I’m not even sure what my biggest fear is anymore. Is it really breaking down in the middle of the subway or is it never being able to leave my apartment again?
I haven’t written in two days, just sat on the couch or laid on the floor near the French doors, looking outside without the lights on. Last night a dark car slid into a parking space and sat there for a long time. I stared at it, wondering who was inside, wishing it was Jake. But eventually it drove away. Probably a tourist—few people in the city own cars.
I probably should have been freaked out by it, but I was mostly sad it left. I’d felt like there was at least one person in the city still awake other than me.
Daphne has sent me a dozen unhappy emails about my lack of progress on the manuscript. I don’t need her to remind me of my looming, already-missed-once deadline, but my creativity is stifled when I take the drugs.
I can’t write emotion if I don’t feel it.
Call me.
The note is the only thing that interests me and really, what do I have to lose by calling him? He’s already seen me at my dismal worst. If he acts embarrassed and unhappy, I’ll hang up and that will be one more thing I’ve sacrificed at the altar of my anxiety. It’s eaten everything else that is decent and good. Why not Jake?
The phone rings so many times I nearly hang up.
“Tanner here.”
The sharp bite of his tone throws me, but I’ve called and he answered so I might as well plunge ahead.
“Beck here,” I mimic.
“Natalie.” His voice drops into a low, rumbly tenor. Comforting and sexy. I want to wrap myself up in that voice. “How are you doing?”
“Hungry,” I joke. Although it’s not entirely a joke. Now that I think about it, I haven’t eaten anything in a while. I lower the phone from my ear to check the time. Holy crap. I haven’t eaten anything in seven hours. I’ve just sat on my ass staring at the blank wall across from my sofa. “I’m sorry I missed our dinner date. I could be eating Chinese leftovers right now.”
“Maybe I would’ve taken the rest home with me,” he laughingly suggests. “I like leftovers too.”
“I don’t believe you would have. If you bring it to my house, you have to leave it here.”
“Is that a Natalie Beck rule?”
“I think Emily Post says it. If you are visiting, bring lots of food and leave it.”
“I’m taking notes.”
I love talking to him. Love it so much. I could talk to him forever. I stretch out on the sofa and pull a throw over myself. Snuggling down, I pretend he’s in the room and we’re having that date—just two normal people hanging out after dinner. Would he allow me to put my feet in his lap? Some guys are adamantly against feet. My last boyfriend, if I could really call him that, had an anti-foot fetish. He didn’t even like to see toes and was freaked out whenever I’d run my feet along his calf. Suffice it to say, we never played footsie. Not that that was what turned me on, but his aversion to my bare piggies kind of hurt my feelings.
And like I’d turn Jake down if he was anti-foot. I’ve already concluded that he must have some terrible personality trait that has not yet revealed itself to me. Like maybe he has bad personal hygiene and he smells terrible. Maybe he clips his toenails in bed.
Whatever it is, I am down with it. Because he wanted me to call him even after I freaked out about the clown. And it wasn’t just a courtesy gesture, because he could have made an excuse to hang up by now, but instead he’s talking to me, joking about our missed date.
He can have bad breath, leave the toilet seat up, and I’ll buy lots of paper towels to place under his feet. Hell, I’ll give him pedicures.
“I was worried when I didn’t hear from you,” he says softly.
“I’m drugged up,” I admit. “Oliver called Dr. Terrance. He was cursing because he told you to do it and you refused.”
“He said you had a love/hate relationship with your therapist. I wasn’t going to call someone to your place you didn’t fully want there.”
“What else did you look at while you were here?” I ask. He’d seen it all except for my overly froufrou bedroom. I wait for him to remark about the girliness. It’s emasculating, Oliver told me once.
“Your bedroom is very pink,” he admits.
“Would that turn you off? Affect your performance negatively?” I tease.
He chuckles, though, apparently not offended or turned off by my question. “My manhood can withstand a little pink. I grunted a lot this morning.”
