“I’m not birthing anything right now.”
“Just practicing.” He gives me a hotter-than-hot smile.
“Practicing what? The childbirth part or the conception part?”
“I get a choice? Because I pick conception without the conception.”
“Then that’s not conception. It’s just sex.”
“You’re on to something there, Amanda. What a good student you are. Quick study.”
As I nestle in his arms, belly back where it belongs, his hand rests on my outer thigh. When I lean back against his chest, it’s a thick, warm wall of ahhhhhh.
“You have body fat,” I murmur as we watch a gooey baby being placed on a mother’s flaccid belly and crawling up, in search of a nipple. The scene reminds me of that one time I had sex with this really weird guy I met on Craigslist....
“I do.” An appreciative palm gives my thigh a squeeze. “So do you, in all the luscious places.”
“I thought she said he was her brother,” one of the women behind me hisses. “Why’s his hand up her skirt?”
“Ewww,” her husband grunts.
Andrew reluctantly removes his hand and sighs. Warm breath that smells like coffee and spices tickles my ear.
The video shows a woman latching the baby to her breast, a look of blissful contentment on her face. As the camera pans out, we see a doctor merrily stitching away at her torn bits, using a needle the size of an aluminum baseball bat with a meat hook at the end.
At least, that’s how my panicked brain views it.
All of the women in the room collectively gasp and bring our knees together.
“Don’t worry!” Sunny says cheerfully. “That won’t happen to you! Daily perineal massage for months before birth will make you stretch to fit anything in there.”
“What if she already had to stretch to fit anything in there to make the conception possible?” one of the dads jokes.
“Like a turkey baster,” the lone lesbian partner cracks.
“Perineal massage?” Andrew whispers. “Is that what they call it? I just call it foreplay.”
And I’m moist.
He stays right there, cocooning me from behind, his hands roaming over my pretend belly.
“You ever think about having kids?” he asks.
A joke sticks in my throat. I have to swallow twice before I can speak.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes, you’ve thought about it, or yes, you want them?”
“Both. I want them.”
I can feel his smile against my cheek and earlobe.
“How about you?” I ask in a hushed tone.
“Me, too. Not for a little while, but yeah. Some day.” He cups my pregnancy pillow and lovingly pats it.
And just like that, I fall even more in love with my fake brother.
I’m walking down the sidewalk through Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston. Street performers juggle on stilts, crowds surrounding them, errant children clapping and running up to throw dollar bills in open music cases. The sky glows as if it’s daylight and yet it’s not. A dark chill in the air, a smoky mist that billows and blanks out the rest of the city, makes it clear that nighttime prevails.
The scent of freshly-made caramel corn and sour beer fills my nose, and I’m walking, step by step, looking up at the faces of moms and dads, of street people and college students, of people I don’t know.
They all ignore me. I smile harder.
A shriek. A sigh. A raucous laugh. A baby crying. All the sounds pop in and out of the glow and the smoke, as if playing a symphony with the human voice as instruments, following a music score I can’t read.
I stumble slightly on cobblestones, grabbing the corner of a produce cart for support. It is laden with melons and apples, cucumbers and oranges, fresh fruits from the Haymarket stands nearby.
As I look down to catch my footing, I see I’m naked.
Completely nude.
The chill of the nighttime runs up my spine like a mouse escaping a predator, tiny claws making their way from the small of my back to the top of my head. I can’t shout. Can’t move. Can’t bear to do anything that might draw attention to me.
And so I freeze in the center of everything that glows and obscures, my heart receding as if it, too, wants to fade away to nothing so it can’t be seen.
A police siren begins, abrupt and alarming, as if a cruiser hid in the shadows behind the crowd and suddenly flipped a switch.
Instead of turning toward the source of the sound, every single person in the crowd looks at me.
I look down at my chest.
My heart is a red, screaming glow, calling out for a kind of help I don’t have words to ask for.
Andrew’s apartment door buzzes and I sit up, whacking my half-asleep head against a cantaloupe.
“Shit!” shouts the melon.
Oh. That’s not a piece of produce.
The dream lingers, my hand on my chest where the bright red glow of my shrieking heart just was moments ago. I feel my breasts with frantic palms, fingers sliding into the grooves between my ribs, solid and warm but not on fire. The crowd’s eyes are not on me. There are no street performers.
It was, as always, just a dream.
I’m in Andrew’s bed and he’s rubbing his eye socket, squinting at me like a pirate through a white tunnel made of cotton.
I’m under the covers and disoriented. How in the hell do baby kangaroos instinctively find their way out of the birth canal into the mama’s pouch when I can’t disentangle myself from a simple bed sheet?
Andrew’s naked ass walks away, his hand rubbing his head, by the time I extricate myself.
He comes back into the room wearing nothing, but carrying two lattes.
I enjoy the view.
“You answered the door like that?” I accept my morning treat with gratitude.
He leers at my naked chest. “They know to leave it outside the door now.”
“You’ve done this that often?”
“Only with you.” He winks.
“I’m honored.”
“You should be.” He gives me a puzzled look and brushes his fingers against the eyebrow I whacked. “You okay? Bad dream?”
