Just Lunch

by Nia Forrester

  I am messing around with my phone to pass the time when I hear her voice and look up. She is walking toward the track, and next to her is a tall, chocolate-hued brother. They are laughing at something, and Dani is looking up at him as she walks, so at first she doesn’t see me. She is wearing running tights in black, and a form-fitting pink sweatshirt. Her hands are in her pockets, and from one of them, I see the cord for her earphones hanging loose.

  Seeing her walking with dude makes me reflexively look toward the parking lot, to try to figure out whether they rode together, but it was too far off and I can’t see from my vantage point if there are two cars, or just one.

  I wonder if she noticed mine when they pulled up, and decide that she must not have, especially when she finally spots me and stops in her tracks. The dude walking with her stops as well, and then follows her gaze. He sees me, and a smirk crosses his lips.

  Dani is walking toward me now, and he follows, a little way behind her.

  I stand, and when she is right in front of me, I shove my hands even deeper into my pockets to prevent myself from hugging her.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hey.” My eyes drift toward her companion. His eyebrows lift just a little, and he tips his chin in greeting.

  Looking over her shoulder, Dani says, “this is Eric. Eric, Rand.”

  “Rocket Reese,” dude says, stretching out his vowels. “So, you must be Mr. Complicated.”

  I narrow my eyes and he gives a short laugh. He tosses his duffle bag to the side and shrugs off his pullover. Giving me one last look, he heads toward the track and begins doing some high-knee warmups.

  I look at Dani again, and now I’m a little pissed, for real.

  “What’s that all about?” I ask. “That ‘Mr. Complicated’ stuff.”

  Dani shakes her head dismissively. “He’s just … It’s a joke he made once. About my relationship status. It’s not … it’s nothing.”

  “Is your relationship status complicated?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t look directly at me, but instead, off over my shoulder. “Didn’t used to be.”

  “But now it is?” I move in closer, so we’re almost touching chests. I lower my voice. She tries to take a step back but I put an arm around her waist to hold her in place. “Huh?”

  She shrugs. “You tell me.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “It was just … I mean, I …”

  “I messed up,” I admit. “I wouldn’t have gone to that party if I knew it …”

  “You should go wherever you want to go, Rand,” she says, sounding tired.

  “And you wouldn’t care?”

  She still isn’t looking me in the eyes, and I don’t like it. It feels like she’s trying to distance herself from me as much as possible. Like she’s trying to shut me out.

  I know things haven’t changed that much in less than a week, but what’s starting to concern me is that it feels like she wants to change them. Like she no longer wants to feel about me the way I know she was beginning to feel.

  “I do care,” she says, surprising me. “The problem is I care too much.”

  “Then …”

  “I don’t go after other women,” she says. “I don’t go after women and try to … take them down, especially not over someone who …”

  “Someone who …?” I lean in, exploiting what I know she responds most to—me being close. I nuzzle the side of her neck, feel her lean into it. “Talk to me, Dani. What?”

  “I don’t go after other women over a man who isn’t even mine,” she says, exhaling. “That was not a good look for me,” she adds with a laugh. “And it especially wasn’t a good look when you wound up at her house, alone, later the same day I went after her.”

  “It wasn’t alone,” I say. “There were thirty other people there.”

  She pulls back a little to look at me.

  “Okay, I see what you mean.” I nod. “I messed up. I shouldn’t have gone. Especially not without you. But you’re out here … you’re …” I glance back in the direction where dude is still doing his warm-up routine. “You’re taking lunch dates and shit. And now, what’s up? Did you come with him today? Are you …?”

  “We’re running together. I’m doing a half-marathon and he’s helping me train. That’s it.”

  “Did you have your lunch date?” I ask, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m not interested in Eric. I’m not interested in … anyone.”

  “Anyone?” I brush my lips across the area behind her ear, and she shivers a little.

