Her fingers dug into his shoulder. She pulled him back down onto the bed and straddled him again. “We’re two creative adults. Let’s find out.”
This time it was her mouth on his body, tracing a light, fluttery trail over his pecs, along his ribcage, down past his navel, following a happy trail right down to Nirvana. “You don’t have—” Nancy had trained him to think of that as a Big Deal, but these days, anything at all was a Big Deal.
She wrapped her fingers around him and gave him a mischievous tug. “Bullshit. I can’t not. I wonder if you taste like ice cream.”
That did it. His eyes rolled back in his head and when her lips closed around him, he went somewhere north of bliss, guided there by hot fingers and even hotter, softer lips. His fingers tangled in her ebony curls. Her soft curves gave against his hip and thigh, her legs tangled his calf. He held himself frozen for as long as he could, hoarse moans and ragged gasps and her name creeping out of his throat as he fisted one hand in the comforter in an attempt to keep the other from pulling her hair.
He fought a losing battle with his endurance. She dipped her head, swirled her tongue just so, and crystal shards exploded behind his eyelids. His hips thrust upwards and release screamed out of him on a bit-back cry that left him spent and shaking.
~*~
If Lin was worried about Jack’s reality not measuring up to any fantasies she may or may not have built up of him over the years, she shouldn’t have bothered. Reality was so far out of her expectations—and so far past fantasy itself—that the two weren’t even in the same realm.
No, instead, she compared him to Roger. Roger would have kissed her on the top of the head and rolled over, asleep in five minutes. Jack brought her ice-cold water and returned the favor with a repeat performance, minus the kitchen countertop this time. After she caught her breath, she glanced down at him, his hair mussed by the fluffy bedspread. “Are we going to go back and forth like this all night?”
Her smart-ass remark was spoiled by the yawn that interrupted her right in the middle of it. He chuckled and slid up next to her, his weight tipping her into the circle of his arms. They were both a little out of breath, but her sighs didn’t fog the air like his. She rested her chin on his chest.
He plucked one of her curls, stretching out the blue-streaked hair to straight, then let it fall back into a painstakingly-ironed spring. A soft smile played about his lips and he looked content just to lie there, heavy-lidded, and let her look at him.
She, on the other hand, had a million and one questions. But the ones twisting up her tongue had nothing to do with his unusual physiology or the crazy, out-of-this-world experiences they’d had during the evening. She wanted to ask those questions—they burned up the back of her throat—but some part of her decided they were less important than the one she drew breath to ask. She glanced down at his naked chest. “So…that happened.”
Maybe it had to do with her mother’s lifelong beliefs in the supernatural that let Lin take that aspect in stride. After all, when you open your lunch box in junior high to find a fortune tucked in with your Oreos, which your mother expects you to report in on and heed, you gain a certain amount of familiarity with superstition.
But Mother’s fortunes didn’t cover what to do when you hooked up with your old crush, or went from friends to lovers when you’re not sure if you’re still only just friends, and you honestly don’t even want to make that decision.
His lazy expression didn’t change. “Yeah, it did. Can I get you anything?”
She pushed herself up to a sitting position, feeling all sorts of aftershocks and twinges, some of which were even part of the pleasure they’d just shared. Contrast from Roger, all right. Part of her always knew Jack would be a considerate lover. He thanked people for the small things they did. Even back in college, he walked girls home, called them afterwards. Yes, she’d noticed. And she noticed how many of them seemed surprised to hear back from him. Even Nancy, when she’d started dating him, couldn’t get why Jack continued contact with some of his old girlfriends until Bailey told her to leave it alone. Lin had figured Nancy’s jealousy would separate her from Jack soon enough, but she figured wrong and Nancy took Bailey’s advice. The rest was history. History of Jack and Nancy, and she couldn’t help but wonder how she measured up.
