He tried to pinch her butt, but he couldn’t get a grip on the slippery satin and she danced out of his arms.
The restaurant was one of those hip places Flick loved, with an interesting menu and a talented chef, with stunning décor and a way of being both forbiddingly elegant like Tom’s apartment and yet not snobby or off-putting.
Tom wore his dark navy suit with a crisp white shirt but no tie. He held her hand in the cab and did the gentlemanly door-opening, ushering and chair-settling. Whenever she looked at him, he was watching her. Not once did he pretend he wasn’t. It was a visceral thrill.
Chemistry, huh. Let’s see what reaction we can get.
She started by accidentally flirting with the waiter. He was cute, and he started it. He’d failed the waiter-school lesson that said you won’t get a tip if you appear to be too into a guy’s date. It was sixty seconds of giggling over the menu’s use of the word bolao, meaning tomato balls, but it made Tom bark his order of the most expensive beer on the list. The most amusing part was when he realized he’d done that and looked sheepish.
She let all that fly past as if she hadn’t noticed, but that flash of annoyance looked a lot like jealousy and that wasn’t a reaction she expected.
She faced him across the white linen cloth and a table light that looked like a tiny flying saucer made from gelatin come to land between them. That queasy, fluttery, nervous feeling was back. She swallowed it down. “How long has it been since you took a woman out to a nice restaurant?”
His brows went down and his lips compressed. He usually had a good poker face, didn’t telegraph his feelings, but that was a tell, only she wasn’t sure of what.
“My gram was the last woman I took to a starred restaurant.”
Flutter, queasy, flutter. “Sweet, but doesn’t count.”
“I can’t remember.”
She hoped her inner squirm wasn’t all over her face while she was trying to psych him out. “That’s the kind of answer someone gives when the real answer is never.”
“It’s not never. It’s not recent. What kind of man do you think I am?”
“That question was rhetorical?”
It had to be because he’d palmed his face. He mumbled through his fingers, “Yes, because I’m terrified of what you might say.”
Psych-out achieved. “But I like you.” In a too much, too serious way. “I’d say only good things.”
“Would you?” He stopped playacting and hit her with a look that had to make colleagues, reporters and clients alike think twice about their answer. This was not-to-be-trifled-with Tom, and she loved that hard-ass boss in him.
And that she got to trifle with it.
It was a challenge question with only one response. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“The kind who runs the show and does it well.”
“That was a rhetorical question.” But oh, oh, the answer was very fine.
So were their meals. She had the flora tasting menu and he had the fauna. Her meal started with jasmine roe trout and his with guinea hen. There’d be nine courses in all.
She waved a tiny fork at him. “What’s your ideal date?”
“You want to sit here in that dress that performs magic on your body and talk about my other dates?”
Self-preservation. Yes. “Would you rather talk about world events?”
“I would not rather talk about world events.” He took a sip of his beer, held the glass and focused on it as though it had all the answers. “My ideal date is something like this with a woman whose company I liked. But it wouldn’t matter what we did if we enjoyed being with each other.”
She’d made him uncomfortable and that hadn’t been the plan. Stir him up, tease him, but not make him regret being here with her. “You might go bowling.”
The glass went back to the table and his eyes went to hers. “We might.” He took the lifeline.
“You might hike.”
He smiled. “I would definitely want to do that, if she was up for it.”
Firmer ground now. “What else?”
“We’d eat food I cook, and go out to eat, because food is important.”
“And...”
“We’d talk about world events and uncomfortable family relationships and tomato balls.”
She laughed. “You got jealous.”
He screwed up his face. “Yes. You wore that dress, picked this place for me. You’re mine tonight. I have a coupon and I intend to max out on it.”
She might’ve melted except the next course arrived. Alaskan king crab with lemon mint for Tom, and English pea ricotta with olive oil and lavender for her. For the distraction value, she slipped off her shoe and bumped his shin with her toes. He moved his leg.
She almost laughed. She’d never played footsie before, wasn’t exactly sure how it was supposed to work, but probably chasing your partner’s leg around under the table while he ate crab wasn’t it. She tried again, touching the point of her toe to his ankle.
His brows jumped, but he kept eating. She dragged the arch of her foot from his ankle to mid-calf and he looked up from his plate. “You’re doing that deliberately.”
“I am.” That was an invitation to work her toes under the cuff of his trousers to touch his skin above his sock.
“You should probably know I don’t want to talk about hypothetical dates and future timelines,” he said.
She could settle her instep against the curve of his leg, but go no farther inside his trouser leg. “I’ll change the topic.”
“Figured it was better to be straight about that.”
She changed the position of her foot, skimming his ankle, calf, tapping his knee, and when he wet his lips she pushed her foot between his legs against his thigh. He shifted, but to open his legs, sit forward in his chair, not away, forward so with a bit of slumping she could touch her toes to his lap. “You’re a very straight-up guy.”
He wrapped a warm hand around her foot, held it. “I try.”
She was too short to work out if this had made him hard. “It’s in your DNA.”
“You don’t have to seduce me, Flick. I’m a sure thing.”