  “You know what I mean, Rand.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

  I might sound cocky, but I’m relieved. I reach up and gently turn her head toward mine and kiss her softly, waiting until the seam of her lips part on their own before tasting her.

  What I don’t say, is that there was a tiny part of me that kind of knew when I went to Alexa’s that it was something I should leave alone. But I thought about that girl from my past, Rayna, and about Alexa with her long legs crossed as she sat on my kitchen counter earlier; and I wanted to make sure the fever had truly broken on that life.

  Alexa was a stunning hostess, in skin-tight black pants when I got there, and a shimmery top that was seasonally-inappropriate to say the least. Her hair was in a ponytail that resembled a fountain of ink, erupting from the crown of her head. It moved with a kind of mesmerizing sway when she turned her head.

  When I walked in, her eyes lit up with surprise, pleasure, and triumph. She left the people she had been talking to and came over to me, resting a hand on my arm.

  ‘Glad you made it, Rocket,’ she said. ‘Something I can … offer you?’

  She was so slick, so practiced with that shit, I could picture the carcasses of the dozens of men she had probably slain with that line. But I’d only been there five minutes, before I knew that I wouldn’t become one of them.

  ‘Nah,’ I told her. ‘I’m good.’

  I spent the next couple of hours circulating the room, talking to my new colleagues. All everyone was talking about was the NFL protests, and contrary to what Alexa led me to believe, the network wasn’t taking a position, and definitely didn’t have a hard line for its anchors on whether they expressed support or non-support for the protestors.

  ‘No one expects you to jig for the NFL, Rocket,’ one of the producers said, when he pulled me aside. He was a brother, who had played one year in the League himself back in the day. ‘And on the real, could you respect yourself if you did?’

  Then he told me that he’d make me a deal. I should speak my mind, and if I was entering dangerous territory, he’d tug on my sleeve and let me know. Then we gave each other some dap and I was out.

  But when I got back in, chomping at the bit to talk it over with someone, the only ‘someone’ I wanted to talk to was a motionless mound in the bed.

  Though I pull my lips away from Dani’s now, I stay close. I brush my mouth against her ear.

  “I want to do this with you,” I say. “No bullshittin’… no half-steppin’… no lunch dates …”

  She gives a soft laugh.

  “And no … Eric,” I continue.

  Dani pulls back and looks at me. “He’s my trainer for the half-marathon.”

  “We’ll find you another one. Hell, I’ll run the half-marathon, and we’ll train together.”

  She looks at me for a moment. “Are you serious? Does it really make you that uncomfortable, me training with Eric?”

  Hell yeah, it does.

  “Nah,” I lie. “So long as he understands …”

  “I think he understands.” She looks over in his direction and I do as well, seeing that dude is taking it all in, and watching us all loved-up on the sidelines.

  “Just make sure you tell his ass,” I say kissing the side of her neck, “that it ain’t all that complicated: you’re with me.”

 
Dani treats me to one of those cute smiles of hers. I know she loves it when I talk like that.

  “If I leave you to your workout, you’ll come over later?” I ask her.

  She nods.

  “Today?”

  “Yes, today.”

  “Because Little Rocket’s been asking about you. And if you stop by, maybe Freya’ll start talking to me again.”

  I’m masking how much I’ve missed her behind humor. And I don’t tell her what I decided in the last few days—that I’m never letting myself miss her again. This is it. I’m going all in with this woman and, surprisingly, it doesn’t scare me. Not even a little bit.

  She smiles wider. “Okay. Now go. You’re too … distracting.”

  I grin back at her, and give her one last, long kiss.

  I wake up to the sound of cartoons. And they are louder than cartoons—or anything else on television for that matter—have any business being. I open one exploratory eye and see, at the foot of the bed, the back of Little Rocket’s head, his curly hair flattened on one side.

  He is sitting cross-legged, has the remote in hand, and is flipping channels between Nickelodeon and something called Sprout. Back and forth, back … and forth. It takes me a moment to realize that what he’s doing is trying to watch two shows simultaneously.