“My phone.”She put her hand out. “Don’t get up, I can get it.” She moved slowly, but she left the sleeping area and hoped her head would clear. She didn’t consider herself psycho-girlfriend material—not even with Roger, who, as it turned out, had merited watching. Two days ago, she’d been confident that her self-worth did not rest on whether or not she had a man, and firm in her resolve to think twice before giving up the single life again.
Jack’s apartment, spotless in only the way someone who worked from home and was neurotic could make it, had its perfect order marred by her clothes strewn about. She picked up her dress and found her underwear on the kitchen floor, next to a bowl with a thin film of milk in the bottom. Did Jack have a cat? She glanced around as she pulled her panties back up her hips, sparing a glance up to the rafters.
She found her wrap and pulled her phone out of the pocket before hanging it and her dress on the coat rack by the door. She sent a quick text to Starla. “Went home. Left Car. Ok. Talk l8r.” The curiosity would kill her friend, but it would have to wait.
Curiosity of her own prompted her to peek in his fridge. Wine, cottage cheese, yogurt, and six gallons of milk. She heard a footstep behind her. “Good grief, you’re as bad as Shane. I told him he was going to kill himself if he kept living off Cap’n Crunch and take-out. Same goes for you.”
He reached in around her and pulled out the open gallon of milk. “Are you dissing the Cap’n? I seem to remember your cupboards full of a delicious part of a nutritious breakfast.”
She smirked. “Sure, twenty years ago, before heredity had its way with me and gave me lactose intolerance. What’s your excuse?”
He gestured around the apartment. “Single guy. I don’t need an excuse. I get to fail at housekeeping. It’s expected.” He unscrewed the cap and poured the milk into the bowl on the floor. “Anyway, I brought you that.” He gestured to a fuzzy pile on the island and sidled around her to put the milk back in the fridge.
She caught his attention on her breasts and lifted her eyebrows at the evidence beginning to rise from underneath his boxers. He shook out the fuzzy fabric to reveal a bathrobe. “I thought you might get cold.”
She slipped into the robe. It smelled like laundry soap. “I take it you don’t get cold?”
He shook his head. “Not really. I can feel the cold, but not to the point where it hurts me.”
She belted the robe. “What about heat? I know how this city gets in summer. Tell me you have air conditioning.”
“And fans. Lots of fans. But I’m not a snowman or anything. I won’t melt in the sun.” He double-checked the deadbolt and flipped off the lights, leaving only the illumination from the sleeping area and the windows letting in the ambient city light.
“That’s…good to know.”
She followed him back into the bedroom, phone in hand, and set it on the dresser next to his. His and hers phones now?
He’d straightened his own clothes as well as the bedding. She half-expected to find a mint on her pillow. He caught her hand in his. “Stay the night?” He pulled her close enough to kiss again.
A cool-water thrill trickled through her. She nodded, fighting off another huge yawn. But once his weight sank the mattress next to her, sleep was the last thing on her mind for a long time as they shared kisses, touches, and found each other’s ticklish spots once she’d shrugged back out of the robe. When she finally did drift off to sleep it was with the cool breeze of his breath ruffling her hair and his chest at her back, his body stretched out next to hers.
~*~
Jack Winters woke up naked.
Much like every other day, the sky was just beginning to lighten and his phone peeped polit
ely at him to let him know it was time for a run. His hip joints were just beginning to suggest that maybe lying down wasn’t something to engage in for too much longer, and the fog in his brain slowly condensed into the need to get up and pee.
Unlike every other day, he had not been alone during the night. A slow grin spread across his face, along with the stirring memory of soft, feminine skin, dark eyes full of promise and passion, and a rather gymnastic tongue full of acerbic wit. Memories of morning coffee shared with Nan over the newspaper at the breakfast bar gave him a sense of vertigo, but the female face in his mind morphed easily away from his ex-wife’s. The breakfast bar, he realized, had been the Formica-topped one from the old condo. With the replacement of Nancy came the replacement of the bar with the stainless-topped island in his current kitchen. The same one they’d had so much fun on last night. And maybe this morning, too?
