by Tessa Blake
I feel myself blush. It’s not crowded in here, but neither is it empty. “I just meant, I’m sure I have appropriate clothes—”
“There’s nothing inappropriate about the clothes you have on now,” he says. “Although … you know, there is something I think you’d look much better in.”
“What?”
“My bed.”
It’s clichéd and ridiculous, and it shouldn’t work. But it does. Somehow, with his deep voice and the clean, masculine smell of him, and those forearms — my God, I think, why does a man look so good with his sleeves rolled up? — somehow it works.
I go a little weak at the knees. “That sounds … pretty good.”
He dips his head, whispers in my ear. “Do you want to go somewhere else first? I’m not just interested in getting you into bed.”
“No?” I tilt my head so he can brush his lips against the skin right there, behind my ear. “Are you sure about that?”
“I’m sure,” he says. His lips find mine, and the searing heat of the kiss he gives me has me practically swooning. “It’s just what I’m most interested in right now.”
“That makes two of us,” I say, weakly. “If you’re as good horizontally as you are vertically, I just hope I live through it.”
To my surprise, he laughs, then drops another of those quick, light kisses on my mouth. “I’ll do my best,” he says.
Slate
The taxi drops us off at my apartment, and Sunny tilts her head back to look up — and up — at the way the building spears into the sky.
“Hope you’ve got an elevator,” she says.
“Several.” I lead her inside and through the lobby. Tension throbs between us, but I keep my distance. There are cameras in the lobby, in the elevator, and I’d rather not provide entertainment for the people who monitor them. Same goes for the corridor from the elevator to my apartment.
But the instant I get her inside, all bets are off. The door closes behind us and I spin her around, pressing her against the wall and claiming her mouth. She winds her arms around my neck and kisses me back, just as fiercely.
It’s not enough, and I break away from her just long enough to pull her halter top up. She raises her arms so I can pull it over her head, and then I’m filling my hands with her breasts and kissing her again and moving toward the bedroom all at once. She stumbles and almost goes down, and laughs — a full-throated laugh in the middle of passion that somehow could not possibly be more arousing. I swing her into my arms and stride down the hall.
In the bedroom, I deposit her on the bed and step back, shucking off my clothes as quickly as I can. She looks up at me as I do, her gaze sweeping me from head to toe, and the appreciative gleam there makes all the hair on my arms stand up. How can she be so incredibly sexy?
I cover her body with mine, only her skirt between us, and explore her body, my hands discovering all the places that make her gasp and sigh. I feel drunk with it, almost delirious, as I strip off the rest of her clothes. Her skin is ridiculously soft, luminously pale. Faint freckles are scattered everywhere like constellations.
Our interlude on the roof was barely an appetizer for the feast before me, and I skim my mouth down over her stomach because I have to taste her, have to know if she tastes as good as she smells.
She does. And when she arches up and cries out my name as she comes, any small scrap of restraint I might have had goes completely out the window. I move swiftly up her body, silence the last of her gasps with my mouth hungry on hers, and tilt her hips up, sinking into the heat of her in one stroke. She makes a soft keening noise against my lips, and I move over her, winding my fingers in her hair so I can kiss her more deeply.
Oh, shit, I think. Stop for a second. Think about baseball.
It’s no use. She’s so hot, so wet. I shudder, then helplessly spill myself inside her. The pulsing feels like it rocks me all the way down to my toes, and I rest my forehead on hers for just a moment, wondering why sex has never, ever felt like this before.
I collapse next to her with a groan and run my hand through my hair, damp now with sweat. “Holy shit, Sunny.”
She makes a small noise that sounds like agreement, and I turn my head to look at her. She’s got her eyes closed and a small, satisfied smile on her face.
Mildly embarrassed, I say, “I’m generally good for more than two minutes.”
“I know.”
Oh, yeah, right. The roof.
“I don’t care if it’s two seconds,” she says, “as long as you observe the ‘ladies first’ rule.” She opens those big brown eyes and turns to meet my gaze. “I thought that was magnificent.”
“Still. Give me a few minutes to recuperate, and I’ll show you what magnificent really means.”
She laughs and sits up, holding the sheet so that it covers her breasts. It’s fetchingly modest, considering that I could describe them down to the last freckle at this point. “To be honest, I should go home,” she says.
“Nonsense,” I say, sitting up beside her. Normally, I’d be pretty pleased if whoever was in my bed showed herself out, but not tonight. “Stay here.”
“I have an early morning—”
“So do I. Money doesn’t make itself, you know.” I brush her soft cloud of hair back from her face. “I’ll make sure you’re up early — I get up early myself — and I’ll have my driver take you home, okay?”
“I can take a cab,” she says, “or the subway.”
“Of course you can. But just let me take care of you.”
She looks at me, her face somber. “I’m used to taking care of myself.”
“And I don’t want to insinuate that you’re not able to, or that you shouldn’t.” How am I supposed to explain that taking care of her is not just a whim — and certainly not a play for dominance — but rather a need. However chauvinistic it may be, I’ve claimed her, and she’s mine to protect.
She’ll just have to get used to the limo.
