didn’t even consider lying to him. Charlie saw things other people didn’t see. Tell him what you know, then tell him how you feel. “I know about you and Chelsea.”

  His expression closed off. One second he was in his eyes, and the next second he was gone. He rolled over, his back to her, and sat up, then reached for the beer bottle. “Do you,” he said, but it wasn’t a question.

  Her skin chilled. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “I never asked you not to look.”

  “You didn’t need to ask,” she said. “It’s very obvious you’re a private person. But that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry for what she did.”

  That was too much. He got up and rummaged around on the floor for his jeans. “Why should you be sorry?”

  She tucked the sheet more securely under her arms. “Because I care about you and I hate that someone hurt you so badly, so publicly.”

  “I walked into it, Milla. I knew exactly what kind of girl she was, and I walked into it with my eyes wide open. Then I shut them tight until she walked out.” He pulled his shirt on and finished the rest of the beer in two angry swallows.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Do you want me to go?”