Asking for Trouble

by Mary Kay McComas

  “Hole in the Mattress.”

  She snorted a giggle through her nose and then laughed aloud as Jerry and Tom exchanged knowing glances and began to laugh too.

  “Maybe we can give this back to Jerry now,” Tom said, slipping the flask from her fingers. “You seem to be feeling better.”

  “I do,” she said, more proud than amazed. “Let’s tell more jokes.”

  Tom’s chuckle made his chest vibrate, and when he gave her shoulders an affectionate squeeze, she sighed and felt warm and happy all over.

  She liked Tom Ghorman. He wasn’t stuffy and number oriented like most of her dates. He laughed as easily as he breathed, and nothing, including the fact that she might be a little tipsy, seemed to bother him. He didn’t even know that she was a senior manager with the firm, and he liked her anyway, accepted her for who she was. She really did like Tom Ghorman.

  “You’re okay for a girl, Sydney Wiesman,” he said in a low voice, much the way his nephew might, but with a certain admiration in his eyes that only an adult male could bestow.

  She wanted Tom Ghorman to like her too. Not enough to pretend to be someone she wasn’t, but absolutely enough to be flattered by his praise.

  She enjoyed the way his gaze lingered on her legs, or drifted down to her mouth, or further down across the curves of her breasts and hips when he thought she wasn’t looking. It made her feel pretty and feminine. Oh, she knew sexual attraction wasn’t the most important aspect of a relationship, but she was undeniably human and ingrained with the notion that a little healthy sex appeal never hurt anyone.

  She took a deep breath, filling her senses with Tom’s scent. There was no thick, cloying aroma, no perfume that was sweet enough or strong enough to gag a horse. It was simply a light, mysterious musky smell that fascinated her.

  Three

  THE THREE OF THEM sat on the floor of the elevator regaling one another with their repertoire of jokes, and she soon discovered that what she liked best about Tom was his laugh. She went out of her way to hear it over and over again.

  “So the new hillbilly dogcatcher stepped forward and said, ‘The reason I ain’t caught no dogs yet, is cuz I don’t know what I’m ’posed to catch ’em at.’” Sydney articulated in her best hillbilly dialect.

  Tom’s laugh, low and rumbling, filled the elevator with cozy good cheer and did queer things to Sydney’s pulse. She got the distinct feeling that he was laughing more at the way she told the joke than the joke itself, but it didn’t really matter.

  Jerry’s prediction that there would be plenty of air to breathe in the elevator seemed to be true. Actually, it had been some time since she’d given it any thought. And if she pretended very hard that she could open the doors anytime she wished, she found the sight of their firmly closed surface almost tolerable.

  But between the hot air they were blowing at one another and the fact that the air-conditioning was somehow involved with the elevator malfunction, the small enclosed box had become an oven. She had long since removed her jacket and released the tail of her camisole-style top from the waistband of her skirt.

  When she’d finished with her series of hillbilly jokes and passed the limelight on to Jerry, she leaned back against the wall again and was gratified to feel Tom’s arm still behind her. The warmth of his skin beneath his shirtsleeve and the tight power of his arm against her bare back were like candy—sweet, forbidden, and too tempting to resist. In no distress at the moment, however, she felt obliged to sit forward to release him, but his hand curled around her upper arm and held her steady.

  He acted as if sitting with his arm around a near total stranger, his hand brushing lightly over her skin and driving her nuts with tiny tingles, were the most natural thing in the world. But it didn’t feel natural to Sydney. It was something new and enlivening, something she wanted to investigate further.

  Every time she moved beside him, every time he felt her take a deep breath and sigh, it was an erotic torment. He wanted to touch her. He longed to feel the texture and warmth of her skin with the tips of his fingers, against his naked body and in his mind. He had a yen to lower her gently onto her back and make love to her slowly, thoroughly, until she screamed in ecstasy.