“Okay.” She lies back down, tucking herself neatly into the curve of my arm and resting one hand on my chest. Her lips are a bare centimeter from mine. “Are you tired?” she asks.
“No.” I slip my hand down, between her thighs, and stroke my fingers through the damp curls there. Her breath hitches, puffing out against my lips, and I kiss her again — then again. She moans softly into my mouth and I shift, hook her leg over my hip, and press into her wet heat. It rocks me to my toes again, but this time I keep myself on a leash. I’ve got something to prove. “Are you?” I ask. “Tired, I mean?”
Her whole body shudders, and she shakes her head. “No,” she breathes. “Not yet.”
“Good,” I say, and set about showing her what magnificent means.
Despite a near-catastrophic lack of sleep, I wake before the alarm, as I usually do. What’s not usual is waking with Sunny snuggled securely in my arms.
Not usual, maybe, but I could get used to it.
The nape of her neck looks pretty inviting, so I press my lips against it. Her sweet floral smell surrounds me, and all my nerve endings sit up and take notice.
“Again?” she murmurs sleepily.
“Yeah,”I say. “Again.” I slip my hand between her thighs and find her hot and wet, ready for me again — or maybe still. “Unless you don’t want to.”
“Oh, I want to,” she says, her voice more awake now. “I’m just wondering what the hell kind of vitamins you take. How many times is this?”
“I lost count.” We only fell asleep about three hours ago, so quite a few. “Is there a limit?”
“I certainly hope not.”
I shift and part her thighs so I can slip inside her. She lets out a shaky breath and reaches up and back, trailing her fingers over my jaw. I kiss her fingertips. She’s hot and tight around me, and I slow down, savoring the feel of her. My hands cup her breasts, just the right size for the palm of my hand, and then I move one hand down and touch her where our bodies are joined together. I know her body now, know just how to
make her gasp and clench around me.
She breathes out my name, almost too quietly to hear, and presses back against me. We move together in the dim morning light, our rhythm almost gentle; when I empty myself inside her, she moans long and low and goes rigid in my arms for a moment. I smile my satisfaction into the curve of her shoulder.
“This is crazy,” I tell her. “I feel like I’ll never have enough of you.”
She turns over and presses her lips to mine. “Yes, it’s crazy,” she says. “We’re going to have to talk about this, because it’s too much too fast.”
“Okay.”
“If this is the kind of thing you do … you know, often. With a lot of women”— she won’t meet my eyes — “then I need to know that now.”
I tip her chin up so she has to look at me. “It’s not. We’ll talk.” I kiss her, let my mouth linger on hers so I can take the memory through the rest of my day. “We have all the time in the world.”
“Do we?”
“We do. Except not this morning, we don’t. I’ve got to get up in a minute.”
She looks past me at the clock. “Oh, shit. Me, too.”
Because I know she has somewhere to be, I don’t join her in the shower — if I did, we might neither of us leave the apartment till lunch. She emerges from my bathroom wearing her clothes from last night, and grins at me ruefully.
“Isaac and Marcus are going to give me a hard time about the walk of shame.”
“The limo ride of shame,” I correct her. “The car is waiting downstairs.”
“Thank you.” She crosses the room and kisses me, her lips soft and warm. She smells like herself, but like my shampoo too. “Will I see you later?”
“You can count on it,” I tell her.
The gets another smile out of her, this one bright and not rueful at all.
Then she kisses me again, just a quick brush of her lips, and she’s gone.
Sunny
The crowd in front of Slate’s office is much bigger than I expected. People aren’t exactly crushed together in this little plaza outside the Garrett Enterprises building, but there’s not a lot of room, either.
I’m standing on the fringe of the crowd, at stage right. Rainbow and Marcus flank me on either side. We’re here to support Isaac, whose band is about to play. We’ve been chanting a lot of the morning, but it’s just about lunchtime now; there are food vendors and ice cream trucks gathering off to one side.
I’m surrounded by friends, and by people I’ve marched with, protested with, had sit-ins with. I should feel at home.
And I do, but …
But I shouldn’t be here.
I believe in what I’m doing, but I should not be here, not today. Not when everything just got so … complicated.
I know this.
But what else am I going to do? Tell my friends Sorry, can’t protest the environmental impact of unchecked capitalism today, because I’ve taken a millionaire lover? Give me a damn break.
Slate and I have to talk, though. My activism, his businesses… We have to talk. Sooner rather than later.
The band starts up "Mercy, Mercy Me," and that shakes me from my reverie. I turn away, reach out my hands to either side of me. Rainbow and Marcus each take one.
Isaac takes the vocal, his voice pouring over the syllables like syrup. Marvin Gaye himself would be proud. Everyone in the crowd—at least everyone I can see—joins hands and sings along. The sun is warm on my shoulders, and I tip my face up, eyes closed, just savoring the warmth and the light and the voices rising around me. Maybe I’ll go get a slice of pizza. Or—
“Sunny?”
I startle, fingers clenching involuntarily on Rainbow’s and Marcus’s hands. My shoulders want to hunch, and I have to fight to stop myself from lowering my head like a dog that’s been naughty.
