I’m never going to stop thinking about this. I’m going to replay it over and over. Thinking of this night, thinking of Chase, will be what gets me off for the rest of my natural life.
“Yes.” I’m so close. “Yes. I’ll think about you,” I gasp.
Instantly his hands are off me, and my feet are back on the ground.
I blink several times, confused. Dazed. My clit is throbbing so hard I’m in pain.
Chase straightens his sweater, his breathing heavy. “I knew I could make you admit it,” he says, his cocky grin lighting up his perfect face.
“But—” Oh my fucking God, I’m going to murder him.
Murder him.
After I calm down anyway, which will require several cold showers.
“Don’t pout, kitten.” He pulls my coat together and buttons it while he talks. “We’re going to be naked together the next time we see each other. I want you thinking about me until then.”
I’m too mad to talk. Too horny to talk. Too dazed by his kiss and my hormones, and his stupid twinkling blue eyes.
After finding my keys in my coat pocket, he clicks my car unlocked, opens the door, and helps me inside. He bends down so he can pull my seatbelt across my body and fasten it.
“So we can be safe,” he says. I immediately recognize it as a line from Dora the Explorer from library story time, and I know he’s got to have learned it from having nephews.
And seeing him with his nephews was the whole reason I decided to pick him to be the father of my baby. Which is the reason I agreed to the date tonight. Which is the reason I’m about to drive home with the most painful arousal I’ve ever felt.
“Don’t even be cute right now,” I grumble, finally finding my voice.
“There’s my kitten,” Chase says. He brushes his lips against mine once more. “And Liv, I’ll be thinking about fucking you too.”
He shuts my door and backs up a few feet but makes no move to go to his car. I know him well enough already to guess he’s going to stay there until he knows my car starts and he sees me drive off safely.
His waiting is the only reason I don’t stay in the parking lot and rub one out before leaving.
As I drive off, I steal one last look at him. He’s pulled his sweater down, but he can’t hide the tent he’s sporting. It’s a minor consolation knowing that I’m leaving him in similar agony.
And as he said, the next time I see him, we’re going to be naked together.
I end up smiling all the way home.
Six
Chase
Of course I said yes. It was a simple question, and I’m a simple kind of man, just like Mama says to be in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song. A hot librarian wants me to fuck her without a condom, empty myself inside of her, and then walk away from all the consequences.
I mean, it couldn’t have been a better present had it been wrapped in Paper Source paper and tied up with a goddamn bow. And like I said at dinner, I couldn’t entirely write off the possibility that there were already little Chase Kellys in the world. What’s one more?
Also, there was that damn kiss by her car...I could still feel how wet her pussy was against my fingertips, could feel how eagerly she rocked against my dick, how easily she surrendered to my mouth…
Oh yes. Fucking my little librarian is going to be a fucking delight.
So...it’s all pretty simple, right?
The problem is that there’s a small part of me that doesn’t feel so simple about it. And it’s that same unfamiliar part that lives in my chest and twists at the strangest thoughts. Like the thought of Livia being broken-hearted by other men. The thought of her wanting a baby this fiercely. The memory of the way she looked at JoJo kicking happily in my arms.
I try to poke at this twisty place in my chest while I’m jumping rope, while I’m running, while I’m doing pull-ups on the rings. I poke at it while I’m at work, while I do welfare checks on the elderly and while I beg Gutierrez to let me do a body camera presentation to the city council. I poke at it while I watch TV with Pop, while we drink coffee and later while we trim the hedges outside.
After two days, I give up. This weird pull in my chest won’t go away and it doesn’t make sense. It’s not ordered, logical, or even wanted—it’s just there. Unasked for and confusing. Not lining up with any of the things I know to be true about myself.
Well, except for one thing.