  She looked at him, but he pretended to be listening to Jerry. Countless times he’d caught himself staring at her. She was going to start thinking he was perverted if he wasn’t more careful, he thought. But he couldn’t get over the feeling that he’d seen her before somewhere. Not really seen her, on the street or in the newspaper or at a party. But seen in a visualized sense, like in a dream or a fantasy. Yep. The more he labored over it, the more certain he became that he had known her before, that she’d stepped out of his fondest dream.

  Jerry, due either to his limited supply of clean jokes or his seemingly limitless supply of liquid spirits, introduced several ribald stories before Tom switched the evening’s entertainment to humorous personal anecdotes.

  She wasn’t sure if his story about a championship football game in high school was meant to be extremely long and tedious, but there was a smile on his lips when Jerry fell asleep, lolling to one side for several minutes before he finally toppled over onto the floor, snoring atrociously.

  “Don’t you just hate a third wheel?” he asked, turning his full attention to Sydney.

  “I do,” she said, smiling nervously over at the sleeping maintenance man. She felt like an astronaut during countdown, eager to see space and land on the moon, but aware of the dangers along the way. “Although you might still be trying to scrape me off the ceiling if it weren’t for him and his handy little flask. I’m really sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. Are you feeling better?” He was sure she couldn’t look any better.

  “Yes. Hungry is all.”

  “Mm. Me too.” He tilted his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, pulling Sydney a tad closer. “Where will we go when we get out of here, and what will we eat?”

  “At midnight? Oh! I know,” she said with a jolt of enthusiasm. “There’s an all-night diner about three miles from here, off the boulevard. It has the greatest grease burgers I’ve ever eaten.”

  He opened his eyes and smiled at her. “Will you marry me?”

  “What?”

  “You have to be the last woman in California who isn’t a health food freak, repulsed by the mere thought of a grease burger. We were made for each other.”

  She laughed. “Actually, I’m a recovering junk-food-aholic. I know it’s bad for me, and I try to eat better food, but once in a while I go on these binges and ... well, it’s too embarrassing to talk about.”

  “No, no. Tell me more. What else am I going to like about you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know you well enough to know what you like.”

  “I like beautiful women.”

  She could tell it was true by the way he was staring at her. Her cheeks burned, and she wanted to giggle like a schoolgirl. Instead she said, “Not me. I’m into good-looking men. Do you enjoy going to the beach?”

  “I love the beach. I live close to the marina, and”—he wagged his brows up and down—“I own a schooner you might be interested in.”

  “I love to sail.”

  “I know. You told me the other night on the phone. I figured that if you didn’t like me, I might be able to hold your interest if I bribed you with an afternoon of sailing.”

  “It would have worked,” she said, smiling. But they both knew that it wouldn’t be necessary. “This is very strange. What else do we have in common?”

  The list seemed endless. Neither one was much of a party person, though they both had friends they enjoyed spending time with. They enjoyed movies in movie theaters as opposed to videos, and they both liked to read—although she preferred biographies and he science fiction. They argued briefly over the death penalty and abortion laws before they agreed not to talk religion or politics until they knew each other better. Then their words grew serious.

  “Do you ea
t crackers in bed?” he asked, straightening the thin spaghetti strap that had fallen off her shoulder, savoring—at last—the smooth, silky warmth of her skin.

  Jerry let loose a grunting noise. They chuckled together, but she couldn’t displace the knowledge that his fingers had moved on and were tracing the curves at the base of her neck.

  “Crackers? Ah, if I’m sick and I’m eating soup too, I sometimes eat them in bed. But not on a routine basis, no. Do you?” They’d been asking these sorts of questions for some time, a get-to-know-you game with no rules and no holds barred.

  “No. Do you ... like hot or warm showers?” he asked, his finger traveling back down the line of the strap.

  She swallowed hard and tried to remember—no easy task while little shivers raced up her neck and across her breasts.

  “Ah, warm in the morning, hot to relax, and cool to cool off when it’s hot,” she said, wondering if she’d made sense. “What about you?”

