by Ruthie Knox
He crossed his arms.
She raised an eyebrow.
He glanced at Rosemary, who raised an eyebrow of her own. You promised to help me. So help.
Kal let out a long sigh. “Fine.”
Then, all at once, Patricia asked if she would be allowed to come, Sengmu began complaining that Kal was supposed to cover her shifts at the restaurant, and Tenzing—or perhaps it was Tashi—said he would be happy to drive if Kal didn’t want to, which resulted in Kal fixing him with an absolutely withering glare, none of which seemed to perturb Yangchen in the least. The older woman’s smile drifted to Rosemary through the chaos, and Rosemary smiled back at her. It was the wrong adventure, with the wrong companions—a distraction from everything she was meant to be doing. But it felt marvelous.
“We’ll leave early,” Yangchen said. “Six o’clock.”
“That sounds perfect.”
Two days with Yangchen. Two more days with Kal. A journey with a story along the way, and her daughter at the end of it.
Crazy, and unanticipated, and completely perfect.
Chapter 15
Kal sat with Rosemary in the backseat of a spotless white Escalade driven by a Korean woman who in no way matched the profile picture the Lyft app had provided.
The closer they got to the club, the more convinced Kal became that Rosemary wasn’t going to like it.
He decided to focus on her inevitable disappointment to distract himself from wondering why the fuck his mother wanted to go to Wisconsin with Rosemary, and also why the fuck he’d agreed to drive them, and furthermore why the fuck his life was spinning completely out of his control and he wasn’t doing anything to stop it.
When distraction failed, he focused on Rosemary’s pants.
Her pants were killing him. They were black and shiny, he thought maybe leather, if it was possible to make shiny leather pants out of a thousand patchwork pieces stitched together with sparkly silver thread.
They were very, very tight, and they made her ass look very, very good.
She knew it, too, which made it difficult to keep his hands off her.
Kal cleared his throat. “What kind of dancing did you want to do?”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I just want to dance.”
“Yeah, but, I mean, when you used to go to clubs, what kind of music did they play?”
“I don’t know, dance music.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Rosemary laughed. “No. Stop fretting at me. I’m sure wherever we’re going will be perfect.”
“It’s just this club I used to go to years ago. It might not be your thing.”
“Do they have alcohol?”
“Last time I checked.”
“Do they have loud music and a dance floor?”
“Yep.”
“Then that’s where I want to be.”
They cleared the last light. The Escalade pulled over to the curb. Kal thanked the driver, helped Rosemary out of the car, and then there was nothing to do but pay the cover charge and follow her inside.
The club was darker than he remembered, and cheesier, with pools of colored lights and blaring salsa music. It was busy but not crowded yet.
“Where to?” He thought he asked the question aloud. But he might not have, because Rosemary was slipping off her jacket, and her shirt was the kind of shirt that was not a shirt, completely backless, the front hanging from a jeweled clasp at the back of her neck, draping and clinging to her in all the right ways. It was made of sort of…wisps. Gray, clingy wisps with frayed edges, overlapping all over the front, ending right below her waistband.
He’d known something was up with that shirt from the way she held her jacket closed over it at dinner, but he’d had no idea. None.
Rosemary snapped her fingers in front of his face.
“What?”
“You want a drink?” Her mouth was perfectly smug. The cocky princess.
“Yeah. Alcohol. I want one large alcohol.”
“Find us somewhere to sit.” She shoved her jacket into his chest. “I’ll be right back.”
Kal located a corner table a decent distance from the speakers and watched Rosemary at the bar, where the bartender and a handful of unattached Latino men welcomed her with more generosity than he felt was strictly necessary.
Rosemary talked and laughed with the men, winding her hair into her hands and pulling it forward over her shoulder, treating Kal to a delicious view of bare back and ass and legs that went all the way up. A view he would have found considerably more delicious if Rosemary was smiling at him rather than at four guys who didn’t know he existed and would be happy to take his place.
He should’ve taken her to a VFW square dance. Maybe they’d do that on their Grand Road Trip to WTFery, Wisconsin.
She sashayed across the space between the bar and their table, her skin turning blue under the fuchsia lights, then golden-brown under the red lights, blue under the purple lights. He wanted to spend more time with her skin. They hadn’t had enough time. He barely remembered what they’d done in Lukla, and the airplane seemed like a million years ago.
Rosemary plunked a martini glass in front of him. When she sat, her knee rubbed against his. He’d changed into jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt that had seemed sharp the last time he wore it but felt sad in this room full of men wearing pearl snaps and flower embroidery and actual sparkles. And boots. He should get some boots.
A Sherpa dude in boots, though—it didn’t have the same effect.
“One alcohol for you, and one alcohol for me,” she said.
“What kind?”
“Yours is an apple martini. Mine is a Gibson, shaken, not stirred.”
“What am I, a nineteen-year-old girl?”
“You are. And I’m James Bond, but with cocktail onions.” She popped the onion into her mouth, smacked her lips, and smiled. “Are you going to be grouchy all night?”
“I’m not.”
“You pouted at me the entire time I was at the bar.”
“I never saw you look over here.”
