by Cara McKenna
Mica was curled on his side when she returned to his room. She ditched her clothes, and the moment she was under the covers he was pulling her back to his chest, draping his arm along her waist.
He sighed, and Clare glowed, unseen. She wasn’t dumb enough to get her hopes up, but the bald show of affection felt like a good sign.
“Oh.” All at once, a thought struck. “We should’ve told your friend we were leaving.”
“He’ll put two and two together.”
“You could text him, just in case he’s wondering.”
Mica surrendered with a sleepy grunt, rolling over to grab his phone off the bedside table. Just as he did, a noise came from the kitchen—a click and soon another, the sounds of a door opening and closing, and then of a bolt being flipped.
Mica set his phone back down. “Guess he figured it out.”
“Guess so.” Though it still nagged at Clare, just a little, taking a tiny measure of the glow off the moment. She couldn’t say she understood precisely how best-friendships worked between guys, but she knew she’d be annoyed with Bree if she’d driven her to a party and then the girl had gone AWOL.
It’s different with women. We worry about each other.
With that, she set the uneasy feeling aside, focusing instead on the noises moving through the apartment—keys being set on a counter or table, water running, footsteps coming down the hall. No voices. It seemed Vaughn hadn’t had Mica’s luck tonight. Though for all she knew he had a girlfriend, or maybe he wasn’t the one-night-stand type. He seemed to approach things with maturity and thoughtfulness, a touch of reserve.
Though you never could tell for sure. After all, I wasn’t the one-night-stand type until an hour ago.
She had little doubt that that’s what this would be. Hand-holding and placid spooning aside, this didn’t feel like a blossoming romance. Mica didn’t feel like a suitor—he felt vaguely like a predator, in fact, sleek and beautiful and calculating, and at the end of it all, she was only too happy to have let him catch and devour her. He was the perfect antidote to the doldrums her last relationship had left her in. If she only got the one dose, so be it.
No matter how things felt when they parted in the morning, no matter if she never saw him again, she’d remember this night fondly for a very, very long time.
CHAPTER FOUR
Clare woke as the sun lit the blinds behind her, confused.
She blinked, contacts sticky in her eyes. Red sheets stirred her sluggish memory. The plain white walls and the subtle scents of this strange room.
Mica.
She rolled over, finding herself alone in his bed.
She could hear a tap running not far away, then faint raps, as though someone were knocking the water from their toothbrush.
But which of them is it? Mica or Vaughn? Both options gave her nerves a jolt—she didn’t know either man well enough to guess how welcome she might be here, and for how long.
She’d play it cool, she decided, get her shit together efficiently, use the bathroom and steal a glass of water, then excuse herself. If someone offered a cup of coffee, she’d accept it, but not dawdle.
The thing was . . . last night had been the single hottest experience of her life.
No matter what she’d told herself as she’d fallen asleep, she wanted it to happen again. It felt crucial that she stick the landing this morning—be respectful that it was their space, their daily routines she was waking in, and not linger too long. Be friendly and sane and flirt a little with Mica if it felt natural, make her interest known, but not look too clingy, too eager.
She sat up and gave her pillow-flattened curls a finger-combing, found her bra on the floor next to the bed. Her panties took far longer to locate, buried deep in the covers, but she tugged those on as well. They weren’t exactly fresh feeling, but it beat going commando in a skirt on a brisk day. She’d just found her top when a door creaked in the distance and footsteps sounded in the hall.
Instantly her jitters kicked into high gear, any plans to play it cool leaping out the window. The steps faded, heading toward the kitchen, and she supposed she had little choice but to bite the bullet and find out for herself who was prowling.
A glance at her phone told her it was just after eight. Crazy she’d slept through the night and well past her usual wake-up time, but then again, sex was one powerful sedative. She opened the door and headed down the hall.
The TV or a radio was playing in the living room, the soft drone of the morning news. She used the bathroom, then took a deep breath and made for the kitchen.
Vaughn was at the table, his back to her, his attention on his phone, she thought, his arm moving subtly as though he was scrolling.
She knocked on the door frame, smiling when he turned.
His brows rose, if only a fraction. “Oh, hey. I thought you were Mica.”
“Funny,” she said, stepping into the room, “I wondered if maybe you were him, too.”
“He’s not in his room? He must have an opening shift.”
“Oh.” That was a touch perplexing. What if she’d slept later than whatever time Vaughn headed to work and been left with no way to lock their apartment behind her? Though there was a small chance Mica had woken her, told her he was going. Clare could be a heavy sleeper.
She ducked into the next room, where she’d left her shoes by the coffee table. As she stepped into them she called, “Well, good thing I got up before you left for work, I guess.”
When she returned to the kitchen she found Vaughn looking awkward, smiling tightly. “You, um, you want coffee? I don’t have to leave for an hour, still.”
“Maybe just a small cup.” She’d chug it down quickly and be on her merry way.
Vaughn got up and filled her a mug from the pot warming in the machine. He was dressed for work, in sturdy black pants and a black button-up, a pager or other such device clipped to his belt. “Milk?”
“Milk and sugar, if you have it. Thanks.”
He fixed her coffee and handed it over.
