Kendra probably didn’t have to either. Her parents were far from billionaires, but they had enough to put them in the upper one percent. Her family would never allow her to have a small wedding, and her envy was evident. To me, anyway. Because it was something I envied as well. But did she also realize that the reasons she and I felt like we had no other choice were trivial compared to the fact that most people—people like Tess—actually didn’t have a choice?
I was going to spoil her, I decided right then. As long as Tess was in my world, I was going to give her all the things she’d never had access to. How had Kendra been in her world so long and not been driven to do the same?
She went on as though her privilege hadn’t just been checked. “Two bridesmaids, you always said. You just couldn’t decide who would be the maid of honor—me or Teyana.”
“It would be Teyana,” Tess said pointedly. “No other bridesmaids.”
Kendra deflated as the words had their intended effect. “Of course. You two are so close.” She let a beat pass. “I’m not really close to anyone. My mother will have a list of cousins and friends that we’ll have to include, but for my maid of honor, there’s no one I could think of asking besides you.”
Oh. Well. That was unexpected.
Manipulative, too. Was Tess supposed to feel bad about that?
I didn’t have to look to know Tess hadn’t taken it well. “Is this your passive-aggressive way of asking me to be your maid of honor, K?”
“I...I...don’t...I—” Kendra stuttered.
Tess didn’t let her struggle long. “Earlier today you hinted that I might be on the brink of being fired, and you think I’m somehow cool enough with that to consider saying yes to being in your wedding party? Am I just your lap dog? Subject to your beck and call and your whims?”
Kendra whirled around to face the backseat. “Why would I even think you still want to work for me? You’ve already basically accused me of taking you for granted, and then you went behind my back, Tess. When I thought you were my friend. When I thought you were the one person in my life who would never take advantage of me. Were you trying to hurt me? Do you want to be fired?”
I kept my eyes pinned on the traffic, forcing myself to concentrate on the driving and ignoring the primitive instinct to defend my woman. It wouldn’t be pretty if I did. Kendra would be shred into pieces. After I’d spent all morning insisting we keep the status quo because I feared her retaliation, destroying her seemed counterproductive.
Tess didn’t need me to defend her anyway. She had her own back. “I honestly don’t know right now, Kendra.”
That seemed to hurt my bride-not-to-be more than anything I could have said.
“Okay. So.” Kendra turned to face the front, her voice thick with emotion. “We’ll get through this deal with SIC, and then we’ll reevaluate. Both of us.”
“Perfect,” Tess replied tightly.
After that, we rode in silence. That stretch of minutes felt endless. I kept looking at the time to destination on the dash, certain it was stuck. Eight minutes, it said. Eight minutes. Eight minutes.
Then, finally, seven minutes. It stayed seven minutes for a decade. Then it was six for another decade. Then five. Then four. Then three. Then two.
Then I was pulling up to the curb in front of her building. I popped the trunk as the doorman opened Kendra’s door. Then he opened the back door.
“Come on, Tess,” Kendra said.
Tess had avoided eye contact since the conversation had halted, but now she met my eyes, questioning.
“I’ll take you,” I assured her.
“She’s all the way in Jersey City,” Kendra said, already half out of the car.
“It’s fine. I’m taking her.”
“It’s really no big deal to take the train from here,” Tess offered.
“I said I’m taking you,” I snapped. Which I immediately felt shitty about since she wasn’t the one I wanted to be snapping at.
“That’s really nice of you. I must be marrying a saint.” Kendra gave me a gritted-teeth smile, and I knew she felt this was another betrayal, this time from the man who was supposedly going to be her husband. It had to seem like I’d taken a side. Had to be salt in her wound, but asshole that I was, I didn’t give a shit about her wound unless her pain ended up causing her to hurt Tess.
She slammed the door when she got out.
Tess didn’t move from her place in the back.
“You should come up here so I don’t feel like a chauffeur,” I said, when what I really wanted to say was, You should come up here so I can be near you, so I can be close enough to smell your shampoo, so I can forget that there is anyone in the world that exists but you.
Kendra was already out of earshot. I could have said it. I should have.
But I’d been too carefully guarding my words for the entire drive, and I’d forgotten momentarily how to let that guard down.
She didn’t respond. But she did climb out of the backseat and into the front. Without a word, she reached over to enter her address into the GPS then put her seatbelt on and huddled next to the door, making her seem just as far away now as she had when she’d been in the back.
I pulled into traffic in silence, wracking my brain trying to figure out what to say, how to fix this weird tension between us. So much had happened over the course of the day, so much had been said, so much I wanted to explain and apologize for and make better, and fuck. I didn’t know the first thing about how to do any of that. I’d never had a non-related relationship that required work. I’d never hung around long enough to ever get to that point. Unless I counted my family, and those relationships were so laborious that I’d purposefully abstained from any other emotional intimacies.
With Tess, though, I wanted to try. Wanted to explore the possibility that love didn’t always have to be so hard.
Wanting to didn’t mean knowing how. And each silent minute that passed without making an attempt felt like another mile stretched between us.