Maybe it had.
He pushed his thumb into the middle of her foot, an impromptu under-the-table massage that was hygienically ill-advised but a lifetime top-ten turn-on that made her sigh and close her eyes. Oh, the chemistry was every letter in the alphabet, and the alphabet was freezing, melting, burning, giving off vapor, reducing, expanding and fusing.
While he was eating bay scallops and she tackled white asparagus, she faced an uncomfortable truth. Somewhere between becoming his temporary tenant and a TV marathon, she’d discovered he was the one.
During her pear-banana finger limes and his cashew-cocoa crème fraîche it became obvious she’d fallen in love for real with Tom.
That could not be more inconvenient.
Least of all because he didn’t believe in it.
“Do you want to marry, have a family?”
“I want you to try this.” He held out a forkful of his dessert.
She leaned forward and let him feed her. The taste explosion was nothing on the way she hung off his answer, or the way his eyes settled on her lips.
“Since we’re talking about things I don’t want to talk about, I think marriage is an outdated institution. Childless couples are a rising demographic. Look at South Korea and Japan, shrinking populations. And I don’t even want to own a goldfish. I’ve never spent any time thinking about having a kid.”
There it was, sanity restored. Tom was her temporary roommate, couponing partner and the hottest lover she’d ever had, her soon-to-be long-distance friend and maybe lifelong regret. But not tonight. Tonight, he was as much hers as she was his, no future considerations need get in the way of that.
“Would you like a tas
te of mine?” He leaned forward and she forked a generous mouthful, ready to feed him.
He stopped her hand. “I would like to taste you all over. Start at your toes, move up your legs, pay serious, sustained attention to the honeyed space between them. I’d like to suck on your nipples till they’re hard candy in my mouth and nibble on your lips till you’re desperate for one of those kisses that wipes out history and changes the world.” He brought her trembling hand to his mouth and ate the portion. “And then, I’d like to do it all over again.”
She’d meant her chocolate with grapefruit, chartreuse and celery heart, but his idea was infinitesimally better and for now—for now, it would paper over the cracks in her own blood-and-tissue heart.
Chapter Nineteen
After tonight, Tom was down to nineteen coupons. Nineteen more days with Flick as his roommate and lover. He spread them out on the coffee table, mainly to give Flick space in the kitchen. She was working too hard at pretending she wasn’t stressed about cooking for him. But also, so he could plan more carefully, because he’d screwed up the order.
Dear Tom, in retrospect, it was a cruel choice to have Flick cook for you on a Monday night. It’s a work night, so her preparation time is limited, and also because it follows the fantastic meal at Altri, so you’ve raised the stakes unnecessarily. Signed, Tom. P.S. Do better, you dickhead.
Altri. Great restaurant he’d always been meaning to try out. Killer meal, knockout dress, giggling fucking waiter, the thing with Flick’s foot on his leg and the dessert taste swap, and the way she smiled at him, held his hand like she didn’t ever want to let go.
Incomparable woman.
With her uncomfortable questions.
He’d talked about shrinking populations in Asia, for God’s sake. Do better, dickhead, because time is running out to understand what all this means.
There was the sound of a lid being clamped on a pot with too much force and he half turned to see Flick push hair out of her eyes. “Okay?”
She made back-off motions with both hands. “Nothing happening here. No reason to get excited. Play with your coupons. They are all the birthday present you’re getting.”
Best birthday present he’d ever had. It was a two-way trade and worked out just as well for the giver as the receiver.
There was no acrid smell of burning anything, so he put his finger on the Breakfast in Bed coupon and slipped it over the table’s surface till it was lined up behind the Massage coupon. What should come after it, dirty talk or the quickie, and who was meant to initiate the quickie?
It made sense to plot the remaining coupons out, but no matter which way he rearranged them it felt wrong. The order was imperfect, the activities were too specific, like Lingerie Shopping, or too vague, like Play a Game. Every way he scheduled them seemed wrong. Did a successful picnic need a weekend? Could they coordinate a lunch hour? What kind of game? Chess? Monopoly? Would’ve been fun to play Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto with Flick, but Josh took his Xbox with him and Tom hadn’t gotten around to replacing it. By the time he did, she’d be gone.
The more serious question—was it better to split the sex play up and intersperse it with other more mundane activities, or to gorge in one rolling wave of sexual excess?
It’s not like they weren’t having off-coupon couplings. They might as well have taken out a season pass to making each other come. Not that he had any complaints. He didn’t get this much action in college. The sex coupons just added an extra element of novelty.
And there were only nineteen days left for any kind of play with Flick.
There were ten days till the thirty minutes in his calendar set aside for Beau Rendel. Beau wanted to talk. Just a general chat, his admin assistant had said. It would be the I’m sorry this happened, I believe in you, I trust we have your continued loyalty chat. He’d like to put his finger on it and move it somewhere else like he could the coupon for tie-Flick-up-for-sex, which maybe should go before massage or after Flick told him a secret. Or maybe he could lose that coupon under the sectional; he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
Denise Revero wanted to chat too. Everything she said would be a secret as well, at least in the short term. She got time in his calendar tomorrow.