“Thank you.” Clare’s bags were cluttering up the table and she slung them over the back of the chair. She took a seat, feeling about half as weird as she might expect. And not especially coy. “Sorry,” she said.
“For?”
“This.” She hugged her mug and let her eyes move around the table, the kitchen. “This is a little awkward, isn’t it?”
“Probably. He didn’t tell you he was leaving early, did he?”
She shook her head.
“I shouldn’t be surprised. Mica’s not always the most intuitive guy when it comes to social graces,” he offered. “But if it makes you feel any better, I don’t care. Sorry, though. He can be a flake about stuff like that.”
So she was gathering. A flake, but a truly fantastic fuck. There was always a price to pay, she supposed, and if the cost of getting her mind blown was to make small talk with the man’s roommate, she decided it wasn’t such a high one. Plus . . .
“Good coffee,” she told him, raising her mug.
“Good.”
“So you’re off on your EMT duties this morning?”
“Yeah, in a bit. I work weird hours. Today’s ten to ten, and sometimes I do overnights.”
“When are you busiest?”
“Nights. Things get real sloppy right around three a.m.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You get all the photos you wanted?” he asked, glancing at the camera bag hanging by her side.
She pictured those shots of Mica, kneeling above her, shirtless. “Yeah, definitely. I’m excited to get them onto my computer and see what I’m working with.”
“Is that your day job? Photography?”
“No, I wish. I work in a call center for an online retailer. I’m the one you call and bitch at when you can’t find your tracking number or y
our new shoes smell weird.”
He laughed. “You must talk to some real characters.”
“You could say that, yeah. If it’s taught me anything, it’s that shopping doesn’t make anybody half as happy as the advertising industry wants us to believe.”
“No doubt.”
She sipped her coffee—too hot still to chug, but not drinking it felt as rude as lingering. Small talk it was.
“So you guys met through a kind of Outward Bound thing, right?”
Vaughn nodded. “It’s called Urban Exchange. This guy from Philadelphia, Julius Green, started it in the eighties, to get inner-city boys exposed to nature. Great program. I volunteered as a counselor for a couple of summers, after I aged out.”
“Cool. And you and Mica stayed friends, obviously. He said you take climbing trips together.”
“Yeah, at least once a year—coordinating my vacation time and his finances isn’t always easy, but we make it happen.”
“What is it about climbing, for you?” It was a question she wanted to ask Mica, as well, to know if the same quality that made him fearless in bed was also the thing that sent him scrambling up cliff faces.
“I like a challenge, I guess,” said Vaughn. “And the change of scenery. We meet up in the Southwest a lot—Arizona, New Mexico. Hot as hell, but it’s a welcome change of pace—plus, it gets me out of muggy, sweaty Pittsburgh for a week or two. It’s all the differentness that I like, I think. Different colors, different smells. Different sky at night. Different noises.”
“Sounds nice. I can’t remember the last vacation I took that was anyplace exotic . . . Philly doesn’t count, right?”
He smiled. “Probably not.”
“So is that what you and Mica bonded over, way back then?” she asked. “Climbing?”
He laughed. “Um, eventually. Not right away. We actually hated each other at first, or I hated him, anyhow.”
“Really?”
Vaughn nodded. “He was a real cocky little shit when he was sixteen. Obnoxious. He was lucky he didn’t get kicked out of the program for trying to goad the other guys into fights.”
“Jeez.”
“I wanted to kick his ass so bad, and I nearly did, our second summer in the program together—I was big for my age; he was crazy skinny.”
“But you didn’t? Kick his ass?”
“I started to. It got broken up by one of the counselors. He talked me down.”
“Oh? What’d he say?”
Vaughn looked thoughtful for a long moment before going on. “He basically laid it out for me, like, kids like Mica, they’re mean because mean is all they know. Mean is all anybody was to them.”
“Ah.” Interesting. Mica didn’t seem mean to her at all. He had an edge to him—you could see it in his stare and feel it when he fucked, but he’d not given a clue he might be a jerk of any sort. Of course, this was teenage Mica they were talking about. A man did a lot of growing up in a decade-plus. Thank goodness.
“The counselor told me fighting meanness with more meanness won’t win anybody anything,” Vaughn said, “so shrug it off, be the bigger man. So when we had to pair up for some survival skills hike, I walked up to him and asked if he’d be my partner. Nobody else would have—everyone was pairing up as quick as they could, praying they didn’t get stuck with him.”
“Awww.” Clare pouted, feeling bad for teenage Mica.
“No, not awww. I mean, the kid was a serious asshole. But anyway, we paired up, and we found out we were both really into Rainbow Six—this video game that was big at the time. And we ragged on some of the other kids, like you do, that sort of thing. He changed real quick, once I was talking to him guy-to-guy, not trying to prove anything. I don’t think I knew it at the time, but I think maybe I was, like, his first real friend.”
“Really? He seems so . . . charming.”
“He can be. And with girls, it’s different. But back then . . . And where he’s from, you’re stuck with the people on your block, for protection. But he never fit in, because he didn’t look like anybody else in that hood. And because he could be such a dick, alienating himself before other people could do the job for him, I think. And, you know, for other reasons.”