Then, abruptly, she threw her head back against the seat rest. “Oh my God, that was terrible!” she groaned.
I pulled my eyes from the road to make sure I was reading her right, that she meant to commiserate and not to blame. The tense smile assured me it was the latter.
“So terrible!” I agreed. “So fucking terrible.”
“The absolute worst.”
We hit a red light, and I turned to her. “I’m already going to my parents for a family dinner tomorrow night. I’ll tell them this is over then. One more day, Tessa. Can you give me just one more day?”
She swung her head toward me. “As long as I don’t have to be in a room with her before then, yes. I can give you one more day.”
Sunlight had a way of making the world forget there could ever be a storm. Tess was sunlight right then. A bright light piercing through an otherwise dark day.
I leaned across the console and kissed her, kissed her hard, kissed her like we were in my bed and not on Columbus Avenue, and when the car behind us honked for us to get moving, I kissed her quickly once more before turning my eyes back to the road.
Seven
Tess
“I have to cancel.” I lowered my voice as I said it so that Teyana wouldn’t overhear my disheartened tone and feel guilty.
On the other side of the phone call, Scott echoed my disappointment. “No! Why?”
As soon as I’d gotten in the apartment after he’d dropped me off earlier and I’d found Tey in the fetal position, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep our date for later. Still, I’d waited to tell him in case some miracle happened and she was feeling well enough for me to leave her alone.
Unfortunately, she’d only gotten worse. She’d thrown up twice and fainted every time she stood up, no matter how slowly she’d gone. The last time she’d gone to the bathroom, she’d hobbled, her body bent over itself from the excruciating pain in her ribs.
“Tey’s having a bad night,” I said. “Like, a really bad
night.” She was always bad when she had her period, which because of the type of birth control she was on, only occurred once every three months. Her doctor had chosen that method in order to give her more relief from bad POTS episodes, but having known what she’d been like before, I wasn’t sure that quarterly PMS wasn’t somehow worse.
“As soon as I can get a flipping health care plan that will cover the cost, I’m getting my uterus removed,” she said for the five-hundredth time.
“Ah,” Scott said, obviously hearing her. “A woman’s thing.”
I could have left it there, but I didn’t want him to think I was bailing on him to simply nurse my friend’s bad cramps. “It’s a POTS thing, but the autonomic system is involved in women’s things, so yeah. But I hope it doesn’t come down to something as drastic as a hysterectomy, though I guess a lot of POTSies go that route.”
“I’m not ever having a baby myself,” she protested. “It would be way too hard on my body. So what’s the use in maintaining the misery?”
I turned my back so she wouldn’t see my expression. It was an old argument of ours. Me worrying about the permanence of the decision, her wanting to just feel better.
“Does she need help?” He didn’t have to say the word financial for me to know that was what he was offering.
I considered before responding. Selfishly, I was glad she couldn’t afford the procedure yet since I was still holding out hope that she could get in with a specialist who could find an underlying cause or at least help her get her symptoms under control. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about accepting that kind of help from Scott anyway.
“What she needs is better doctors. Ones that take insurance and don’t have a waiting list that’s a mile long.” There was a knock on our apartment door. “Hey, Scott, can you hold on a sec? I think the medic is here.” I crossed to answer it while I waited for him to reply.
“Medic?”
“IV therapy. A saline drip always makes her feel tons better.” Her doctor prescribed them for her usually, but when she’s really bad, we splurged and spent the hundred fifty dollars to have them come to our home. I peeked out the peephole and saw a guy in scrubs and a med pack. “Yeah, it’s him. Should I call you back?”
“The medic is a him? I’ll hold.”
I stifled a laugh. “Suit yourself.” With the phone pressed against my chest, I opened the door, greeted the tech who introduced himself as Bennie, and directed him over to Teyana on the couch.
“You’ll be okay if I…?” I asked her, nodding toward my bedroom.
“Please, go,” she said with as much drama as she could muster. “I feel sick enough without having to hear your disgusting gushing.”
I shot her a scowl. So maybe I’d been a bit smitten when I’d brought her up-to-date on my Scott weekend, but I’d told her the shitty parts too.
Okay, mostly I’d focused on the swoony parts. She was feeling ill, after all. I hadn’t wanted her to get worked up.
“Fine, I will,” I said with mock smugness, already heading down the hall.
“Good. Now I can have Bennie all to myself.” At least she was feeling well enough to banter.
I turned to give him a wink. “When you’re tired of her, Bennie, I’m here. Just holler.” I slipped into my bedroom and shut the door before bringing my phone to my ear. “You still there?”
“Did you just offer yourself to Bennie?”
I laughed. “I don’t think you have any place to be jealous, Mr. I’m-not-really-engaged.”
“Not jealous,” he protested too quickly. “Curious. What’s he look like? Is he attractive? Are you into him? Could you be into him?”
My body went warm from head to toe. I’d had plenty of experience being the one who asked those questions. The men I’d always fallen for were usually falling over multiple women themselves. This was the first time I could remember a man expressing jealousy over me.