He stared at the layout of the coupons. He’d give Flick a break and ask her to make his new playlist tomorrow night. It didn’t matter if it only had one song. He had another night where he’d get to wrap around her as they slept, another day he’d wake to her faked morning-person cheer. She hated mornings. Thinking about it made him smile.
The breakfast-in-bed coupon should be scheduled for a weekend, so it didn’t have to have her out of bed early. There were only two weekends together left.
He swapped the Sixty-Nine with the Servant for a Day coupon, and then swapped the Servant for a Day coupon for the Kama Sutra Position of Your Choice, and then put Afternoon Delight between them only to realize they’d need a hotel to make that happen on a weekday. Managing his own work calendar wasn’t this complex.
And the only thing he was achieving here was the transfer of yet more glitter to surfaces that didn’t benefit from it, including the table, rug, his fingers and no doubt his face again. What was it with glitter and its inability to stick to whatever it was supposed to stick to and to shed everywhere else? Design flaw. Like these coupons were designed to lead him inexorably closer to Flick while relentlessly counting down to the day they parted.
That was an evil sleight of hand.
“It’s safe for you to come back over here,” Flick said.
He restacked the coupons in next-to-last order. “You didn’t set off any alarms.”
“Other than those internal ones in you. The ‘OMG what’s she doing now’ bell, the ‘is it safe to leave her unsupervised’ buzzer, and the ‘I can’t trust her with my things’ siren.”
“I trust you with my things.”
“You’re absolutely correct.” She bounced the heel of her hand on her forehead. “You even let me put some of them in my mouth.”
Holy fuck. Nothing was sacred with her. “How is it you’ve lived this long?”
“It’s my special talent,” she said with an eye roll. “Now sit down and tell me what you’d like to drink.”
He chose the bottle of wine she’d brought home and sat at the place she’d set for him. He knew there was fish in this meal, but he’d abandoned the kitchen before she’d done much more than unwrap it. He could smell garlic and lemon and his stomach rumbled.
A bowl of steamed vegetables went down in front of him and then a plated meal.
“Smoked cod with creamy parsley sauce on garlic potato mash,” she said with a TV-game-show-host arm wave.
“It looks good.” A cautiously hedged comment if ever there was one. He’d expected something less competent from the banging about and the stress on her face, and it must’ve showed in his tone.
“It tastes good too, you enormous heaving lump of doubt. You thought I’d fuck up. I don’t like cooking. I’d almost rather do anything else, but I know how to do it.”
The greater part of valor would be to eat and make approving noises at this stage. Not difficult. It was very tasty. “It’s really good.”
She grunted, eyes down on her plate. They were sitting close enough for him to open his arm like a bird wing, elbow out, and nudge her ribs. “You could cook this when we have Wren and Josh over, when he’s back for an office leaders meeting, or we could do something together.”
“Are you completely crazy?” She put her utensils down and turned to him. “You and me in the kitchen collaborating? It would be like Thunderdome. Two men enter. One man leaves.”
“Ah—”
“You want to impress your friends, or at least not horrify them. We collaborate beautifully in the bedroom. We even manage to rub together remarkably well outside the bedroom now, but together in the kitchen...�
�� She took a sip of her wine and he waited on her final pronouncement. “Man, you have a death wish.”
Not a death wish, but there were other things he wished for. Primarily for more than nineteen coupons.
Denise Revero had an interesting opening for him in San Francisco. The sign-on bonus would more than compensate for the inconvenience of moving. He’d like the weather, but he hesitated. Selling up was a big deal. He’d had enough of moving around growing up, and he’d never seriously thought about Frisco before.
“I’m not saying you should jump on this opportunity, but it might be a waiting game otherwise,” Denise said.
“Let me think about it.”
“Twenty-four hours, Tom. If I don’t hear from you by this time Wednesday, it’s a pass.”
Fair call. He’d have time to think about it overnight. But pounding the treadmill didn’t give him any clarity. Neither did drawing up his mental pros-and-cons list. It was a balanced ledger, which meant he needed some factor outside the rational motivations to sway him. The only thing swaying him Tuesday night was Flick.
He put playlists together by adopting other people’s. Legitimatized theft of their efforts. Flick had a whole other way of working it out that required headphones and dancing. Not that he would see what she was dancing to. Not that it mattered. There was a certain clarity in the shift of her hips and the roll of her pelvis, and the only decision he cared about was whose bed they were sleeping in after they’d finished messing up the sheets.
He waited until she wasn’t flailing around and slipped in behind her, hands on her hips. She pushed the headphones off one ear and looked back at him. “I’m working here.”
“I appreciate it.”
She leaned back into him. “You’re far away tonight.”
“You’re the one in another world.” He pulled the jack from the socket for emphasis and she took the headphones off, taking a seat on the coffee table.
“Talk to me.” She made a come-on gesture with her fingers.
“There’s a job in Frisco.”
Her eyes popped wide. “You’re thinking of quitting Rendel.”
The Love Coupon Page 21