“I’m a mum, I have eyes in the back of my head. Plus, I could feel you vibing me all the way across the room.”
“Yeah? What was I vibing?” Kal took a sip of his martini. It was actually pretty good—crisp, sour, not too sweet.
“Threatened masculinity. Doctor Doom vibes. Sullen man-child manipulated by his mother into an errand he’d prefer not to do. I’m not having it.”
Kal wanted to argue with her, but giving in to his worst impulses had never gotten him anything he wanted. “What are you having?”
“I’m having a Gibson, and you’re going to show me how to salsa dance, and then if I’m very lucky, I’m having sex in a nightclub lavatory.”
Kal choked. Going the wrong direction, apple martini burned like a motherfucker. Rosemary put her hand on his knee and squeezed, hard. “Finish your drink,” she said. “I need at least three in me before I turn into a brilliant dancer.”
Her eyes found his, the dimple winking in her cheek. Kal figured out how to inhale again and let the Doctor Doom vibes go on the exhale.
It wasn’t worth it.
He’d get his chance to peel those leather pants off, inch by inch—possibly in the bathroom of this very nightclub—and he could take as long as he wanted at it.
No other man in the room had that much to look forward to.
—
Rosemary was pleased to discover that she was an excellent salsa dancer.
The steps were easy. It was an eight count, and she was drunk enough to feel hot-faced, a little dizzy when she spun, but not so drunk that she’d forgotten how to count.
“Put it in your hips,” Kal said. Closer now, his hand at her waist as he came toward her, then stepped back and beckoned her into him.
It was a rocking dance, a mimicry of courtship, of sex, advancing and retreating.
“There you go.”
His voice melted into her skin. Th
e club had a live band, the sound system absolutely deafening, but it felt so good to feel music singing through her bones, her new clothes tight everywhere she wanted to feel herself move, loose where she wanted to float and spin and lift away, and Kal’s hands, Kal’s voice, Kal’s body keeping her tethered and dizzy and hot.
Four martinis and a sort of line dance, perhaps an hour ago, to make her feel expansively human, part of the crowd, a community of sweating, ecstatic bodies. Rosemary felt limber. Buzzed. Competent.
Sexy.
Her feet didn’t hurt, not even a little bit. Kal spun her, and she lost her balance and tipped forward into his arms, but he caught her easily, guided her back into the steps, laughing.
He was a good dancer. He’d told her the Latina girls would have parties here in high school, quinceañeras. He’d been to a lot of parties, and later, hung out at clubs on the weekends, salsa nights with a two-dollar cover charge, trying to cadge a drink underage, trying to catch the right girl’s eyes with his moves.
She loved to watch him move. His shirt stretched tight over the lean muscles of his arms, his thighs moving under denim, his feet sure of where to go. Everything felt carnal, every touch a memory of their night in Lukla, sex she could barely remember that her body couldn’t forget.
“Let’s try the dip.” He guided her closer, his thigh between her legs. He put his hand along her spine and she lay back on it, unafraid, loose everywhere.
Her hair brushed the floor, the strength in Kal’s arms all that kept her from falling.
How many moments in her life had been like this one? Completely present, completely ecstatic in her body, completely trusting.
Not since she was very young.
She thought of Everest, cold and hard and horrible. Rosemary didn’t know what she’d been chasing there, but it wasn’t life.
She took Kal’s hand. Drew him to her. “I love this.”
“It’s what you wanted?”
“It’s exactly what I wanted.”
“I like giving you exactly what you want.” He said it so earnestly, looking right at her, he might as well have taken her nipple in his mouth and sucked. The effect was the same.
“Do you? Because I have this fantasy…”
“The bathroom thing?”
They were no longer dancing. They stood entangled on the dance floor, breathing hard. “Would you?”
“If you want me to.”
Rosemary almost chickened out. If she wanted him to, he would, and she was thirty-nine years old, decades past old enough to know better.
She’d known better. She’d spent so many years knowing better, and all it had done was cut her off from life so utterly that she couldn’t recall the last time she’d learned a new dance step, flirted with a bartender, let herself do something stupid and dangerous that felt good.
“Come with me.” She took his hand and led him off the dance floor. Past the bar, toward the restroom, a quick look around to ensure no one was paying attention, and then they ducked into the loo. It was the sort with a beige stall around each toilet, bright overhead fluorescent lights, but Kal’s hand was warm in hers, his tiny smile when she pushed him into the largest stall and locked the door just for her, just enough to make her back him into the wall and put her mouth on his.
Yes.
Yes to the hot sweep of his tongue, to the deep pulse of heat between her legs, the pounding lazy drowsy arousal that made her close her eyes and inhale the smell of his neck, made her lick his salty skin and test how hard she could bite before his hands tightened on her hips. His knee came up, his foot braced against the wall, and she rode his thigh, kissed him again, the glide of his hands up her bare back everything she’d wanted, his fingers digging in, pulling her closer, tighter.
Yes.
He turned her around, pressing her into the wall, cool tile at her back, the music vibrating through her body, Kal hard between her hitched leg, his grip behind her knee, the hard muscles of his upper arms against her palms, his tongue moving in rhythm with every pulse against her, matched, gorgeous, perfect lust.
