by Ruthie Knox
Tony wondered where Amber fit in all that, growing up at the apartment complex. She’d have gone to elementary school in Camelot, but they bused the Camelot kids into Mount Pleasant for middle school and high school. Then she would have driven into town for her college classes at the Naz.
She wasn’t quite from either place, maybe. Somewhere in between.
Her fingers kept plucking at the knee of her pants, as if it were vitally important for the wet fabric not to touch her leg.
Spooked again. He wondered if she was half as spooked as he was.
They’d gone their separate ways inside the building, Tony checking out the site while Amber moved through all the rooms and made sure everything had come through the storm okay. Then he’d offered her a ride.
He almost wished he hadn’t, though he would have been a total dick to leave her there by herself.
It was just that she looked too good in his truck.
He drove almost all the way out to the two-lane state highway that connected Camelot to Mount Pleasant, then hung a right and headed uphill toward the apartment complex. Amber shivered.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
She didn’t offer any more conversation, and he wasn’t sure what to say. He turned on the heat, angling the vents in her direction. The dashboard clock read six forty-five. Ninety minutes since the tornado siren had sent him into the basement with her.
Ninety minutes since he’d first said more than three words to her. So how had he ended up practically nailing her up against a tree, in public, where anybody could have seen them? What the fuck was wrong with him?
He was hot for her, sure. That kiss had been off the charts. Her body, her tongue, her breasts … just thinking about it made his balls ache and his dick get heavy all over again.
But he’d been reckless, and reckless was no good. Bad things happened when you started thinking the rules didn’t apply to you. He and Patrick used to think that, and Patrick had ended up in prison for it. Patrick had ended up destroyed by it.
It could just as easily have been Tony.
Somebody had told her he was trouble. He wished whoever it was had told her the rest of the story. He was starting to think he was going to have to.
At the entrance to the complex, he slowed down.
“Second building on the right,” she said.
He pulled into a space out front and cut the engine. She turned toward him, her eyes deep and liquid dark, full of an emotion he couldn’t identify. Something in them made him want to wrap his arm over her shoulder, but he knew where that would lead.
She’d never even had an orgasm with a man, and he wanted to hand her her first one. Of course he did. He was hard-wired to want that. Spread his seed, perpetuate the species. But what did that leave Amber with? Memories of getting off with some hard-hat-wearing roughneck who tumbled her around for a few hours and then never called her again?
Was he really that big of an asshole?
He didn’t want to be.
“You want to come up?” she asked.
She would get the wrong idea, and she’d end up hurt. Hell, he’d probably already hurt her, out there in the parking lot. She would regret it later on. But it would be worse if he took her up to her apartment and took her to bed the way he wanted to, because she would wake up in the morning thinking they had something that didn’t exist.
It couldn’t exist. This pull he felt when he looked at her, and the out-of-control way he’d felt under the tree, as if he had to touch her or something would slip away from him, something he needed—that was all an illusion. It took a long time to get to know somebody, to figure out all the stuff about them that was going to drive you nuts over the long haul. Weeks and months to find out how compatible you were in the sack and to get your sense of humor lined up.
This thing with Amber—it was some kind of temporary attachment, the result of spending that time in the dark with her. Probably the result of flipping out in front of her, too. Attraction and fear came with potent chemicals. Surely they could make you think you had something that wasn’t really there.
“Go ahead and say no, if you’re going to say no,” she said. “Don’t sit there trying to decide how to break it to me.”
She had that snap to her voice again. That don’t-bullshit-me tone that he liked, even when she was busting his balls. “That’s not what I was trying to decide.”
“Sure you were. If you were going to say yes, you’d already have said it.”
“You know what happens if I come up.”
She glanced at him, then away. “Probably.”
“Definitely.”
Her chin lifted. “I can fix you something to eat, if I can get the burners to light. The stove’s gas. I can’t dry your clothes off, though.”
“So I strip, you offer me a towel, and then we sit around in the dark with candles lit, and what? Talk about baseball?”
“I like baseball.”
“You do, huh?”
“I watch it with my dad.”
He reached out to cup her shoulder, knowing his touch would rattle her and wanting it to. “Look, Amber. If I come up, I’m going to have you naked in no time flat. I’m going to fuck you. Is that what you want?”
She squirmed. “Do you have to say it that way?”
“Say it what way, ‘fuck’?”
“Yeah.”
“What would you call it, honey? Until a couple hours ago, I’d never even had a conversation with you. We do this tonight, it’s not gonna be making love. It’ll just be sex. And then I go to work Monday, and you unlock the place, and we gotta figure out how to be around each other after. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like a terrible idea.”
Her fingers picked at the fabric over her knee. “I don’t see why it has to be that way,” she said quietly. “After, I mean.”
“You don’t get why it has to be one night.”
“No. I mean, yes, sort of. I guess I don’t see why you’re so sure you know what’s going to happen. It’s not like any of this has gone according to some master plan you had.”