I want to fuck Livia. I like her and I want to fuck her, and Jesus, it’s messed up, but the idea of going inside her bare, of actually trying to plant a baby in her, to breed her...well, it gets me hard in a way I’ve never felt before. Urgently hard. Throbbing hard. My-balls-feel-fucking-heavy-and-full hard. I’m masturbating like a teenage boy morning and night, and still I can’t take the edge off this itch for her, the edge off this need to get her pregnant. To mate with her, like I’m a fucking caveman.
So there it is. She wants me to get her pregnant, the idea of getting her pregnant turns me the fuck on, so I’m all systems go for this insane, ridiculous plan. I’m just going to ignore the distracting pull in my chest when I think about her and focus only on the logical.
Tab Chase goes into Slot Livia; lather, rinse, repeat until baby.
Which means I’m in the right frame of mind when I get a text from her three days after our first date.
My ovulation test says my luteinizing hormone is surging today, and I have salivary ferning. Tonight, at the Nite’s Inn, 8 p.m., please.
It’s polite and straightforward and all business, which appeals to the Spock-like part of me, although the horny part of me is pretty insistent that we take a few dirty detours tonight as well. If I want this librarian out of my system by the time I knock her up, then I’m going to need to take full and long advantage of our nights together. She agreed to include non-fertile times as part of our arrangement, and I’m already planning on exploiting that condition as much as possible. Besides, I read online that the man should ejaculate often to improve sperm motility or something like that. So me fucking her throughout the month is good for conceiving the baby too.
However, something about her text bothers me. Well, actually two somethings.
Something Number One—salivary ferning? What the fuck is that?
I tell dispatch I’m going on a lunch break, but instead of going into the break room, I go out to my Audi TT—the perfect marriage of muscle and clean, precise German engineering—and climb inside. There on the passenger seat are a bunch of books from the library about babies and pregnancy. (I checked them out from the Central Resource Library, to avoid the risk of seeing Megan and having to explain why her playboy brother is researching babies.)
And as I start flipping through them looking for any information on ferning, I pull out my phone and make a call about Something Number Two, the Nite’s Inn. It sounds familiar somehow, but I can’t remember why, except I know it’s in Overland Park, the next suburb over.
While the place I live and work, Prairie Village, is a well-off residential community of upper middle class families and old people, Overland Park suffers from a lot of the issues that plague bigger, older suburbs. Empty retail spaces, seedy areas, crumbling apartment complexes filled with cockroaches tucked behind Targets and movie theaters, that kind of thing. In fact, Prairie Village during the midnight shift is so boring that when I worked midnights myself, I used to creep across the city line to see if anything more interesting was happening in Overland Park. And the answer was always, invariably, yes.
More often than not, the guy handling the more interesting things was a taciturn academy buddy of mine named Taylor, and since he’s now a detective with a suit and tie and a stack of case folders taller than I am, I know he’s got nothing better to do than pick up the phone.
He picks up the phone.
“Taylor here.”
“Hey, it’s Kelly from Prairie Village.”
A sigh. “Do I need to chase you out of my city again?”
I smile, still flipping throu
gh the baby book. “Those were the days. When we were just out of academy, working midnights.”
“Ah. When we were young men.”
I laugh. “Speak for yourself. I’m only thirty-three.”
“I hate to break it to you, Kelly, but we’re old now. We’re past thirty. We might as well be dead.”
“Why is everyone saying that lately?” I mumble-ask, groping for another baby book when the one I’m holding comes up empty of answers.
“Because it’s true. Did you really call me just to talk about mortality?”
“No,” I say, giving up on this baby book too when the glossary yields no entry under the word ferning or salivary. “Do you know the Nite’s Inn?”
“You mean, do I know it from all the prostitution? Or do I know it from all the murder?”
“Oh. Oh man.”
“Why?” Taylor asks. “You got a lead from there you need to follow?”
“Not a lead exactly,” I say slowly, glancing out of my windshield. Three blocks from here is the Corinth Branch, where right now Livia might be working on programs or sitting through a committee meeting on senior outreach or something. “I’ve, uh. I’ve got a date I’m meeting there.”
