She’d never before cared what her family thought of the men she knew. She’d never bothered to introduce most of them to her family. And while she hadn’t cared much what the Bloom clan would think when she’d brought Casey to Grandma Ida’s seder, she cared now. She didn’t want Grandma Ida setting her up with Julia’s magazine guy. If Grandma Ida ever spent five minutes talking to Casey, she would recognize his quality.
They left Queens around five, rode the subway into Manhattan and downtown, and ate pizza at Nico’s. She’d arranged to have the night off, and it was fun to be waited on by the people with whom she usually worked side by side. Casey thought the current window—which featured a bicycle with two fake pizzas where the wheels were supposed to be, and information about Nico’s delivery service—was catchy, but he wasn’t overwhelmed by the pizza itself. “Not enough texture to the crust,” he critiqued it.
After dinner they went to a Jackie Chan double feature, which let out around eleven. Then to a café for espresso and cannolis, and then back to her apartment.
Fourteen hours they’d spent together so far. And now they were going to sleep in the same room, which she was prepared to argue should count toward the final hour tally if he gave her a difficult time about it. A part of her was edgy with excitement, but another part of her was totally calm. Of course, that part of her seemed to say, this is what’s supposed to happen. You spend a day together. You spend a night together. Sex or no sex, you’re connected.
Unfortunately, Anna and Caitlin were both without plans that evening. Anna told Susie she’d gone out earlier for Thai with Rick, but even though he’d invited her she’d wound up having to pay for most of it because he’d had only eight dollars on him. “Your cousin is a great guy, but he’s a turd, you know?” Anna said.
“That about sums it up,” Susie agreed.
Apparently, there were no hockey teams in town, so Caitlin was home, too. She and Anna retired to the bedroom, and Susie told Casey they would both sleep in the living room. No way was she going to use her bed in the other room while he slept in the living room. If she did, it wouldn’t count toward their total hours together.
Although, as she thought about it, the whole hours thing didn’t seem to matter anymore. She just wanted to be in the same room with him. He insisted that she take the couch, and she dragged out her old sleeping bag—which at one time had been her cousin Neil’s, although she wasn’t really sure how she’d wound up with it. She had a vague memory of Aunt Martha’s having pressed it upon her when she was packing for Bennington. “Perhaps up in Vermont you’ll become one with nature,” Aunt Martha had predicted. Susie had become one with a few boys at Bennington, but nature hadn’t done much for her.
She gave Casey the pillow from her bed, spread a sheet and blanket for herself over the lumpy sofa cushions, and wondered what would happen next. She didn’t want to sleep clothed, but what was she supposed to do, strip down to her undies in front of him? She’d greatly prefer for him to strip her himself, but that wasn’t going to happen when they still had at least five hours left.
He excused himself to use the bathroom. While he was gone, she shed her black jeans and V-neck, leaving on her kelly-green camisole and panties. She slipped under the blanket and tried to find a comfortable position on the cushions.
Lumps or no lumps, she’d be more comfortable in Casey’s arms. She’d be more comfortable if he just held her, let her use his shoulder for a pillow—even if it was a pretty bony shoulder—and allowed the quiet, steady thump of his heartbeat to lull her to sleep.
He returned from the bathroom wearing only his cargo pants. She tried not to ogle his naked chest, but the whole warm, connected, sex-doesn’t-matter concept was hard to hang on to when she was confronted with the sight of Casey stripped to the waist. His blond hair hung loose against his shoulders, his eyes were radiant despite the late hour, his torso was sleek and golden—and he barely spared her a glance.
“Where’s the light switch?” he asked.
All right, so she didn’t tempt him the way he tempted her. He’d kissed her once in the stairwell at the Bloom Building, decided she wasn’t worth pursuing beyond that one kiss and opted to play with her head for a whole bunch of hours. There she was, clad in the closest apparel to lingerie that she owned, and he was going to spend what was left of the night no more than five feet away from her, and he didn’t even consider her deserving of a good-night peck on the cheek.