“I know how I am.”
Her face came up, and those eyes found his. Those huge, dark eyes, searching his expression for something they were never going to find. “So if you come up, and we … then tomorrow, you’re not going to like me anymore, is that it?”
He sighed. “I’ll still like you. I just won’t want to hurt you, any more than I do now. I’m trying to do the right thing here. We already talked about this, right? You want a wedding and a white dress. Even if we made sense as a couple—and we really don’t, babe, when you think about it—I’m not going to be able to give you that.”
Her expression hardened as he spoke, her mouth flattening out. “That’s so insulting.”
“What is?”
“You’re telling me you don’t want to come up because if you have sex with me, I’ll fall in love with you, and then I’ll want to marry you and you’ll break my heart.”
He just stared at her, unsure what to say. That was kind of what he was telling her. But when she put it that way, it sounded bad, and he could tell it pissed her off.
“Look, Amber—”
She cut him off. “That’s so arrogant.”
“Honey—”
“Quit ‘honeying’ me. I’m not your honey. I’m a person, Tony, and I want to have sex with you. Don’t go thinking you’re some kind of god just because you know I like you. You’re not going to break my heart by putting your … your dick in me. You might make me so mad I change my mind, though, if you keep talking to me like I’m some kind of delicate flower who’s going to wither away and die if you don’t handle me just right.”
She flung open the door and hopped out of the truck. “I’m going up to my apartment now, and I’m going to take off all my clothes. If you want to be there to see that, get off your tush and follow me.”
She slammed the door and stalked toward the building, and To
ny tried to remember why he wasn’t supposed to follow her.
He tried for what felt like forever, but she was walking fast, and the farther away she got, the more urgently the need pounded through him.
He wanted her. Wanted her way too much to deny himself, even knowing how much he would regret it later.
The truck door slammed behind him. By the time he hit the steps, he was jogging.
Chapter Eight
Amber dropped her purse on the table by the door.
She discarded her shirt in the middle of the living area and knelt down to take off her shoes in the short hallway that led to the bedroom.
She didn’t know if he would come in, but if he did, he was going to get an eyeful.
Was this her, unzipping her pants at the threshold of the bathroom? She felt as though she must be a different Amber Clark from the one who’d hung a cluster of carefully arranged photographs on the wall across from the toilet and bought a bowl of potpourri to sit on top of the tank.
Something had happened to her.
Strange to think that one afternoon could redirect her, reshape her—but maybe all she’d needed was a reason. A desire that made becoming different more important than the safety of being the same.
Someone to reach for.
She heard a soft knock. “Amber?”
“The door’s unlocked.”
Her khakis dropped to the floor, and she carefully pulled the ponytail elastic out of her wet hair. The strands brushed her back, right above her bra strap. Her nipples hardened with a shiver.
Tony was in her apartment, and she was in her bra and panties.
The floor creaked beneath his feet. “Where are you?”
“In the bathroom.”
She pushed aside the shower curtain and turned the spray on hot.
When she twisted around again, he filled the doorway, and he was staring.
He didn’t say anything. Not a word. But he looked at her, and she felt it as a flush of heat across her neck, a fullness in her breasts. She felt it on her lips, felt it brushing over her stomach and deep between her legs.
Amber reached behind her back to unhook her bra. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Tony braced his hands in the doorway. She couldn’t tell whether he was trying to hold himself up or keep himself back.
She let the bra drop.
A muscle jumped in his jaw.
She hooked her thumbs into her panties over each hip bone and looked for something in his eyes. Permission. An invitation.
“Go on.” His voice had melted—or maybe it was that it was melting her. That low, deep, rich sound puddling between her legs. “Get yourself warm.”
Amber bent over and pushed her panties off, aware of the way her belly folded when she leaned down, the way her breasts hung. These shapes were all her own shapes, but his now, too. To a man as hard and rough as Tony, she must look so soft and rounded. Rare and beautiful.
He didn’t move.
She didn’t want him to.
She stepped into the shower but left a gap in the curtain big enough to talk through. Or glimpse through.
As she tipped her head back and let the hot spray pound against her scalp, she gave voice to the sentence that had been tripping around the back of her head for more than an hour. “The first guy I had sex with cried afterward.”
She kept her eyes on the pebbly plastic texture of the shower ceiling as she lathered up her hair.
“His name was Brian. He went to the Naz, too, and we dated junior year. I was … I was really unhappy back then.”
After losing her faith in God, she hadn’t known how to get it back. Hadn’t even wanted it back, but she’d felt an aching need to fill the hole it had left behind.
“Do you want to hear this?” she asked. Because the sound of the water was soothing, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the darkness for burying her apprehension.
“Yes.”
Curt and gruff, even for Tony.
Still, it was what she needed to hear to continue.
“So I kind of latched on to Brian.”