He turned his head into the pillow and still smelled her hair. The sheets weren’t even that cold.
He listened for the sounds of plumbing, of movement. He sat up and rested his elbows on his knees as his body adjusted to being vertical again, the little kinks and pops working themselves out in half their usual time, thanks to the languor from a night well-spent in the company of endorphins he thought he’d said goodbye to a long while back.
As his blurry vision came into focus, he caught the Chillsprite squatting on the dresser. A start tensed his muscles as he counted only one phone.
The Chillsprite bowed. “She is gone. Majesty sleeps safely.”
Dread wormed through him at the creature’s words. “You did not chase her out.” Maybe if he said it sternly enough, it would be true.
The Chillsprite shook its potato-shaped head. “No, Majesty.”
He scrubbed his face, feeling the start of stubble, familiar since age sixteen or so, and the moist rime of condensing frost, not nearly as familiar—but not, sadly, unknown. Probably for the best, anyway. Last night could be chalked up to something in the drinks if he played it carefully. Chillsprites in the cold light of morning tended to be harder to explain away. Especially when they wouldn’t shut up.
“The thief crept out as the drafts do, around the chinks in the doorways. The tribe would give chase, if Majesty granted tribe the license to mete justice in Majesty’s name.”
“Oh, hell no. And what’s this nonsense about a thief?” He pulled on underwear and a performance shirt and rummaged for the matching leggings in the drawer underneath the one the Chillsprite still pointed at.
The little gremlin’s ears drooped when Jack denied it a deputization, but its mouth didn’t stop running. “She stole from Majesty, the trickster did!” The Chillsprite pointed at the floor. “She took her dress and put it over herself, and—and then she took Majesty’s shirt as well!” The last was delivered with pride that only came from juicy gossip, and the hushed tones that came from scandal.
Jack couldn’t help himself. He widened his eyes. “Really? Shocking!” The majority of his mental faculties wanted to focus on the fact that she’d nicked his shirt. He dived through the neck hole of the shirt and when he emerged, the grin returned to his face.
“This one knows! Justice must be done! Majesty’s abode is inviolate! It is an out—”
“Oh, relax, already.” He found the leggings and left the Chillsprite on the way to the bathroom. “If she has my shirt, that means she wants to see me again.”
When he emerged from the bathroom, the Chillsprites clustered around him, ready to leave the loft, their little potato bodies crowding him out of what should have been a simple correction of an even simpler misunderstanding. “Majesty chooses this one as his entourage!”
He eyed it. “What the hell, guys? I’m just going for a run.” He didn’t think he’d ever been this mellow about their presence. A little of last night’s surreality must have stuck around after sunrise.
“Majesty has been robbed!” Constable Chillsprite gave an indignant flap of its hands.
Another Chillsprite elbowed the Constable out of the way. “Majesty bids this one accompany him as he travels the realm!”
Jack laced on his sneakers. “I’m not ‘traveling the realm,’ I’m going for a run. Which I do every day. Alone.”
“Majesty honors this one!” The speaker dived for its opponent and began to scuffle with it. The little creatures rolled across the dresser surface, upsetting the little dish he kept his watch and change in, sending quarters skittering across the surface.
Their indignant squeaks turned to yowls as the Constable aimed one gnarled-looking, bare foot into the fracas. The addition of a third sent the ball of spindly limbs tumbling across the dresser again, this time catching his phone underneath a horny-toenailed foot and sending it sailing.
Jack fumbled forward and barely caught the phone with the tips of his fingers. The screen lit up with the motion, illuminating the Chillsprite’s face in that weird, flashlight-up way that made everyone’s face look horrific, and Jack froze.
The good mood faded with the return of an all-too-familiar tension. This. This is what I open the door to, as soon as I call her. The relaxing Saturday morning scene with coffee and paper morphed into chaos as he imagined Chillsprites plopping onto the counter from the ceiling, freezing the coffee in Lin’s cup, tangling in her hair, slipping down into her borrowed shirt until she ran shrieking from his apartment and his life.