Twenty hours she’d invested in this guy! Twenty hours with him and untold hours dreaming about him, puzzling over him, trying to psyche him out and convincing herself that the effort, however futile, was great fun. And tomorrow she was going to wake up to find him gone, or laughing at her. “Suckered you, didn’t I?” he’d snicker. “Do you honestly think I would have wasted all those hours talking to you if I wanted to get it on with you? Think it through, Susie! Does that make sense?”
No, it didn’t make sense—and the sudden realization caused her nose to clog as tears filled her eyes and backed into her sinuses. The couch was uncomfortable—parts of the upholstery were soft enough to swallow her, and other parts jutted into her as if the cushions had baseballs and burrs embedded in them. She’d sacrificed her pillow to Casey, and her head banged against the couch’s arm. The light was off and she couldn’t see him, but she could hear his steady breathing, she could smell his Ivory-soap scent, and she hated him for having made a fool out of her.
It was well past one-thirty, however, and she’d put in a long day traipsing all over Flushing Meadows with him, and she would be able to hate him more effectively after she’d enjoyed a good night’s rest. Closing her eyes, she mouthed a blasphemy in his general direction and glided into a surprisingly deep sleep.
“Susie.”
She’d barely drifted off, and now someone was rousing her with a sibilant whisper. She resisted, but the voice hissed into her ear again. “Susie?”
Irked, she squinted one eye open. Anna was hunkered down beside the couch. The living room was bathed in murky light that seeped through the window shades. “What?” she grunted, not quite awake enough to remember that she was supposed to be full of resentment about something.
About someone. Casey. She hated him; it was coming back to her. She hated him for toying with her for twenty hours and not even feeling enough attraction to her to kiss her good-night.
“Caitlin and I are going out for brunch,” Anna informed her. “We’ll be back at noon, okay? That gives you two-and-a-half hours.”
In two-and-a-half hours, she could stab Casey through the heart, dismember him and shove his body parts down the compactor chute.
She attempted a smile. Anna and Caitlin thought they were doing her a huge favor, clearing out of the apartment so she and Casey could have two-and-a-half hours alone, but she didn’t feel grateful. What could happen between them in those two-and-a-half hours? Besides bloodshed. They could have a nasty argument. She could kick him out. She could phone Julia and ask her to fire Casey—except she’d never do that, because his inventiveness with bagels was too valuable to the store.
Shit. She hadn’t even officially accepted the job as editor of the Bloom’s Bulletin, and already she was thinking about what would be best for the store. If Casey’s talent was required by Bloom’s, Susie was just going to have to let him live.
What was happening to her? Why did she care about what was best for Bloom’s? Had she turned into a pod person?
The door closed with a thud, and then silence settled into the room. She closed her eyes in the hope of falling back to sleep. Maybe Casey would leave while she was dozing. Maybe he’d sneak out like a coward. If he knew she was contemplating stuffing pieces of him down the compactor chute, sneaking out would be a wise move.
She heard him stir in the sleeping bag, and squeezed her eyes so she wouldn’t be tempted to open them. He shifted some more, and the sleeping bag’s zipper opened with a rasp. She breathed deeply, focused her vision on the nothingness on the inside of he
r eyelids and prayed for sleep to steal her away.
He touched her foot, and she nearly leaped off the cushions in surprise. “Is this the ankle with the butterfly?” he asked, sounding absurdly lucid.
Damn. He was awake. He had obviously heard Anna and Caitlin leave. He probably thought Susie had schemed with them ahead of time to remove them from the premises in the futile hope that Casey would want to do something with her that required privacy.
But his hand was warm on her ankle, massaging her instep, and instead of screaming at him that he should have kissed her last night, she said, “No, it’s the other one.”
She felt a chill as he pushed the blanket off her, and then she decided it was silly to keep her eyes closed. She opened them in time to see him bow over her legs and brush her tattoo with a kiss.