I laugh through my nose, suddenly tongue-tied. “Just my usual. Naked in public nightmare.”
“Ouch.” He gives me a searching look, but one of companionship and acceptance. It’s okay, that look says. Take your time. I’ll be here.
The residue of the discomfort from that other world persists, like an oily sheen on my skin. I want to talk about anything but the dream, especially when I am, indeed, naked right now.
I look outside at the gorgeous spring day. “How about we have coffee outside on the balcony?”
His face goes blank. A pinprick sensation, a tingly sense that there is a misalignment in the room, washes over me.
“Let’s just stay here in bed,” he says in a clipped voice, avoiding my eyes.
I shove my hair out of my face and feel a thick thatch at the back of my head. This is no normal case of bedhead. This is, most firmly, sexhead, which is a physical manifestation of being well-thumped in ways where by thumped, I mean fu—
“I love how you look when I wake up next to you,” he says, his eyes tipping down to look at the top of his coffee. Shyness is endearing on most men, but on Andrew, it damn near makes my heart implode.
I’m going to need more caffeine for this level of emotional engagement and nakedness combined at 7:07 a.m. Whatever weirdness I just felt fades instantly.
“I love waking up next to you, my fake brother.”
His laughter carries across the room and out the open window, toward that family picture on his dresser.
“That felt a little porny if I’m your brother.”
“As if creating a clay mold of my cervix last night in class wasn’t inappropriate enough?”
“It certainly was interesting when that instructor took your cervix and shoved the plastic doll through it.” He shudder
s as he drinks his coffee, his shoulders round and contoured, corded tendons popping out as he moves. I don’t need Netflix.
I just need Andrewflix. Twenty-four seven. I could watch him all day.
I shudder, too. “She seemed way too enthusiastic about perineal massage.”
His hand goes for my naked hip. “I don’t know. I’m not sure you can ever be too excited about that part of a woman’s anatomy.”
“You have an endless supply of frat boy lines.” I can’t stop giggling. He joins me, his deep chuckles rippling on the air, weaving with my laughter to form a cloud of contentment that fills the room.
“What were you really doing at the hospital last night?” I ask. We didn’t exactly, um, talk much last night after the childbirth class was over. In fact, I think my panties are still in the limo. Now that I have coffee and we’ve thoroughly reacquainted ourselves with every inch of each other’s skin, it’s time to turn to conversation.
“Board meeting.”
“Sunny said something about a cancer wing.”
He blinks fast, suddenly, and his neck tenses. “Right. Dad’s donating to the hospital. Wants to help bring new technology to the cancer center.”
“To help him?”
“To help everyone. He’s always had his hand in smaller philanthropic causes, but for this one he wants to pour a ton of his personal fortune into the new wing.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Andrew shrugs. “His money. His choice.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask questions like this,” I say, suddenly feeling like I’ve gone in the wrong direction.
“What?” He holds my hand. “No. Nothing wrong with talking.”
“You seem closed off.”
“I do?” He purses his lips, eyebrows tilting down in an expression that’s not quite a frown. “I guess...I just don’t talk to people like this. It’s new.”
“Like what?”
“Like a human being.”
“You are one, you know.”
His eyes light up with mischief, little flecks of amber shining in the sunlight. “I’ll have to drive that out of me. Such a weakness.”
The heavy moment is over. I take a big gulp of my coffee and stay quiet.
He squeezes my hand. “You can ask me anything, Amanda. No subject is off limits.”
“Really?”
“Really. For instance, you could ask me about that family resemblance the instructor noticed last night—”
“Can we change the subject? You are so not my brother. Not even my fake brother. I’m an only child.”
“Lucky.” He drinks a big sip and looks at me. “You never had to compete for attention.”
“Nope. Just me and my mom.”
A shadow passes over his face. If I weren’t staring at him, I’d have missed it.
“Right. For us, it was just the three sons and our dad and our tutors and his assistant, Grace.”
“You mean Declan’s assistant.”
“She is now. But back then, she worked for Dad.” Andrew’s face goes wistful, the light stubble on his face the only manifestation of adulthood holding him back from looking like a teen as he remembers. “Grace was the one who helped keep us functioning after Mom died.”
I look at the family picture. He looks at me.
“Have you seen that?”
I nod as I drink more coffee. A salty gust of wind lifts up and into the room, carrying my heart with it, lifting so high in my chest it seems to cry out as it bangs against its limits.
Crawling to the end of his bed, he stretches and grabs the frame, then settles next to me, holding it.
“She—” His voice cracks like a preteen’s. Having him sit here, post night-time lovemaking, drinking coffee in bed while going into the very vulnerable center of his being is a gift. I want to spend the rest of my life just sitting next to him. Holding his hand. Drinking coffee.
Just being.
That feeling rolls through me with a resounding certainty that clears my mind.
“She what?” I ask, urging him on. This is like having a windowless room turn out to have an enormous skylight buried under three feet of snow that has just thawed.
“Nothing. Not important.”
“It’s important to me.”