I turn. I already know who it is — I recognized the voice — but until I actually see him, my brain keeps thinking Maybe it’s not him, maybe it’s not him…
“Slate,” I say.
He’s holding a small paper bag in one hand, probably something purchased from one of the newly-arrived street vendors. “What—” He stops, starts again. “What are you doing here?”
He’s lost his composure, which is unnerving. There’s an inherent smoothness to him that’s never flagged — not at the club, on the roof, in bed. Even at a run-down corner pizza parlor, he radiated calm self-possession.
But here, now, for the first time, he’s visibly shaken.
He blinks. “Are you … are you here for the protest?”
“I— Well. Yes.” Shoulders straight, I remind myself. You haven’t done anything. “Yes, I’m here with the protest.”
He looks around, his eyes taking in the people, the signs, all the accoutrements of a day-long protest. On stage, Isaac is still singing about the animals and birds nearby dying — which seemed like a great idea when we planned it out. Fresh Kills is destroying the wetlands it’s built on. There’s nothing there but gulls and reeds. But it’s not too late — not quite too late to correct course, to bring the marsh back. It’s almost never too late. Until it is.
Which is why I’m working so hard on the Superfund bill with Senator Robbins.
Of course, none of that matters here and now. What matters is the way Slate’s lips press together, the way he tilts his head almost imperceptibly to one side and looks at me with eyes gone cold.
“You’re here to protest. At my office.”
“Well, you know … the company’s office.” As evasions go, it’s not exactly spectacular.
Clearly, Slate agrees. “It’s my company. My name on the door.” He moves closer to me, speaks in a harsh whisper, which I’m very grateful for when I realize what he’s saying: “Last night, I had you trembling underneath me, and today you’re marching with a sign about what a monster I am?”
Thank God no one else can hear him. I blush to the roots of my hair and cast about for a reply. “We’re not marching,” I say weakly. “I … I don’t have a sign.”
Though some do. And they’re not very flattering.
“Oh, well, that’s fine then,” he says, and the sarcasm cuts me deep.
“What do you expect me to do?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He steps back from me again, and shakes his head a little. “I don’t know, but I know that what you’re doing here is ridiculous.”
Ridiculous? “At least I’m doing something,” I say. “We came to your office yesterday” — oh my God, was it really only yesterday? — “and your father just waved us off. If you don’t care, someone has to.”
“I’m not my father,” he says, his voice somehow brittle. “You have no idea what I do.”
“Are you secretly planning to close his landfill?” I demand. “Are you going to be in charge of cleanup there? Are you going to restore the marshland?”
“No one can restore the marshland. Someday the dump will reach capacity, or the people on Staten Island will succeed in shutting it down—”
“Good!”
“Yeah, sure, good.” He rolls his eyes. “And then everyone in New York can just start storing their trash under the bed.”
“People need to start recycling—”
“Yes, they do,” he says, and his voice is now as cold as his eyes. “That’s why I convinced my father to throw our weight behind passing a bottle deposit law like they have in Oregon.” He pauses. “And Vermont.”
“Oh,” I say. What else can I say?
“We’re also investing in recycling centers, and I’m in charge of a new initiative to pass a law to make recycling mandatory here in New York.”
He pauses, but I don’t say anything.
“So yeah, it’s small stuff,” he says, “but it will slow the expansion of Fresh Kills. It gives us time to figure out other steps. Incremental changes matter, Sunny. That’s how things get done in the real world—slow, steady improvement, not tilting at windmills.“
Tilting at windmills? How dare
he?
“I happen to think that wind power is very interesting,” I say. I know it’s lame even as I’m saying it—he did actually just win this argument, or at least knock me down a peg, and this is a stupid comeback, but I forge on: “And we should look at it as a possible energy source to decrease our reliance on foreign oil.”
He laughs at me. Laughs. But it’s not a warm laugh, like the ones we shared over pizza last night. It’s bitter. It’s mocking.
“Don’t laugh at me,” I snap.
“Then don’t be laughable.”
I mean, he’s kind of right; it was a ridiculous response. But I’m so mad.
And so is he.
We stare at each other for a moment, neither of us giving way.
But then I think about how this must look to him, and I know I should have said something before coming here. This has to feel like an ambush, and that’s not cool.
I would still have come — I can only be who I am — but I could have at least warned him.
“Listen,” I say, “I’m sorry. I have to get back — maybe we could talk about this tonight?”
“I’m busy tonight,” he says.
“But I thought we—”
“I know what you thought,” he says coldly, “but I unexpectedly find myself with other plans.”
Without another word, he turns and walks away, into the building — and, I assume, out of my life.
Behind me, Marcus says “What the hell just happened?”
And I put my face in my hands and start to cry.
Slate
I slide my empty shot glass across the bar and raise a finger. The bartender comes down from the end of the bar and pours another shot of Ardberg.
“You might want that to be your last.” The bartender looks at me out of narrowed eyes. “Whatever you’re trying to forget, if you haven’t forgotten it by now, you’re not gonna.”
“How many is that?”