All right, so she maybe didn’t hate him.
He lifted his head and gazed at her, and what she saw in his eyes—hunger, yearning, lust, a single emotion refracted a million different ways—made her hate him even less. She pushed herself to sit as he reached for her shoulders, and then she tumbled off the couch and onto the floor, into his arms.
His mouth met hers and it was like that time in the stairwell, only much, much better because this time they were horizontal and all he had on was a pair of silk boxers and all she had on was her camisole and panties, which he promptly removed. His hands felt delightful on her skin, large and warm and possessive. She imagined his hands kneading dough, rolling it and shaping it into bagels. She imagined them twining through her hair, and in less than a minute she didn’t have to imagine that anymore because his hands were stroking her hair back from her face, caressing behind her ears, cupping her cheeks while he kissed her.
She sensed the connection between them again, just like yesterday in Flushing Meadows. Unspoken, unseen, yet as powerful as a force of physics, magnetism or electricity or one of those things. She’d never excelled in science, but right now she was thinking chemistry. The chemistry between her and Casey was incredible.
She touched his chest, stroked his sides, eased back to look at him. He was smiling, that same wonderful smile she’d fallen in love with nearly two months ago, when he’d selected an egg bagel for her because he thought she was nubile. She felt nubile now, as if her insides were swelling and softening for him.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“I’m happy. Why are you smiling?”
She hadn’t realized she was until he mentioned it, and then she felt the ache of her smile in her temples. “I’m just wondering whether we would be doing this if we’d only spent, like, eighteen hours together.”
“I’d give us a discount on those last two hours,” he murmured, running his hands up and down her back, tracing the roundness of her bottom and then drawing them forward, up over her ribs to explore her breasts. “I think we’re ready for this, don’t you?”
She’d been ready since that first day with the egg bagel. But no—he was right. Then it would have been sex. Now it was more. They were talking too much for it to be just sex. “Frankly,” she said, “I don’t know how you managed to resist me for so long.”
“It wasn’t easy,” he admitted, then sighed as she slid her hands down to the waist of his shorts and pushed them down his legs. “I guess I’m just tough.”
“How tough?”
“Tough enough.” He sighed again when she stroked his erection. “Almost,” he added with a laugh.
She joined his laughter. God, this was good. Better than good. They were talking, laughing, touching, kissing again, moving against each other, kissing some more, pulling back to catch their breaths and laughing again. He eased her onto her back on the sleeping bag, then reached under the coffee table for his trousers and pulled open the Velcro flap on one of the pockets. He removed a condom.
He’d come for this. He’d been counting the hours as obsessively as she had, and he’d known today would be the day. That thought made her smile, and he smiled, too, and kissed her breasts, kissed her crotch, kissed her lips and fused himself to her.
Atop Neil’s old sleeping bag, Susie became one with Casey, and it was as natural as nature itself. She closed her eyes and thought about all kinds of things she never thought about during sex: the length of his fingers, the shimmer in his gaze, his critique of Jackie Chan’s foot movements during the second movie last night. His description of his best shot, the three-pointer that people thought was so hard but was pretty much instinctive to him. “It’s just the way I’m used to moving,” he’d told her. “I don’t even slam it. I hardly even aim. It just happens.”
That was how this was: just happening, instinctively, his aim perfect. She came, and he kept moving inside her until she came again, gasping and clinging to him and feeling his climax as keenly as her own. They sank onto the sleeping bag, holding each other tight, breathing hard.
Moments passed, and she relaxed her arms enough for him to lean back. His hair was disheveled, his face damp with sweat. Fudge, she decided. The richest, densest fudge in the world. She had been well and truly fudged, and she felt fat and sated.
“I think I’m in love,” she murmured.
He grinned. “Let me know when you’re sure.”
His body softened and he slid out of her. She wanted him inside her again, as soon as possible. “How many condoms did you bring with you?”