“That’s nice to know.” My cheeks are pink to match the decor, part in embarrassment over the other night and part delight. I burrow under the covers, where I can pretend that we’re talking in person. His next sentence surprises me.
“We need to reschedule our dinner.”
It’s a joke. It’s so clearly a joke so I respond in kind. “Yeah, tomorrow night.” I force a light laugh.
“I can do tomorrow.”
“It’s too bad you can’t come. Wait, what?” Did he just say tomorrow?
“How about tomorrow night?” he repeats.
“I, uh, I don’t know.” I can’t process his question right now because the thought of opening the door again, not knowing what is on the other side, is terrifying so I avoid it, but I can’t have him hang up on me. I change the topic hastily. “What’s your office like?”
He accepts my avoidance, just like he accepts every weird thing about me. “It’s very boring. White walls, gray carpet. It’s on the bottom of my townhouse, the garden level and the main level. I live in the top three with one of my sisters, Sabrina, who will be graduating from Columbia this year.”
“What’s your other sister’s name?” I want to know everything about him.
“Megan. She’s thirty-two. My parents had Megan and me a couple years apart. Sabrina was a late-in-life surprise for them. You?”
He’s thirty-four or thirty-five then. Nearly a decade older than me.
“Oliver’s like a brother to me. My parents died in a twenty-car pileup when I was five. The roads were icy and a truck on the interstate did a three-sixty, took a bunch of cars out, and caused a huge accident. They were coming home from a lecture at the university. My dad’s sister took me and raised Oliver and me together. He’s only two years older than me.”
“So you’re twenty-six?”
“You know how old Oliver is?” I guess he’s as good at math as I am.
“Since he won the Super Bowl, I think that everyone in the city not only knows how old he is, but how much he weighs, how tall he is, and what he bench-presses.”
“Good point. Are you a fan?” Maybe that’s it. Maybe he’s a huge Oliver Graham fan and he’s going to try to get to Oliver through me. He’d be disappointed to know that the most I can offer is a signed jersey, and I tell him so. “I don’t get free tickets to the game. Oliver’s given up on me attending so he gives them to other people. I could get you a signed jersey, though.”
I try hard to keep the disappointment out of my voice.
He’s quiet for a heartbeat, maybe two. “This may sound like I’m bragging, but I have a good friend who has a box at Cobras Stadium and I’ve got a freestanding invitation, and while I’m a fan, I think I’m a little old for a signed jersey. Besides, your cousin offered me one when we first met and I turned it down.”
“Oh.” There is a subtle rebuke in there, as if I should know better.
“Honey, are you trying to find something wrong with me?”
“No, I’m . . . oh Lord, this sounds pathetic and I know it’s going to sound worse when I say the words out loud, but I don’t understand why you’re even talking to me.”
“Tell me what flaws you’ve given me.” His voice warms me like a hot chocolate on a snowy day.
“No.” I’m not saying even one of them.
“I’m not going to be offended.” He’s having trouble hiding the amusement in his voice, I can tell.
“But I’ll be embarrassed. Or more embarr
assed. If you could see me now, I’m rivaling a tomato in color.”
His voice drops at least a pitch. “I’d like to see how red you get. Do you blush all the way to your toes?”
If I wasn’t before, I am now. I’m hot, and not from shame, but from his suggestive tone and words.
“I, ah, I’m very red.” God, I suck at this phone-flirting thing but he . . . seems pretty adept at it. “Have you done this before? This, um, phone thing? You’re better at it than I am.”
He chuckles. “You’re doing just fine. But, yes, to answer your question, when I was deployed, I used Skype and emails to stay in contact with an old girlfriend.”
“How old?” I ask, instantaneously jealous over this nameless, faceless woman.
“In age or time since our separation? We broke up a few years into my deployment. I haven’t dated seriously since. How about you?”