Brian had been so easy, so good. She’d loved that about him—how simple he seemed to find everything. As if his neural pathways were all four-lane highways, compared to the tangled, byzantine mess inside her head.
“We had about four million movie dates, and he came to my parents’ for dinner and hung out with Caleb and Katie. He practically felt like a member of the family. And then one of my friends heard him talking to one of his friends about breaking up with me.”
She had suds all over her hands, a great pile of shampoo lather that overflowed between her fingers. Quickly, she tipped her head back and rinsed it all out.
Then the conditioner, a cool puddle cupped in her palm.
“He’d never done more than kiss me. When I realized he was going to dump me as soon as he worked up the guts, I think … I think I was actually angry with him, but it didn’t come out like anger. I thought I loved him.”
Even then she’d realized that she didn’t love him enough. She never would have married him, and he must have recognized that. It must have factored into his decision to end things.
She’d just wanted to have a boyfriend. To have sex and be normal. The problem was that Brian didn’t really think sex was a normal part of a relationship. To him, it was something that should only happen between a married couple.
“I kind of … seduced him. Not that he made it hard, or anything, but he always kept his hands above the waist, and I moved them down. Gave him permission.”
She rinsed out the conditioner and glanced through the gap in the shower curtain. Tony was leaning against the door frame, watching. Listening.
“It was bad?” he asked.
“It was terrible.” It hurt, and she bled, and then she spent the whole time wishing it would be over. “He cried afterward. Like, really cried. I felt awful.” Not because she thought they’d sinned, but because she’d made him do it, and she knew he would beat himself up over it forever. “And then he dumped me.”
“Was the other guy better or worse?”
“Both.”
“Tell me.”
She twirled a bar of soap between her hands and spread suds down her arm. “The thing with Brian … I wasn’t in a hurry to do it again. But then I was going out with this guy, Andy.”
One of a chain of well-meaning men pressed on her by others. Amber was happy enough to go out with them, but usually things would peter out after three or four dates. Andy had lasted longer. Met her parents. Taken her to Cleveland for a Browns game.
“Tell me, Amber.”
His voice so calm and certain, the way it was on the job site when he told the workmen what to do.
Authority and kindness. Exactly what she needed.
“I was going out with him around Christmas, and he came over here for dinner and gave me a present that was way too expensive. A flat-screen TV. And I knew when I opened it, ‘This is because he wants you to have sex with him.’ So he was a creep, right?”
It hadn’t just been the present. She’d already noticed that he wasn’t as interesting as he’d seemed at first, or as nice. And on one of their dates, he’d been rude and condescending to their waitress. Always a bad sign.
“I’d bought him a tie. Seriously, a tie. And he bought me a TV, which I don’t even really watch. But I let him sleep with me anyway, because I wanted to have done it with more than one person. I felt like, I’m twenty-three, and I should know what this is like. I should be doing this.”
Her hands skated over her breasts, lathered between her legs. Her body felt sensitized, aware, but there was nothing arousing about telling these stories. It was a purging, a necessary cleansing so she could have Tony the way she wanted him.
Honest.
“That time it didn’t hurt. It was just exactly what it was, you know? His body and my body, joined together in this really improbable way, and the whole thing with the condom, and trying to figure out where
to put my arms.
“There was no way I was ever going to come, not in a million years. So I just made this little sound, like oh! and he seemed to think that was it, and he slapped along to the conclusion.”
Afterward, she’d felt scooped-out and empty, and she hadn’t been able to understand why. She’d gone to mass with her mother, just to see if she could find some glimmer of the feeling it used to inspire in her, and she’d felt nothing. No sin. No forgiveness. Just … nothing.
“He called me a few times after that, but I didn’t call him back.”
She rinsed off the soap and cut the water, wrung it from her hair, and pushed the excess droplets off her arms and legs with the flats of her hands. When she emerged into the clouded bathroom, he held open her old green towel and wrapped it around her.
He leaned down and kissed her softly on the mouth.
“It’s not supposed to be like that,” he said.
“I know.”
He walked her into the bedroom and took a seat on the edge of her bed. So stern again, serious in his wet red T-shirt and jeans, his hands braced over his kneecaps as if he needed something to hang on to.
He was beautiful.
And now that she’d told him, she felt different. Not quite perfectly calm, because her heart was pounding way too fast, and she felt as if she were floating an inch or two outside her body. But more sure of herself.
She wanted Tony for different reasons than she’d wanted Brian or Andy. Not because she expected him to rescue her or change her or fix her, and not because she had anything to prove.
Because he made her hot. Because he was sexy. And maybe more than either of those, she wanted him because she liked him. The actual him.
It was a good reason.
He didn’t look like he agreed, though. He looked like she’d drawn him to the edge of an abyss, and he wasn’t sure he ought to go over it.
“What are we doing, Amber?”
She tried to lighten the mood. “I thought you planned to—to—”
“To fuck you?”
“Right.”