  “Hot.”

  His gaze met hers. Hot. Oh, yes. Sydney could see very well that the man liked everything hot. He was not a tepid man. He would have his food spicy, his women flushed and sultry, his passions fiery, and his sex torrid and frenzied.

  Again a twinge of anxiety pulled at her. She’d prayed for someone more exciting than the quiet, sedate CPAs she’d been dating, but she wasn’t sure if she was ready for a man like Tom Ghorman. He was looking at her as if he could eat her alive—no, he was looking at her as if he wanted to make her feel alive.

  The message in his eyes made her heart pump so fast, there was no distinguishing one beat from the next. There was air locked deep in her lungs that she couldn’t get out. She felt ready to explode.

  “Do you sleep on your back or your stomach?” he asked, his voice hardly more than a whisper, his face extremely close to hers. A kiss. That’s what he wanted now. Touching her was all he’d hoped it would be, a new high in tactile pleasure. But it wasn’t enough. A kiss, now that would be something, he calculated.

  “I ... sleep on my side. My left side. And I hardly mess up the sheets. I don’t think I move all night,” she said, rushing once she got started. “Do you snore?”

  “I’ve been accused of breathing loud, but not snoring.”

  “Where ... how do you sleep? The position, I mean,” she stammered, as he lowered his eyes to watch his finger skimming across the top of her blouse, grazing the soft fullness of her breasts.

  “All over the bed. And I make a mess of the sheets.” She should have known he’d say that, she thought. He probably put a lot of energy into everything he did. “I do miss sleeping with a woman, though.”

  “That’s right,” she said, grabbing at the information. “I’d forgotten that you’re divorced. How long has it been?”

  “Seven years.”

  She couldn’t help it, she was astounded. “You haven’t had sex in seven years?”

  He laughed and shook his head once. “That’s not what I said. There’s a huge difference between sleeping with someone and having sex with them.”

  “Well, sure. When you’re sleeping, you’re sleeping. And when you’re not ... you’re, ah, not.”

  He fingered the strap on her other shoulder, and while she turned to putty, he said, “When you sleep with someone you can roll over in the middle of the night and know you’re not alone. When it’s cold you can cuddle up to that person and sleep like a baby. You can wake her up and talk when you’re worried or afraid. You can have sex with anyone, but you need someone special to sleep with.”

  “And your wife was someone special?”

  “In the beginning. That’s when I first made the distinction, I suppose. But by the time we’d been married eighteen months, we were sleeping in different beds ... in different houses ... with different people.”

  “She cheated on you?” Sydney found this hard to believe. How could any woman risk losing a man like Tom?

  He looked surprised. “How do you know it was her? What makes you think it wasn’t me?”

  She shrugged. He didn’t seem the type. He gave her the impression of being someone who was possessive, but also faithful once he’d made up his mind on a partner. But how could she explain an impression? “Because you enjoyed sleeping with her, I guess. Anyone that content in their marriage wouldn’t have to cheat.”

  He smiled at her perceptiveness and toyed with the tiny silver loop in her earlobe. Sydney was someone special, someone he could sleep with, he knew instinctively. Of course, sex with her wouldn’t be too shabby either, he decided with his second thought.

  “Actually,” he said, “we were separated before she started sleeping around, and I hadn’t cared about what she was doing for months before that, so it didn’t really matter.”

  “Not a very long marriage,” she muttered, more to herself than to Tom. She was wondering what had happened for him to go from discovering the joys of sleeping with his wife to total disinterest in less than eighteen months.

  “No, but it was long enough for me to realize that I liked being married and what kind of woman I’d need to make it last.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to ask about this wonder woman he was looking for, but she held the words back. If anything was going to happen between them, she wanted it to happen honestly. If she knew what he thought a perfect woman was, it would be too easy to take on those qualities to please him. She wanted him to want Sydney.

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “All I know is what I don’t want.”

  “Which is?”

