Bare Pleasures

by Lindsay Evans

  Lex got out of the car and opened the passenger side door for her, stepping back to let her pass him. The back view of the dress was not as modest as the front, the cloth allowing for the looser movement of her gorgeous ass, showing the subtle movement of its mouthwatering dip and sway.

  “You look good,” he said.

  She sank into the leather seat and demurely tucked herself into the car, her purse on her lap. “Thank you.”

  He put Fela Kuti on the stereo, put the car in gear and reversed slowly out of her driveway. Beside him, she was silent and still, her legs crossed and her purse clasped loosely in her hands. Her perfume was subtle, a fruity cloud that made him think of mangoes and bare bodies ripening in the sun.

  “It was a pleasant surprise to get your invitation,” he said. Although it hadn’t really been an invitation as much as it had been an order. One he’d gladly followed.

  The faint twitch of her mouth pretty much confirmed that. “Thanks for accepting. I wasn’t sure if you were doing anything, had another date or something else going on.”

  “I would have canceled if I had,” he said, realizing it was true.

  He felt her eyes on him, weighing and evaluating. “You have really good game,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be a player anymore,” he said. The atmosphere was too heavy. Even if he was the one who’d caused it. But Noelle didn’t react. Lex sighed. “I wanted to see you. If you hadn’t called, I would have.”

  Noelle nodded. Her red lips pursed and she looked briefly at him, seeming surprised to catch him watching her, before she turned her attention back to the passing scenery. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

  Lex swallowed and then slowly breathed out, the guilt working the muscle in his jaw. They weren’t even in the same damn book.

  At the restaurant, they were a little early for their 7:30 p.m. reservation but still got immediately seated, tucked away in a romantic alcove overlooking a back garden blooming with lavender, sage and rosemary. The lights were suitably dim, provided by a baroque lamp shade made of elegant swirls of copper hanging low overhead. A small vase of yellow daisies sat precisely in the middle of the small wooden table.

  Lex raised his eyebrow as he looked around the space. “Your idea?”

  “Well, this is a French restaurant. Maybe the romance comes with the price of admission.” Noelle settled into the chair opposite him with a graceful shrug.

  Seeming completely relaxed, Noelle settled her small purse on a corner of the table and spread the napkin from her place setting across her lap. The softened light settled over her features, the wings of her eyelashes and her shoulders moving elegantly under the straps of her dress. And Lex watched her, looking for traces of the sadness Margot insisted were there. Sure, Noelle seemed thoughtful, and there were times that a hint of melancholy turned down her mouth and made her eyes glisten like diamonds. But nothing she said or did made him think she was ready to chuck it all because of some idiot who had been too afraid of happiness to grab and hold on to it with both hands.

  A waitress came, quiet and polite, into their alcove, bringing water and the bottle of red Bordeaux he’d ordered. She smiled at them both, kind and faintly envious, before leaving with their orders.

  Lex waited until the waitress left before he braced his arms on the table and gave her his absolute attention.

  “This is a nice place,” he said.

  “Isn’t it? Ruby—remember her from dance class?” When he nodded, she continued. “She told me about it. They have an incredible strawberry-and-Nutella crepe.”

  “For dinner?”

  “Any meal you want.”

  With a bright smile, quick and completely unexpected, she reminded him of his youngest sister, Elia, who loved having breakfast any time of the day or night. She could even be a little obsessed with pancakes.

  “My sister loves pancakes too. She can have them for any meal.”

  Noelle wrinkled her nose. “Blasphemer. I’m not sure what bad name to call you right now,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything about pancakes. I said crepes.”

  “I heard you the first time. Crepes are just glorified pancakes.”

  After a moment, she shrugged, the corners of her mouth soft with an almost smile. “I’ll have to consider that point.”

  When the waitress came back with water and warm bread for them to share, they put the crepe argument aside.

  “You have a lot of brothers,” she said, taking an appreciative sip of her wine. “I can’t imagine growing up with that much testosterone in one house.”

  “It was all right with me, obviously.” He shrugged. “I can’t speak for my mother and sisters.”

  He chewed on a piece of buttered bread and watched her with a smile. She was damn beautiful. He would miss this when she was gone from his life.

  “Not that I’m not enjoying this very light tiptoeing,” he said once he finished chewing, “But you said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “That’s not what I said, but apparently you want to talk to me.”

  “I do, but my conversation isn’t very urgent.” He watched her put another piece of bread in her mouth, the butter melting and leaving a glistening trace on her lips that he immediately wanted to lick off. Focus. “After the...uh, unfortunate way our last outing ended, I thought the last thing you’d want to see was my face.”

  Noelle slid her knife into the butter again but didn’t touch the piece of bread already on her plate. Under the dim light, it was hard to tell, but it felt like heat radiated from her, a blush. “I was a little forward the other night at the club, and when I didn’t get what I wanted, which was you in my bed, I acted like a brat. I want to apologize. I’m not usually like that.”

  Lex denied her apology with a quick shake of his head. “No, you have absolutely nothing to apologize for. I was the one who started things up. I...just wasn’t ready to follow through.”