His hands found the button of her trousers, fumbled with it, lowered the zipper, and then his fingers discovered where she was unbearably hot and slick and made her hotter, sliding down to move inside her, hard and deep.
Yes, yes, y—
The outside lavatory door opened, the music louder, and Kal went still. Rosemary opened her eyes. He was watching her, his eyes laughing, not alarmed.
“There’s somebody in there,” a voice said in a dramatic whisper, and another voice, a girl, “Two someones.” Then they were giggling, running water, and Rosemary exhaled.
Her feet hurt.
The light was too bright, and she wanted a bed, to be completely naked in a bed, alone with Kal.
She pressed her face into his chest, pressed a kiss through his shirt, squeezing tight around his fingers inside her body.
When the girls left, she said, “Take me home.”
Chapter 16
The doorman at Rosemary’s apartment was the same one from when they’d rolled into town last night. Kal nodded at him as they passed through the door, and the man nodded back and said, “Have a good evening.”
It was surreal to think it was only a day ago they’d landed at JFK. “How long have we known each other?”
Rosemary unlocked the apartment door. “I don’t know. Five? Six days? We crossed a lot of time zones, I’ve had trouble keeping track.”
She dropped the keys into a bowl on the countertop. The apartment was cold, the hum of the refrigerator unexpectedly loud. Rosemary fixed ice water in the kitchen. “You were quiet in the taxi.”
“It’s late.”
“If you’re tired, we don’t have to do this.”
“I’m good.”
She watched him sip from his glass, the line between her eyebrows making it clear she didn’t buy it but she didn’t know what his deal was.
His deal was that she’d laid her head on his shoulder in the cab, and he’d put his arm around her like he’d been putting his arm around her forever. And with that gesture he’d felt an incredible rush of emotion of the sort he’d only felt before when he was drying off Patricia after giving her a bath, or when he spotted his mom walking out of the icefall alive, not even limping, and she’d waved at him.
Rosemary set her glass down on the countertop with a clink. “I feel as though I should offer you something, but I haven’t any idea what you want.”
“This part is kind of awkward, huh?”
She furrowed her forehead at him, arms crossed. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re thinking about nothing.”
“Yes.” He was going to stick with that, the worst answer in the history of human conversation.
“The whole time in the taxi, you were thinking of nothing?”
“Yes?”
“That’s not particularly flattering, considering you came here to have sex with me.”
“No?”
“No, what? No, it’s not flattering, or no, you didn’t come here for sex?”
“I mean, why isn’t it flattering?” Stupid question. It made her nostrils flare.
“I can order you a car if you want to leave. This doesn’t have to be complicated.”
“Doesn’t it?” He asked the question with more heat than he wanted it to have.
It was complicated. He’d known Rosemary for less than a week, and already she’d had dinner with his family, prayed at his monastery, wrapped tentacles around his mother, seduced his little sister, and given him feelings in the backseat of a cab. None of that should have made him want to spend the next twelve hours figuring out how many ways he could fuck her, but he did want to. He also wanted to wake up next to her and run out for the enormous, decadent coffee she liked. Treat her like a princess.
Which, just, fuck.
“I thought we wanted the same thing,” she said. “I was wrong, obviously. There’s no nee
d for you to have escorted me home, to hang about, when you’ve lost interest—”
Kal just gave up and kissed her.
It was complicated to think about her, complicated to try to talk to her, but if she was going to look at him with hurt in her eyes and try to find a way to say she didn’t believe he wanted her, then he was going to kiss her, every time.
“Mmph,” she said.
“This okay?”
“Yes.” She wound her arms around his neck. Kal picked her up, set her on the countertop, and yanked her against his body. It was stupid how good she felt. Just stupid backward and forward, this whole thing with Rosemary, and even stupider that he didn’t want it to stop.
He took off her stupid shoes, and she moaned when he rubbed her feet.
He held her head in both hands and kissed her deep, pushing his frustration into her body, gripping her too tight so she’d have to grip him back, run her hands up under his shirt and dig into him with her fingernails.
His balls ached. His lower back began to protest the weird configuration of their bodies. “Where’s the bedroom?”
Rosemary pointed.
“Hang onto me.”
He carried her in and dumped her onto the bed, crawled up over her, and kissed her until the only frustration he felt was that she had clothes on.
That was a problem Kal could fix.
He kneeled above her, found the clasp that held her shirt together, fumbled with it until the halves separated cleanly and left him with a strap in each hand that he pulled down to reveal her bare chest.
“It comes off easier over my head.”
“Take it off.”
Rosemary did, sitting halfway up, which trapped his erection with so much sweet pressure that he tore off his shirt, attacked the zipper on her insane pants, peeled them down her legs, her panties, his jeans, until there was nothing left but Rosemary in his arms, wrapped around his body, tight against him everywhere.
He’d told himself he would take the time tonight to memorize every inch of her. The truth was, he’d already done it.
Five days, or six, however you counted the time, he already knew Rosemary Chamberlain, and she knew him, too, knew how to kiss him and sigh against his mouth and wiggle her hand between their bodies to palm his dick and drive him crazy.