The knot in his stomach tightened. What woman would want nights like last night when they came with mornings like this one? Even without this morning, there had been plenty to send Lin running last night. Borrowed shirt or not, maybe it was better he keep the night a dubious memory rather than a confirmed reality.
The Chillsprites crowded around him as he headed for the door and suddenly, they were too much. Their little freakish bodies weren’t the body he wanted bumping into his, their sharp teeth not the teeth he wanted to see behind a smile, their alien eyes— “Clear off, all of you! Is it too much to ask for boundaries?” He slammed the door open, then slammed it shut behind him.
~*~
It was still mostly dark when Lin pulled her exhausted self into the shelter to wait for the Holly Jolly Trolley’s early-morning run. While her limbs still held traces of a pleasant lassitude, her feet hurt in last night’s party shoes, the satiny fabric of last night’s party dress stuck to her skin with a fine coating of sweat, and she was sure that last night’s mascara had diffused into raccoon circles around her eyes. The cold, damp, pre-dawn air settled on her skin and she huddled down into Jack’s shirt, which was a mistake in its own right, because that brought up his aftershave, and she wanted to wallow in it.
She sat down across from a blonde about fifteen years younger, who gave her a worn-out smile of solidarity, although the other woman’s last-night accoutrements didn’t look like they’d been through a meat grinder. “I keep saying I’m not staying out all night, but Old Man Winter’s been so accommodating, I just can’t say no.”
Lin’s own smile felt like an insincere, too-tired stretch of lips. “Old man” Winters had been plenty accommodating to her, but when she woke up to an unfamiliar ceiling and the brush of an unusually cool body against hers—she sighed.
I panicked.
The blonde pulled out a tiny pouch from her clutch and from it emerged a pair of packable ballet-looking slippers. She shook the bag. “Best things ever invented,” she said. “Keeps the Walk of Shame from being the Walk of Pain, y’know?”
Lin felt color creep into her cheeks. God, I must be that obvious.
The blonde rose as the trolley pulled up. “Last night must have been good for you, though.”
How did you know? She wanted to ask, as she put her hands to her face to check if someone had written “Yes I went home with him” on her forehead. She followed the younger woman onto the Trolley and slumped in a seat.
They’d only gone one or two stops when she realized that the pocket of her wrap contained her phone and ID-holder, it did not contain her keys. She closed her
eyes and silently cursed. I can’t even creep out the right way! I have to go back for my keys.
The panic subsided a moment later with the memory of tossing the keys in the basket by Starla’s front door last night. The keys had been the last thing on her mind, given the unconventional way she’d ended up back downtown with Jack.
When she rose at the next stop, the blonde patted her shoulder. “You must want to see him again if you nicked his shirt. Make sure he knows it.”
Lin’s fingers curled around the shirt cuffs. Another waft of fresh-fallen snow and cedar surrounded her as she stood. Make sure he knows it, she thought as she limped down the street towards the east end. I’ve spent almost fifteen years making damn sure he didn’t.
~*~
Her sore feet took her to a pagoda-shaped storefront. The Japanese tea garden was the only concession to her Japanese heritage that hadn’t driven her nuts at one time or another. The tea garden shared space with a bar and Hibachi steak house, and all three interconnected businesses shared a back patio landscaped to resemble a traditional Shinto sanctuary. If this were San Francisco or Seattle, this place would be one of many cultural enclaves. But this was Ohio, and the place catered to the tourists.
Still, it had become something of a hangout for her and Shane—they shared weekly brunches on Sundays, and Lin came here to work every so often when she needed a break from the office.
The tea house was open early, even on Saturday. In addition to the traditional fare, they served coffee and pastries and panini sandwiches at lunch time. Ken greeted her by name—her Japanese name—and asked if she’d like her usual coffee. And tactfully avoided comment on her outfit.
She found herself shaking her head. “Green tea and daifuku, please.”
The host’s nod came with a small smile. “Need a little taste of home?”
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 10