  “I’ve been around long enough to know that rejecting sex is not the same thing as rejecting the person.” Noelle rested her elbows on the table and linked her fingers under her chin. “And I should have been more gracious when you told me no.”

  This was the most backward conversation Lex had ever had. True, turning down sex wasn’t something he did on a regular basis, if ever. If it hadn’t been for Margot and the promise he made to her, they would’ve done a lot more than kiss that night. Speaking of Margot...

  Lex thought about what he should say and how to say it. “I really, really wanted to...” He broke off. “I’ve thought about making love to you since the moment I saw you at the gallery. If you’d wanted to have sex the afternoon we talked at the tea shop, I would’ve totally been down—” her frown stopped him “—not that that’s what you wanted.”

  A smile lurked at the corner of her eyes. “No, no,” she said. “I understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “I promised myself I’d be celibate,” he said quickly. Did I really just...?

  “What?”

  Now she was going to make him repeat himself. It sounded so stupid when he said it out loud. “I gave up sex.”

  Her eyes were wide with a kind of horror. “For how long?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

  Noelle stared at him over the rim of her wineglass like he was some sort of museum oddity. “Celibacy.” She tasted the word like it was a completely foreign dish, one she had to roll over her tongue several times to make any sense of. “Why? I mean, I’m not questioning your choice, but you seem like a very sexual person. Why are you cutting yourself off if that’s not in your nature?”

  His tongue hovered between the truth and deflection before he finally chose the truth. “I’m a bit of a ho.”

  She choked on her wine and laughter spilled pa
st her fingers. “Excuse me?”

  The waitress chose that moment to come up to the table. To be fair, she had their food and was just doing her job, but Lex felt a spasm of annoyance that she was interrupting his already difficult confession. He wasn’t up to saying this to Noelle, or to anybody else for that matter, more than once.

  The waitress gracefully slid their warm plates on the table in front of them. Noelle’s strawberry-and-Nutella crepe. His boeuf bourguignonne. The French beef stew with its pearl onions and carrots served on a bed of whipped potatoes distracted him with its rich, wine-steeped scent. He picked up his fork before the plate was barely settled in front of him, sank it into a tender cube of beef, testing its texture, and then stopped himself. He lifted his head to apologize for his greediness but caught Noelle doing the same thing to her crepe. They shared a quick smile at their mutual hunger before taking a silently agreed-upon bite of their dinner.

  The beef was perfect, the flavor of the red wine perfectly balanced in the meaty dish. He moaned with not-so-silent appreciation the same moment Noelle made a similar sound.

  “This place is a keeper,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  They both chewed in respectful and thankful silence. Then Noelle wiped her mouth with her napkin.

  “You were saying...?”

  Lex took a swallow of wine. What was there to say after making the statement he just had? “That’s very self-explanatory.”

  “No, it’s not. You can’t say something like that and not...not explain yourself.”

  “I think I just did.” Lex picked up his fork, but Noelle reached across the table and grabbed his plate with both hands, pulling it to her side of the table and narrowly missing knocking over the small vase of daisies.

  “Nope,” she said. “Explain yourself.” How did she do that? Wasn’t the plate too hot to touch?

  Lex stared over at his plate with longing, not just for the food but for the opportunity to never have brought up the subject at all. Then, after this point, he would tell her that her sister had convinced him to date her and really end the night on a high note. He sighed.

  “If I promise to tell you, will you give me back my plate?”

  “How can I trust you?”

  “Because I said I would.” He gave her his irritated, hungry-man eyebrow.

  Her eyes narrowed again. “Okay.” She pushed the plate back across the table, wincing. “Damn, I swear this plate wasn’t so hot the first time.” She blew on her fingers while watching him across the table. “Go on. I’m waiting.”

  Lex considered. He could tell her some bull story about saving his sperm for the right woman...but he’d come this far. And he owed her that much plus a whole lot more. He adjusted the cloth napkin on his lap, clattered his fork at the edge of the bowl and sat back in his chair. “I’ve dated more than my fair share of women,” he said. “It’s time for me to slow down.”

  “Is that all there is to it?”

  She would ask follow-up questions... “With most—all—of the women I dated recently, I slept with them too early and, because of that, the relationships ended early too. I wanted to stop having meaningless sex that didn’t lead to anything.”

  “It’s hard to make meaningless sex lead to anything but more meaningless sex and maybe a baby, if you’re in the market for that sort of thing. Which I am not, by the way.” She lifted her hands up like she was warning off any invading babies heading straight to her womb.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not looking for either one,” Lex said with a laugh. He didn’t examine too closely what they’d agreed to, if anything. Instead, he picked up his fork, silently asking if she was satisfied with his answer. By way of response, she shrugged and picked up her own knife and fork.

  “That’s actually a pretty good reason not to indulge in dirty, club sex.” Noelle sliced off a piece of her crepe and put it in her mouth. She chewed slowly, watching him with an unreadable expression.

  “Okay, enough with the sex talk. Let’s talk about something that’s the very opposite of sex.”