“Other reasons?” The way he’d said it, Clare felt like Vaughn expected her to know what this meant.
He studied her face, shrugged. “Just . . . He just didn’t fit the mold, is what I’m saying.”
She felt her brow crease, certain he was hinting at something she was in the dark about, but she let it drop. Getting too nosy about the man with his best friend seemed like the wrong strategy, if she wanted to find herself in bed with him again. “I can understand that,” she offered instead. “Not fitting in.”
“You get a lot of crap for it?” Vaughn asked. “For how you look? Wait, sorry—that came out wrong. You look great. I just meant—”
“It’s fine; I know what you meant. And, you know, not really. Not now, anyhow.”
“No?”
“From strangers, random jerks, sure. Not so much at school. I was with the same kids pretty much from first grade through graduation. Everybody knew who I was and was used to how I look. Though I can’t say I didn’t spend most of that time secretly wishing I could just blend in, look like everybody else. But the kids weren’t usually too bad.” She sipped her cooling coffee, nearly sad it was no longer too hot to drink. She was enjoying this chat.
“But when I was out in the world,” she went on, “in college across town, or in the clubs or wherever, I got plenty of reminders that I was different. It never really bothered me much, though. I mean, fuck whoever wants to say something shitty to me about it, or any guys who want to treat me like some exotic novelty or whatever. That only saves me the trouble of figuring out if they’re worth talking to, you know?”
Vaughn smiled, flashing all his perfect teeth. “I feel you. Like a built-in asshole-detection system.”
“Totally.” She looked to her cup. “I better finish this so you can get on with your morning.”
He glanced at the clock, shrugged. “I’ve got plenty of time.”
“Well, I better get my own ass in gear anyhow. I need to get home and shower. There’s a yoga class at eleven I’d like to catch. And a city to scour for more interesting faces.”
“Cool.”
She stood, draining the last of her coffee as she walked to the sink. She washed out the mug and set it on the drying rack. “Thanks again,” she told Vaughn, checking her purse for the essentials.
“My pleasure.”
“Tell Mica bye for me, I guess, when you see him. Unless that sounds bitchy.”
Vaughn laughed. “He’s not the type to overanalyze.” He stood, walking her to the door, flipping the dead bolt. “You know how to get where you’re going?”
“Oh yeah, it’s not far. I walked here last night.”
“Of course. Well, maybe I’ll see you around.”
She smiled, and felt a blush warming her cheeks. “Maybe.” If your friend asks me over again, I’ll be here quicker than dignity should allow. “Take care, Vaughn.”
“You, too.”
—
Vaughn shut the door at Clare’s back and shook his head to himself as he walked back to the table.
Nice girl. Nice, interesting, charming. Sexy. The kind of girl he’d have worked hard to find the nerve to ask out himself, had they met at a bar or somewhere. Though that was neither here nor there—if Mica was her type, Vaughn very likely wasn’t. Best friends or not, they couldn’t be much less alike.
He picked up his phone and typed out a text.
You forget something in your bed this morning?
He didn’t expect a reply, but Mica came back a minute later with, You offer her a coffee at least?
Vaughn rolled his eyes, typed, You’re the worst.
Not really, though. Mica wasn’t being a dick in his mind about the Clare situation. He hadn’t flaked on her because he didn’t think she deserved the courtesy of a little morning-after chat. He’d flaked because he was oblivious, and a little insensitive, just thoroughly useless when it came to this stuff. Vaughn had tried explaining this shit to his friend, but it was pointless.
We had a real nice talk. You’ll be lucky if she gives you another chance, dumb-ass. She seems cool.
And she was hot, no fucking doubt. Vaughn had always gravitated toward those bohemian types. Artists and musicians—creative girls, to bring a little spontaneity into his life, since he was Mr. Predictable, Mr. Routine. Though for as long as Mica was staying with him, Vaughn doubted he’d be having much luck in that department. He wasn’t blind. He knew his best friend was basically catnip to women. Good-looking, fearless, flirtatious. Vaughn didn’t think he was too shabby himself, but his dad had taught him to be a gentleman, and nice guys did finish last, at least when the competition was as charismatic as Mica.
He waited to see what Mica had to say to his last text, wanting to know if he planned to see Clare again. Vaughn was pretty sure she was into him, judging by how curious she’d been when they’d talked. But either the coffee shop got busy or else Mica didn’t think it warranted a reply, and he never did get an answer.
Vaughn was a by-the-book kind of guy. He met a girl, realized he liked her, asked her to dinner. He’d never in his life used any sort of hookup app or dating site. He met women through work; he’d casually dated a couple of nurses. He met women at parties or at a club, occasionally, though he was getting a little old for that scene. But he met women in the wild, as it were, took them out for a meal or drinks, got to know them.
He wasn’t such a gentleman that he’d not ever taken a woman home that same night, but he tried to not ever hook up unless he thought he wanted to see the girl again. He’d done the get-laid-by-any-means-necessary thing when he’d been younger. The older he got, though, the more lame it felt in the morning, waking up next to somebody you didn’t feel much for, or didn’t feel like you knew at all.