“Bennie is…” I thought about the heavily tattooed hulk of a man currently sitting in my living room, wondering if I should try to drag this out a little longer. Remembering my own past pain, I decided to let Scott off the hook. “Not my type.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He isn’t you.” I felt vulnerable saying it, and it came out breathy.
Scott was silent for a beat, and I worried I’d been too forward. He’d said we were exclusive. He’d said he was my boyfriend. That meant I could say these things, right? Or had I been too presumptuous about what forward meant?
“I could come to you,” he said finally, and I realized the silence was just him being breathless too. “I’ll pack up all the tapas and bring them. I ordered more than enough for three of us.”
I wanted to say yes. It was tempting. Especially since I felt guilty that he’d already ordered dinner, and it would go to waste if I said no.
But it wasn’t fair to Tey, especially when she hated other people seeing her like this. “I’m sorry. I really need to be able to focus on Tey, and you’re too distracting.”
“Because you can’t be in a room with me without tearing my clothes off.”
“You can’t be in a room with me without tearing my clothes off, you mean.”
“Sure, sure. That too.”
The allusion to nakedness and the related activities made my belly hum low. “I suppose I should be grateful that I’ll get a good night’s sleep. After the last two nights, I probably need it.”
“Eh, sleep is boring. What a drab use for a bed.”
I chuckled and then groaned because, yeah. I would have much rather used my bed—or his, I wasn’t picky—for what he had in mind. “There will be other nights.”
With a sigh, I walked over to my bedroom window, drawn by the light streaming in. “The moon is beautiful tonight. It looks full.”
“Is it?”
I heard movement and pictured him walking to his floor-to-ceiling windows to peer up at the sky. “It’s probably even prettier from your view.”
“Maybe. What do you see out your window? Are you looking now?”
“Well, I see the moon.” It was an attempt at light humor, which was maybe disingenuous because it didn’t feel like a moment to laugh. It felt romantic. Both of us in two different places, two different states even, looking up at the same night sky. Taking in the same bright moon.
“What else do you see? You already know what my view is. I want to know yours.”
My heart tripped in my chest. He was feeling it too, that magic thread of connection. Was this what falling in love with someone who was falling too felt like? It usually felt so lonely since I had the habit of picking men who were not at all interested in reciprocating emotions. This felt entirely different. An up feeling instead of a down. An embraced feeling instead of a smothered. A “we” feeling instead of an “I.”
I pulled my eyes from the sky to look at my surroundings. I’d seen them so many times, and they were so impressionable that I had to really look in order to tell him. “The building next door, mostly. If I press my head against the glass, I can see down the block and just barely get a glimpse of Manhattan across the harbor.”
“The building next door—is it another apartment building?”
“An office building. All dark at this time of the night. Except, wait. There’s a light on a couple of floors down. Maybe a janitor. I can’t tell from here.”
“Is it close enough that you can see in the windows on your floor during the day?”
I’d never bothered to look. “I suppose I could.”
“What would I see if I were there right now?”
“If you were in my room? You’d see me pressed against the window trying to figure out if I can spy on the next-door office building.”
He let out a rumble of a laugh. His voice was low when he spoke. Seductive. “I mean if I were in that building, pressed up against the window, spying on you. What would I see?”
Oh.
Ohhh.
I got it. Kinky. What did men want to
hear during phone sex? “You’d see me wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties. White lace panties. No bra, and my T-shirt is tight so you can see the outline of my tits. It’s cold by the window so you can see my nipples perfectly.”
“Mmm.” It was an appreciative sound. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, as though I were really dressed that way. As though he were really watching me. “What else do I see?”
“You see me trailing my hand down over my chest, between my breasts, then lower. You see me slipping it under the waistband of my panties.”
“Don’t say it if it’s not real, Tessa.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell me what you’re doing if you aren’t doing it. Tell me what I’m really seeing.”
Ah. Even kinkier.
I swept my eyes over the building to be sure there really was no one standing at a window looking at me, then I pushed down my yoga pants—awkwardly with one hand holding the phone—and stuck my hand down between my legs. “You see me in a baggy sweatshirt, no bra, but you can’t tell that since the shirt is too loose. My pants are down around my knees, my hand down my blue lacy panties. I’m too needy to undress further because I’m on the phone with my boyfriend, and he’s making me all sorts of hot. Just the sound of his voice has me needing to touch myself.”
“What is he saying to you?”
“He’s saying he wishes he were my hand.”
“I wish I were your hand.” His breath sounded heavy. Thick. “What is your hand doing?”
“It’s rubbing my clit. In small, teasy circles. I want it to be harder, but if it were his hand, he’d be torturing me.”
“So you’re trying to make it feel like it’s him.”
Impossible. His hands were magic. I’d be on the verge of orgasm right now if it were really him.
Actually, I was already getting pretty close. “Yes. I’m trying to touch myself the way he does. He’s so good at touching me.”
“That’s what I see as I’m watching you, don’t I? I see your hand moving slowly through the fabric of your panties. I see the frustrated expression on your face.”
Man in Love Page 7