  She licked a smear of Nutella from the side of her mouth. “I’m perfectly fine with our topic of conversation.”

  “Great.” Because it wasn’t. “We should talk about family. Family is the ultimate cold shower.” Lex desperately needed that to be true. “Your sister. How’s she doing?”

  Lex was floundering. He wanted to talk about sex. He wanted to have sex. With her. But that wasn’t what their dinner was about. He had an actual agenda going into this, didn’t he?

  Across the table, Noelle looked like someone threw a bucket of ice water in her face. “My sister? Margot?”

  “Sure. Unless you have more than one.”

  “One is quite enough,” Noelle muttered. Her utensils clattered against her plate as she abandoned them in favor of her wineglass. “What about her?”

  “Is she still trying to fix your life?”

  “What do you know about my sister?” Her tone was annoyed, instead of suspicious, and Lex winced at his latest misstep.

  “Wasn’t she trying to get you out of your so-called depression the other day? Does she still think you want to slit your wrists?”

  Pursing her lips, Noelle swirled the remaining wine in her glass but didn’t drink. “She’s just worried about me. After our parents died, all we had left was each other. It’s only natural for her to shelter her baby sister from the boogie men always waiting around the corner, even if they’re in her own mind.” But the way she played with her wine betrayed that wasn’t all she thought about her sister’s meddling ways.

  Lex could tell her now. Tell her everything. He gripped the heavy silver handle of his fork, speared a slice of carrot. Tell her. He put the firm oval of the carrot in his mouth and slowly chewed.

  “She cares about you,” he said. “That’s what family does. Our parents, our brothers and sisters, they do messed-up things to you out of love. Sometimes it’s for your own good, sometimes it’s just to prove they can control you and sometimes they act out of fear that you’ll make the same mistakes they did.”

  “Do you think that’s what Margot is doing?” she asked like he was overstepping his boundaries.

  “I’m not talking about your sister,” Lex said, instead of reaching for the words that were there waiting for him to speak. To tell Noelle what he’d agreed to do for Margot and then prepare himself to walk out of the restaurant and never see Noelle again.

  But the words didn’t come. Instead, he gave her the story of his past and what brought him to this table with her instead of a Jamaican prison.

  “I was a dumb kid,” he said.

  Lex told her all the stupid and pointless trouble he got himself into to prove he wasn’t just another Diallo heir, bloated with inherited money, who didn’t have to work and could live off the family wealth if he felt like it.

  From the beginning, he’d rebelled. Cherry bombing the toilets at his first private school, quickly getting himself expelled from another until his parents threw their hands up and sent him to a public school where he learned how to hack into supposedly impossible-to-crack computer systems. Weeks before his high school graduation ceremony, after years of bad behavior, he got sent to Jamaica as punishment and rehabilitation.

  “But was that even a punishment, being sent off to paradise for college?”

  “Oh, yes. It was definitely a punishment.”

  Although he was in college, his aunt and uncle, at his mother’s request, had taken away everything from him except what he needed to do well in school. He was restricted to using the computer lab on campus, only had a cheap cell phone and had to come home when he wasn’t in school.

  Naturally, he found a way around those restrictions, signing up for a fake campus activity that explained the days and nights he danced at Margot’s club.

&nbs
p; But he didn’t tell Noelle the last part.

  “I hated being there, but it ended up changing my life.”

  If Margot hadn’t sat him down and given him one of the most frightening talks of his life, he probably would have gone down a destructive path.

  “It was tough love,” Lex said. “But I needed it.”

  He shared his story, watching Noelle under the restaurant’s golden light. He was stalling, taking the time to enjoy the soft glow of her and the whispered intimacy of their voices while around them the rest of the restaurant hummed with the sound of cutlery and conversation, low laughter, the unobtrusive violins coming from the speakers. He probably would never see Noelle again. This was a night he wanted to remember.

  “Tough love, huh?” Noelle bit the corner of her lip. “I’m glad that worked for you, but I don’t think that’s what I need.”

  “Do you know what you need?”

  Noelle gave a bark of unamused laughter. “For my sister to leave me alone?” She bit her lip again. “You know, when I was with you that night, that first night, I really enjoyed the time we spent together. It was like, for the first time, except for the job I have now, I had something that was all mine that Margot hadn’t gotten for me or hadn’t touched.” She smiled at him, full and wide.

  And it nearly broke him.

  “All my life, my sister has been engineering my friends, my clothes, my boyfriends. Even the guy who dumped me last year was someone she arranged for me to meet. With you, it felt so good to have something apart from her. I love my sister, but she’s completely taken over my life.” She grimaced, a parody of a smile, admission of how doomed and hopeless it all sounded. “Our parents were careless with our lives in many ways. They left even our survival up to chance. Margot has spent her entire adult life trying to reverse the effects of that. I get it. But what she’s done is just another kind of damage.” Noelle took a big breath, like she was about to jump into the deep end of the pool. “Even though things might not have ended so well the other night at the club, I want to keep seeing you. I want to keep you for myself.” She looked embarrassed at her admission, her eyes flickering to the table before lifting again to meet his.