  I stifle a laugh and reach under the sheets, trying not to attract his attention until I am able to locate at least a t-shirt, and hopefully my underwear as well. In my mind, I am cursing Rand’s name because I distinctly told him that he should wake me about an hour before Little Rocket customarily gets up on a Saturday morning.

  By the clock across the room, that time seems to be somewhat before seven a.m. Next to me, there is only the indentation in a pillow where Rand’s head used to be, and a mass of tangled bedcovers, from last night’s … adventurousness.

  I am using my toes to pull toward me a lump of fabric beneath the sheets when I hear his voice.

  “Hey! You have TV in your room. What’d I tell you about coming in here and waking folks up?”

  “She’s sleeping,” Little Rocket says without turning away from the television. My vain hope that maybe he didn’t even notice that I was sleeping naked in his father’s bed is dashed. But it’s also pretty incredible that not only has he noticed, he doesn’t seem to care.

  Rand, shirtless and carrying a coffee mug grins at me and shakes his head.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I tried.”

  He sits on the bed next to me, and tries to kiss me, but, fearful of what I am sure is dragon breath, I evade it so his lips instead make contact with my cheek.

  I take the coffee from him and speak as quietly as I can and still be heard over the television.

  “You were supposed to wake me.”

  “I didn’t want to,” he says, his eyes traveling over my face and down my neck. I pull the sheet closer, and he reaches for it, prying it loose from between my fingers and taking a peek underneath.

  I smack his hand away and laugh. “Give me a shirt, or something,” I say nodding in Little Rocket’s direction.

  Rand reaches across me and pulls one from under his pillow. I recognize it as the shirt I pulled over his head the night before, while I sat astride his pelvis. I hand him the coffee mug again for a moment while I pull it on, then take it back for a long swallow. I close my eyes in pleasure at the bitter-sweetness of the Columbian brew and when I open them, Rand is staring at me, an expression on his face that looks something like love.

  I smile.

  “What?” I ask.

  “This is new to me, too,” he says. I almost don’t hear him because the television is still so loud. His eyes are warm, and vulnerable. And there’s that seventeen-year-old boy again. My heart quakes.

  “What is?”

  “This. Being with someone like this. In a relationship.” He shrugs. “I never did that.”

  “Yeah? So, how is it?” I ask.

  Rand bows his head toward me, and I let my head fall to one side, because I know what he’s about to do. I’ve become accustomed to it, but will never take it for granted—that magical moment when his lips make gentle contact with the side of my neck, and I feel the feathery soft bursts of his breath against my skin, and the goosebumps surface all over my body.

  “How is it?” he echoes, speaking against that soft, sensitive area behind my ear. “It’s …” I feel him smile. “It’s good.”

  Understatement of the year, Rocket.

  No longer leery of my potential dragon breath, I turn my head. I don’t care. I don’t think he does either.

  Just as our lips touch, a little voice reaches us from the foot of the bed.

  “No kissing!”

  Also by Nia Forrester

  Commitment

  Unsuitable Men

  Maybe Never

  Mistress

  Wife

  Mother

  The Seduction of Dylan Acosta

  The Education of Miri Acosta

  In the Nothing

  Secret

  The Art of Endings

  Lifted

  The Come Up

  The Takedown

  Ivy’s League

  The Lover

  Afterwards

  Afterburn

  Young, Rich & Black

  The Fall

  Acceptable Losses

  Paid Companion

  30 Days, 30 Stories

  Still (The Shorts – Book 1)

  The Coffee Date (The Shorts – Book 2)

  Nia Forrester lives and writes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where, by day, she is an attorney working on public policy and by night, she crafts woman-centered fiction that examines the complexities of life, love, and the human condition. She welcomes feedback and email from her readers at authorniaforrester@gmail.com or tweets @NiaForrester. And visit with her, at NiaForrester.com