I have to hold the phone all the way out to the side when Taylor laughs.
And laughs.
And laughs.
“Oh my God,” he wheezes. “Oh my God. A date. At the Nite’s Inn.”
“She picked it,” I say defensively.
“I bet she did. And did you meet her through an ad on Craigslist? Or on a street corner? Did you finally fuck your way through an entire county’s worth of non-hookers?”
“No, no, no. This woman’s a librarian.” And I’m about to add, and I’ve agreed to get her pregnant, so we’re meeting on neutral ground, but then I decide that Taylor wouldn’t think that was any less weird, so instead I just say, “And it’s a totally normal date. Super normal. We are two normal people who are going to meet and have normal non-procreative sex.”
Taylor starts laughing again, wheezing and coughing. “That’s what all the johns say,” he squeezes in between laugh-coughs. “I hope you enjoy your normal, non-procreative sex, Kelly.”
“You suck.”
More laughter. “Oh man, wait until I tell everyone about this. Kelly has a date at the Nite’s Inn. At the place where you pay by the hour. At the No-Tell Motel. At the Nite’s—”
I hang up the phone and drop it into the cup-holder. Fucking Taylor. Fucking Nite’s Inn. Fucking salivary ferning.
Except, wait—there it is!
“Salivary ferning,” I read to myself, running my finger along the words. “When a woman is close to ovulation, changes in her body chemistry give the saliva a fern-like appearance as it dries, as opposed to a speckled appearance.”
Huh. The more you know.
I close the book and text Livia back.
Okay, Fern Woman. I’ll meet you at 8. Then I add, Are you super sure about the Nite’s Inn?
She responds right away. I’ll see you then, and I’m very sure. I’m doing this on a public servant’s budget! And it’s close to a Steak’n Shake, so you know it’s in a good neighborhood.
...Liv. Kitten. They found a body in that Steak’n Shake’s dumpster last year.
One body and all of a sudden it’s a ‘bad’ place. You are so judgey! I, for one, won’t be scared away by that one tiny thing. I like to see the best in places.
My radio goes off in my ear—a senior is causing a disturbance at a nursing home and they need all available units to respond. With a rueful smile to myself at my idealistic little librarian, I send her a final message and then climb out of my car.
See you tonight, Livvy-girl. Don’t get thrown into a dumpster before I get there.
* * *
Even though I was mostly joking about the Murder Steak’n Shake, I get to the Nite’s Inn half an hour early so that I can be extra sure she’s not in the parking lot alone. It’s not that Overland Park is a bad place—for the most part, it’s an extremely safe suburb—but I dug around some more at work today and found out that the Nite’s Inn is extremely popular with truckers and construction workers, due to its proximity to the highway, low rates, and plethora of prostitutes.
I tell myself that it’s my normal cop instinct that wants to keep Livia safe from rough, violent men in the parking lot—I want to keep all civilians safe, because it’s what I’ve taken an oath to do. It’s the right thing to do.
I mean, I certainly would do this for any person I was meeting at an hourly motel to impregnate.
Still, I can’t entirely explain away the spike of excitement I feel when I see her climb out of her bright blue Prius C. It’s lust, yes, but it’s also lust for more than her body—for her laugh, for her attention, for her little gasps of breath when I touch her or surprise her. I lean against the back of my Audi as she approaches, not making a secret of the way my eyes trace her body, not bothering to hide the thickening ridge in my jeans at the sight of her.
The night is warm for March, and a pleasant breeze ruffles her blouse, a white buttoned affair with dainty gathered sleeves that probably have a special name. The blouse is paired with slim black pants and little ballet flats. Elegant, classy, somehow all the sexier for how casually restrained it is. Her hair is back in one of those maddening librarian buns, and I have a brief vision of cupping that head, bun and all, as she kneels in front of me and works on my belt.
“Hey,” she says as she reaches me, not quite meeting my eyes.