“Not since Adam Masterson. He was a senior programmer for Saturnalia. I worked with him every day and after a couple of years, he seemed better than being celibate. We didn’t even date. We just kind of . . . fell into bed with each other. Neither of us were heartbroken when it ended.”
“My heart wasn’t broken either,” he says softly, as if to reassure me that he isn’t holding out for a rekindling of any lost love.
“Did you like it? The phone stuff? The Skyping?” I truly want to know. Can anyone be fulfilled by this? I suppose they must to some extent, or cam girls and 1-900 numbers wouldn’t exist. But with someone like Jake, I’d think he’d have a dozen better offers than sitting at home having a virtual relationship with a shut-in.
“It was better than nothing.”
I’m one step up from nothing at least, I reassure myself. Curious, I ask a question that has sat in the back of my mind since the first time we exchanged messages. “Why do you want to know what the girl is wearing?”
“It grounds you. Gives you a visual. Men are very visual.”
“But the person on the phone could be lying.”
His text message—which I’ve read repeatedly—comes back to me.
And if you’re fully clothed, please feel free to lie and say nothing.
“Doesn’t matter. If you tell me you have your hand down your panties and your shirt pulled up to show off your spectacular breasts, that’s what I’m seeing regardless of what you’re really doing or wearing.”
I lift the blanket and look at my breasts. They’ve flattened out a bit now that I’m on my back, but my nipples are hard. I wouldn’t categorize them as spectacular, but I haven’t had complaints. They’re just . . . breasts. Maybe if he was holding them they would feel spectacular. I tingle at the idea.
“I’m too honest. Like right now I’m wearing jogging pants and an old T-shirt.”
“And nothing else?”
“Well, underwear.”
“Hmmm.” His hum enters my ear from the cell phone and shoots straight between my legs. I squeeze my thighs together once as if to catch his touch and hold it there.
“You?”
“Jeans, T-shirt. Gray socks. Boots.”
I want to know more about this phone sex thing, yet what he’s wearing doesn’t interest me. I guess I want to know what he’s doing or rather what he would do with me.
“So you just say sexy things to each other and then hang up?”
“I had more involvement than that.”
“Like what? You had the phone-sex pillow? I saw that on the Internet once. You programmed it to shake or something when you wanted to alert your long-distance partner to some activity back home. I’m not entirely certain how a vibrating pillow does anything for anyone.”
“No.” He sounds a bit as if he’s strangling on a laugh he doesn’t want to release. He clears his throat and answers frankly, “I’d jack off.”
“Oh.”
The image of him sitting with his legs spread and his big hand around his big dick appears immediately. He’d handle himself with sure strokes and his chest would heave as he took big gulps of air. But his eyes would be pinned to mine as if we were magnetically pulled together.
“You still there, Natalie?”
“Yes.” I lick my dry lips. “Just, um, visualizing it. It’s been a long time.”
His voice gets lower, quieter. “Tell me what you’ve been missing.”
He must read the yearning in my voice, but he doesn’t ask if I’m lonely, because he knows I am. So instead he asks what I want.
“Everything. I miss just the cuddling, but I guess a lot of guys aren’t into that. Just lying around for hours, wrapped up in each other.”
“What else do you want?”
You.
“Touch. The warmth of a palm on my knee.” I breathe in, once and then another time, trying to regain some control. I’m breathless and anxious but not panicked. The need for reassurance is strong. I hate that I’m so vulnerable, but I need to accept my weaknesses. That’s one thing Dr. Terrance has impressed upon me and truthfully it works. Other, more experienced women might be able to play coy but I can’t. Uncertainty generates panic for me, and I’d rather ask a dumb question and be shot down than not know what is going on. Bluntly I ask, “What’s happening between us?”
“We’re getting to know each other better.”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” I admit. I rub my neck, imagining that it is his palm on my chest and his weight against my body, his flesh pushing into mine.
“True for me as well,” he says. “But not all surprises are bad. I’m a big believer in the whole concept of things happening for a reason.”
“What about your loss? What was the reason behind that?” I hope it doesn’t come across as snotty. I am genuinely curious.