The fluttering of his eyelashes as emotions fight against each other within him makes me ache for what his life must be like on the inside. Andrew McCormick, CEO of Anterdec. He’s a wheeler and dealer, the young CEO everyone is watching for his first big misstep, eyes of the business world on him not in admiration but with a smirk, just waiting for him to screw up.
And here I am, in his bed, listening to him talk about missing his mom.
“She would have liked you.” His hand crawls under the sheet, seeking mine again. The threaded pull of our ten fingers intertwined like roots makes me smile.
The stinging pain of unexpected tears and a protective tenderness towards him makes me inhale slowly, like discovering a new flower so beautiful you have to smell it.
“I’m sorry I never got to meet her.”
He leans over and kisses my cheek, all while squeezing my hand. “Me, too.”
The picture frame set aside, he reaches for my coffee and puts it on the bedside table, then slowly, sweetly, makes love to me as if I’m his entire world, as if eternity were an unending loop of all that is good and right in the world and each time our bodies connect, we create a new universe.
21
I think there is a checklist of Things You Do in a Relationship When You Live in Boston, and going to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park is one of them.
Except when you’re dating a CEO and a near-billionaire, the experience is a wee bit different from the masses. I’m standing in a premium suite behind home plate, after spending an hour drinking beer and munching on little lobster and sushi bites. Andrew’s company is hosting an event here for some investors in a new office building in the Financial District, and I’m arm candy.
I’m enjoying being arm candy. It’s a new role for me.
We’re here for a mid-afternoon day game. Because he is Andrew McCormick, we’ve come by limo, doorstep to doorstep, from the underground garage in his apartment building to a back door he walked through so quickly you would think he was on fire.
He is certainly in his element, dressed in a polo shirt and khaki casual trousers, wearing the requisite Red Sox cap. I am dressed in a too-tight V-neck Red Sox jersey that he gave me last night, especially for this event, and I’m learning something about myself as I make small talk with eight men who each are worth more than the gross national product of half the countries in the world.
I am pretty hot.
That sounds so braggy. I know. But coming from someone who has never based her self-worth on her looks, but rather on her ability to fix problems, this is new. Being with Andrew makes me feel attractive. Desirable. Worth the male gaze.
And this jersey he gave me is eating up gazes, all right. My boobs have never had so many conversations.
Most of them with Andrew himself.
He extracts himself from some scintillating talk about reinforced steel and snakes an arm around my waist.
“Nice shirt.”
“Someone gave it to me.”
“He has great taste.”
“He doesn’t know my size.” I tug at the hem to cover my quarter-inch of exposed belly. All that does is expose another half-inch of breast.
“Oh,” he sighs, so hard I feel his hot breath on my cleavage. “He most certainly does.”
“Game starts in ten minutes!” someone shouts.
“Ready to get to our seats?” he asks my breasts.
I touch his chin and make his eyes meet mine.
“They don’t talk, you know.”
“If they could, though, they’d say really nice things about me,” he says with a smile. “That Andrew is so attentive.” He pretends to be my breasts, his voice shifting into a falsetto. “He’s so sweet. We wish Amanda
would let him touch us more.”
I hit him gently, right above his belt buckle.
“Oof.”
“My breasts don’t talk like that. They have a genteel Southern accent.”
He starts to put his ear on my cleavage. “This I have to hear.”
I sprint for the door, knowing that only propriety stops him from hungry-handing my ass.
We wind our way up stairs to the pavilion suites, where a wall of glass faces the ball field. One of the men in the group lets out a low whistle. I join him.
Andrew whistles, too, but I don’t think he’s looking at the ball park.
“That is a view,” I say.
“Sure is,” he agrees, staring at my rack.
“Can that glass wall open up?” one of the men asks.
Andrew tenses and answers, “No. We’re keeping it closed. It’s too humid out there.” While he’s right that it’s a nasty, swampy June day in Massachusetts, he’s not telling the whole truth.
“The glass wall does open,” I correct him. “This can become an open-air suite if we want.”
Andrew’s glare makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong, so I shut up instantly. My teeth snap together from the force of how fast I close my mouth. He doesn’t even have to ask.
Suddenly, this shirt is all wrong. Being in this suite is intolerable. I can’t be here. I give him a shaky smile and go back downstairs to grab my sweater, practically running. The suite is overly air-conditioned anyhow, so I have my excuse if anyone wonders.
In the downstairs lounge, I give myself a few minutes to catch my breath.
What the hell just changed upstairs?
“Honey?” one of the female bartenders asks as she dries a fresh rack of washed glasses. “You okay? Those guys harassing you?” She gives me one of those looks that only two single women can give each other in a sports setting where alcohol is everywhere.
“I’m fine,” I assure her. “Just, you know. My date is here with his clients and I need a break.”
Her eyebrow shoots up. “Andrew McCormick’s your boyfriend?” She makes a whew sound. “Nice.”
I smile. “Thanks.” It definitely feels weird to hear someone call him my boyfriend. Andrew and I haven’t had that conversation yet. I let it slide, because I can. He’s nowhere nearby to overhear.
Vote Then Read: Volume III Page 186