  Her thoughts would sound mean and cruel if she voiced them, so she hesitated, looking for kinder words.

  “It’s hard to explain,” she said, looking away. He fiddled with the short hairs along the nape of her neck, scrambling her thoughts, making speech almost impossible. “I don’t know how ... to explain it, except that my mother always says that when I meet the right man, I’ll know it in my heart. And ... and the men I’ve been dating have left my heart disappointed and bored and angry. Disappointed because they’re not the man I’m looking for. Bored because I’m not interested in them. Angry because they’re not telling my heart what it wants to hear. And it’s not their fault. They’re nice men. They’re just not my man. Does that make sense?”

  As she looked at him his fingers closed around the back of her neck. He had a curious expression on his face—gentle, decisive, and passionate at once. He tipped his head and pressed his lips to hers.

  Her heart caught in her throat while something else fluttered in her chest and her insides tied themselves in knots. He tasted her lips with the tip of his tongue, and she felt his hand slide around her waist to pull her closer. She surrendered to his mouth and tongue as he deepened the kiss.

  A kiss? Is that what he’d been wanting from her all this time? A kiss? Touching his lips to Sydney’s wasn’t like any kissing he’d done before. It was ... Lord, how to explain it? It was intimate. Something warm and private, a carnal secret, thorough and erotic beyond his wildest imaginings. Addictive. Consuming.

  Her mind drifted in a land of clouds and castles. He drew the air from her lungs. Her breasts became engorged with desire. He crushed her against the thick, hard muscles of his chest, and she felt as if she’d been swept off the ground. Her heart soared. She knew the sun and the wind and the stars.

  Tom had her face in his hands when he pulled away. She took in a tremulous breath and stared into skylike eyes that knew where she’d been, what she’d seen, and how she’d felt.

  “Oh my,” she muttered, moving away as she tried to catch her breath. She felt intensely exposed and out of her element. Tom let his hands slip into his lap and didn’t try to keep her near. She glanced at him and was relieved to see that he was watching her with a warmhearted smile.

  “I can’t believe how close I came to not going through with this,” he said, as if awed by the wonders of the universe. If she was as shaken as he by the enormity of what they had discovered, he wanted to put her at ease. The last thing he wanted to
do was scare her away. “It was a buddy’s idea originally. He got hooked on the program and was telling me about it one night. We were laughing and making jokes. You know, describing the women we’d probably end up with.” He chuckled in recollection. “Then out of the blue he said I should go down for an interview and get on the show. Now I’m going to have to apologize for laughing at him and calling him crazy.”

  She smiled at the familiarity of his story and asked, “What made you change your mind?”

  “I don’t know. Right up until that first afternoon when you called and introduced yourself, I was planning to back out.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I liked your voice,” he said, a strange light appearing in the depths of his eyes. It was more than her voice now. It was her face, the way her mind worked, the way she laughed. ...

  “I liked yours too.” Their gazes met, and there was a brief tussle of wills, his beckoning and hers shying away, until she was forced to look elsewhere.

  It was happening too fast. A champion worrier, she needed time to think and stew about the emotions he stirred in her. Were they simply physical? Were they supposed to come this quickly? Invade her so deeply? Could two people fall in love in an elevator in less than four hours? Was that her heart or her loneliness speaking to her?

  She screamed and jumped when the elevator phone rang, but was quick to get on her feet and answer on the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello,” came a man’s voice. “Is this the elevator?”

  “Yes. Is this the other maintenance man?”

  “Charlie Levitz here. Who are you?”

  “I’m Sydney Wiesman. I work on the seventh floor. I’m with Danbury Associates. Tom and Jerry and I have been stuck in this elevator since just after eight o’clock tonight. Can you get us out, please?”

  “Who did you say was in there with you?” he asked.

  “Tom and Jerry.”

  “The cat and the mouse?”

  “What?”

  “You know.” He laughed. “The cat and the mouse. Tom and Jerry. Get it? It’s a joke.”