“I saved a friend,” he answers immediately. “And just so you don’t think I’m bragging, I’ll tell you it was pure accident. If he’d have jumped out of the Humvee before me, he’d have been hit, and he didn’t have the resources like I did. I’m pretty fortunate that I’m alive. I have a great family and a healthy bank account that allowed me access to things other folks don’t have.”
I can’t respond right away because my throat is thick with emotion. Of course he views himself as blessed by his circumstances, but what he won’t ever acknowledge is how he’s embraced his losses and healed both in body and spirit. In reality, his good life is due to his hard work at achieving that spiritual equilibrium that has eluded me for so long. But his courage inspires me.
“I’m scared of many things,” I whisper into the phone. “But not of you.”
“Good. I’ll never give you a reason to be afraid of me. I understand where you are coming from, Natalie. If your only contact with me is over the phone for a while, we’ll get creative.” His throaty words thrill me. “I suspect writers are really good at being inventive.”
It seems impossible, but this man appears to be telling me that he’s willing to date me over the phone for as long as it takes for me to open the door. With someone who fainted at the sight of a clown. How is this even possible?
“So tomorrow night? I’ll bring the Chinese food with me and leave you the extra food. How do things get delivered?”
Trying to stop myself from smiling, trying to stop my heart from fluttering, I answer as evenly as possible. “The doorman calls me, tells me he’s going to bring them up. He sets it by my door. He rings my bell and I wait to hear the elevator ding as he leaves, and then I open it. A lot of stuff Oliver brings up.”
“Okay, then, tomorrow that’s what we’ll do.”
“What if I can’t open the door?”
“Then you don’t open it.” His response is matter-of-fact, as if he doesn’t care that our date might be aborted because I can’t even twist a doorknob.
“How can that be okay for you?”
“Why don’t you let me worry about what’s okay for me, and you worry about you?”
“Okay,” I say, and the last syllable is swallowed by a hiccup. Tears are forming. They aren’t unhappy tears, but tears at t
his man’s amazing generosity. “Excuse me. There’re onions everywhere in my apartment.”
“Take your time.”
“I’m really having a hard time keeping it together. Because of, you know, the onions.”
His reply is full of understanding. “I’ll call you tomorrow, sweetheart. Have sweet dreams.”
“Thanks.” I manage to hold it together until he hangs up, and then I roll over and cry the happiest tears I’ve felt in a long time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JAKE
“What kind of progress are we making on the note and the clown messenger?” I ask my tech guy, Devon Zachs.
Zachs’s inky black hair is stuck up in fifty different directions, and from the number of crumpled potato chip bags littering his desk, I’m wondering when he last left the cellar office.
He claimed this space when I first opened, jokingly saying he planned to drink all the wine from my nonexistent collection. The space was originally designed to house hundreds of bottles of wine and liquor. We tore down the shelves and put in storage units and a bunker that held all our electronic equipment as well as a storage locker full of enough ammunition to arm a small militia. Too many years in the army.
He taps his pen against the far left monitor in his bank of five large screens. “The note is a nonstarter. It’s plain white paper used in millions of offices around the world. It’s printed with an inkjet printer, which probably points to home use. I don’t know what type of ink. We can get that analyzed, but it’s probably just standard ink.
“The clown messenger information is more interesting. The email address that was used to pay him comes from an unverified PayPal account. We can try to hack into it, but hacking individual accounts is a lot harder than a system-wide hack, if you can believe that. We’d need to use a bit of social engineering, and we don’t have enough on the account other than the username dd1995dd. 1995 is an interesting choice, because it’s kind of a bland year. Could be his birthday. I tried a few passwords based on a 1995 date of birth, but came up empty. We don’t really have the computer processing power for hacking, though it’s not like we couldn’t get it. We’ve just never done it in the past. But as we both know, that would be illegal. And given that it’s a financial institution, the penalties could be quite heavy.”
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