“Hey,” I reply, watching her mouth. There’s the faintest glimmer of lip gloss on her lips, as if she swiped it on quickly while she was driving. The idea makes me smile...and it makes me want to kiss the gloss right off her mouth.
She looks up at me, her eyes huge and liquid in the dark. And then her gaze falls to my mouth too. I wonder if she’s remembering the kiss from our first date, the feel of my hard cock pressing into her, a hard, hot ridge grinding against her clit.
And then her gaze drops from my mouth to my belt, where I know she can see that I’m hard for her. Color floods her cheeks, and she struggles to pull her eyes back up to my face.
I have to kiss her right now.
I reach for her, catching her by the waist with both hands and swinging her around so I’ve got her caged against the car. “I’m hungry for your mouth,” I tell her, dropping my lips to hers. “So hungry.”
She breathes against my mouth, her entire body trembling. “Chase…” she says, sounding dazed. “We shouldn’t…”
“Why not?” I say, nibbling at the corners of her mouth, at the bowed curve of her lower lip. Her lips taste like berries, sweet and ripe.
“Because...oh…”
I’ve moved to her jaw now, kissing my way to her neck, where I bite and suck as much as I please, still keeping her caged against the car.
“Why, Liv?” I ask, my lips tickling the shell of her ear. “Because why?”
She is squirming against me now, not in the struggling way, but in the way where she’s trying to get her pelvis closer to mine, seeking out any source of friction she can find. I give her my thigh, and she makes this little grunt of satisfaction that drives me absolutely crazy, squirming down onto the hard muscle of my leg as if her life depended on it. Her fingers are digging into my biceps, and the heat of her on my leg is insane, even through our clothes.
“You like that, kitten?” I whisper in her ear. “You can ride any part of me as long as you please, so long as you let me kiss you too.”
“I...we shouldn’t kiss,” she says hazily. When I pull back to look into her face, her eyes are glassy and her cheeks are flushed.
“But I think you’d like it,” I say, pushing my thigh a little harder against her pussy.
Her eyes flutter. “I would, I did...but it’s not smart.” Her words come out breathless and stilted. “Because we should just focus on the...you know…”
“On the fucking?”
The word from my lips seems
to focus her attention. Like laser focus. I can feel her trembling against me. “Right. The fucking.”
“So you don’t consider kissing a part of the fucking?” I’m genuinely interested in this. I’ve never met a girl who didn’t want to have the breath kissed right out of her by me. And anyway, I really want to kiss Livia. Like really, really, really want to. Want to feel those plush lips give in to mine, want to taste them, want to flick my tongue against hers. I’ve probably beat off two or three times a day thinking about the kiss after our first date, and the urge to have another dirty, dirty kiss like that with her is unbearable.
But if she genuinely doesn’t want to, then I’ll abide by her wishes.
After all, I’m a pretty creative guy, for a cop. I can come up with a thousand other dirty things I can do with her that will scratch my librarian-shaped itch.
“I just don’t want to feel, ummmm…” she trails off as I rock my thigh from side to side, her hands moving from my biceps to fist in my leather jacket. “...confused. It’s too intimate.”
“Kissing is too intimate, but trying to get you pregnant isn’t?” I ask.
“People get pregnant in doctors’ offices. With syringes. It doesn’t have to be intimate, not like kissing.”
She tilts her chin up, a little show of defiance, but she’s still pressing herself hard against me. I tilt my head quizzically. “Are you calling my dick a syringe?”
A small giggle escapes her, and I lean closer to run my fingers along her ribs to tickle her. She laughs harder.
“No. Well, maybe.”
“Kitten, they don’t make syringes like what I’m packing. If they did, the doctor’s office would be the most popular place in town.”
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing. I’m excited to use your syringe.” Then she flushes even deeper, as if she can’t believe she just said that out loud.
I laugh too. She’s so fucking adorable. I should stop bothering her about this kissing thing, but I can’t help but ask, my voice laced with hope and caution:
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