His grin widened. “Eight.”
“All right. I’m sure I’m in love,” she announced.
He laughed.
She joined his laughter for a moment, then grew pensive. “Why did you make us wait so long for this?” she asked.
“I didn’t make us wait,” he told her. “We were heading in this direction all along. I just thought a little foreplay would make it better.”
“Twenty hours of foreplay?”
“Exactly.”
She considered his words. Maybe sex wouldn’t have been so spectacular if they hadn’t waited, if they hadn’t explicated Jackie Chan and T.S. Eliot, if they hadn’t discussed traditional Passover dishes or shared so many lunches in the tiny second-floor lounge at the store. She couldn’t prove that the twenty hours had made all the difference, but who was she to argue with success?
“Do we have to wait twenty hours to do it again?” she asked.
His first answer was “We can’t do that. Your roommates are going to be back at noon.” His second was to place his hand between her legs and make mischief with his fingers, until she startled herself by coming again. She moaned, pleased and embarrassed.
He smiled down at her. “I think you’re amazing.”
“Let me know when you’re sure,” she said, once she got her breath back.
“Okay. I’m sure.” He kissed her, a long, wet kiss that nearly caused her to come yet again. “I’m sure.”
Through the mist her brain had dissolved into, she heard a vaguely familiar chirping sound. She didn’t have a pet bird, and the chirping sounded more technological than avian. When Casey finally slid his mouth from hers, her mind cleared enough to recognize the noise.
“My cell phone,” she muttered.
“Ignore it.”
“It’s my family.” She pushed herself up to sit, and experienced another bout of embarrassment when she noticed the damp spots on Neil’s old sleeping bag. “Only my family calls me on my cell phone.”
“All the more reason to ignore it,” he joked, but he rolled off her so she could stand.
Her legs felt rubbery as she picked her way around their underwear and the coffee table to reach her bag, which she’d left on the table near the window. She dug out her phone, flipped it open and gazed across the room at Casey. He was sitting on the sleeping bag, long and lean, reminding her of a Rodin sculpture. She wasn’t sure which one. Whichever was Rodin’s sexiest, that was the one Casey resembled.
“Hello?” She spoke into the phone.
“Susie?” Her mother. “You’ve got to come to the store.”
“It’s Sunday.”
/>
“So, the store isn’t open Sunday?”
“I meant, it’s Sunday. My day off.”
“It’s everybody’s day off. As if that matters. Your sister is holding a meeting.”
“On a Sunday?”
“She just phoned me. She said we have to meet on the third floor at twelve o’clock. Her and her meshugena meetings! I thought, maybe we should all refuse to show up, but then I realized Jay might show up, and if I wasn’t there it would make him look good. Not like I think he’s going to show up. He’s out on the island, golfing.”
“How do you know that?”
“He’s always out on the island golfing. So he’ll miss the meeting and I’ll be there, and maybe Julia will fire him, which is what he deserves.”
“Okay. Sure. Why did you call me, Mom?”
“Because you need to come to the meeting.”
“Does Julia want me there?” She hadn’t officially become the editor-publisher of the Bloom’s Bulletin, which didn’t even exist yet. Susie wasn’t sure why she should attend Julia’s meeting, unless it was to lend moral support to her sister.
“Julia asked me to call you and tell you to come. But listen to me. I’m worried about your sister. I think maybe the stress is too much for her. To insist on a meeting on a Sunday—it’s crazy. She’s been working so hard, in over her head with this business, and the nonsense about the bookkeeping, the details, missing bagels…And you’re her sister, Susie, you tell me—hasn’t she been acting particularly uptight lately? Very grouchy, very—pardon my French—bitchy. I’m afraid she’s going to snap. She wants this meeting, so she’ll have this meeting. But even if she hadn’t wanted you there, I’d want you there. Just in case.”
Love in Bloom's Page 33
