At the supermarket, she parked, still unsettled, and they walked up the slope of the lot toward Sentry. The humidity was climbing, which ruined a perfectly good summer afternoon as far as Alana was concerned. But given that she was about to move to Orlando, she better get used to it, the average temperature in Florida’s July was in the nineties, with jungle-like humidity. Every single day. She was pretty sure she’d get used to it.
Inside the supermarket, carriage rolling along—Sawyer volunteered to push—they started in the produce aisle after he jokingly suggested they skip it for a direct trip to the meat counter.
“Mushrooms.” He picked up a package of baby portobellos. “Can’t have a steak without mushrooms.”
“Cooked on the grill, brushed with olive oil and thyme, maybe a little balsamic vinegar.”
“Oh, you are speaking my language, woman.”
Alana laughed and moved on, her down mood blasted out of existence by his sense of fun. Even in a supermarket. She felt bright and energized, half expecting the produce to wilt at her brilliance.
“You want salad, so lettuce…”
“Organic. Here. Though I haven’t figured out why they only package the good-for-the-environment lettuce in hard plastic.” She picked up a tub.
“See, that’s the advantage of the Man Diet—no vegetables to poison you or the planet.”
“Hmph. From what I’ve read, the meat industry does more damage.”
“My meat does no damage.” He waggled his eyebrows and she rolled her eyes. She’d bet that wasn’t true at all. Women probably jumped off buildings in droves when he left them.
The idea made her uneasy mood surface again. She pushed it away, helped gather other salad ingredients—carrots, scallions, cucumbers. “You and Melanie should start a garden out back. You can still plant lettuce and beets at this time of year.”
“Beets? You have got to be kidding me.” He picked out some cherry tomatoes. “You like these?”
“Love them. What kind of food did you eat growing up?”
“Traditional for the most part. Dad insisted on main meat and side starch. When he was away on business, Mom would go wild and serve soup or omelets, or even better, breakfast for dinner, like waffles with bacon. She’d experiment with ethnic foods, Oriental, Middle Eastern. Then dad would come home and it was back to pot roast and potatoes. His idea of adventurous foreign eating was lasagna. Snap peas?”
“Another favorite.” She put a handful into a plastic bag.
“What about you?”
“Gran was a great cook. Before that, with Mom, we ate take out, frozen dinners and anything that came out of a can. I was in charge of cooking pretty often, but my skills were limited. I remember trying to make sense of recipes in Mom’s Joy of Cooking once in a while, but we hardly had any ingredients in the house in the first place, and it was too much effort.”
“Wow.” He clutched celery to his chest. “I love that image. Celery?”
“Absolutely. Love what image?”
He put the celery in the cart. “You trying to make a normal family life for yourself and Melanie. It’s poignant, really. I had no idea your mom was so…”
“Absent?” Alana shrugged. “Mom was…is a very magnetic, charming and interesting person. With absolute zero impulse control.”
“More like Melanie, then. Eggplant?”
“Never.”
“I feel the same way.” He grinned and put it back. “So you take after your father?”
“I wish I could tell you. Never met the man, and Mom refuses to talk about him. But I always fantasized that he was just like me.”
“Hmm.” He held up two bags of bakery rolls, one white, one wheat. Alana pointed to wheat and he tossed it into the cart. “We’re batting nearly a thousand on taste compatibility. And I’m sorry about you missing out on having a father. If I’d known I could have sent you mine.”
“You didn’t want him?”
“I’m joking. Mostly. Dad can be a tough person to love, but we all do.” He stopped in front of the deli counter and examined the offerings. “My childhood was a catered picnic in comparison to yours.”
“There’s no point in comparing. We had life easier than others, who had it easier than plenty. When Gran and Grandad realized how bad things were with Mom, they snapped us right up.”
“And you’ve lived happily ever after.”
“So far, yes.” She pointed through the glass case. “Sliced turkey for lunches?”
“As long as we can have salami, too.”
“Psht, a no-brainer.” She ordered the amounts, along with sliced cheese. “Meunster okay?”
“Can’t live a day without it.” He gaped at an enormous summer sausage behind the glass case. “You know mine is—”
“Not one more word.” She was quite sure she had never, ever had this much fun in a supermarket. Sawyer was so alive and so enjoying himself—getting groceries, for heaven’s sake.
“Yes, ma’am.” He picked up a loaf of bread, passed it around his waist a few times, shot for the carriage…and missed. Laughed, scooped it up and deposited it more sedately among the salad items. “Basketball was never my thing.”
Alana laughed again, from sheer happiness. If Sam risked a similar move and missed, he would have sulked. He and she used to get into so many disagreements over brands, calories, nutrition, price, she finally laid down the law that one or the other of them would go food shopping—usually her—but not both.
Shopping with Sawyer was fun. Dangerously fun. If nothing else, Alana would try to put more of this type of fun into her daily life from now on. A lesson well learned. And a way to take part of Sawyer to Florida with her. Which she might as well admit she wanted to do, even knowing his image and her fascination would fade within a week or so after leaving.
At the meat counter, he casually piled five or six steaks in the cart to make her laugh. They settled on a thick ribeye big enough for three or four, two if you listened to Sawyer, then pushed the cart down the cookie aisle where they both reached for Nutter Butters at the same time.
“My favorite.”
“Mine, too.” He held on when she tried to pull them toward the cart, which left them close together holding the crinkly plastic package aloft.
Alana should move, but his eyes seemed to be holding her where she was. “Alana, you are denying fate. We passed the Nutter Butter test. We are clearly destined for each other.”
She tried to laugh, but it didn’t work. “Cookies is the ultimate sign?”
“Sure.” He moved closer. “Cookies.”
She wanted to kiss him practically more than she wanted to go on breathing. But she wouldn’t, not until she had this all squared away with her sister.
“I think…” She swallowed, tried again. “I think we should go buy some wine.”
“I think that I haven’t had this much fun in way too long.” He let go of the package, took a reluctant step back and she put the Nutter Butters in the carriage, feeling as if she were under water, her movements slow and not quite real.
They finished the shopping and made it through the checkout line, fighting amicably over the bill which they finally agreed to split. Back home, they grilled the mushrooms and steaks, made the salad, heated the rolls and ate in the backyard, candles on the table ready to light when it got dark. Simple good food. Alana drank too much wine and put her hand over her glass when Sawyer opened another bottle. More and she’d lie awake in the middle of the night with a headache and the sweats.
The utterly Alana-sensible nature of that thought disgusted her, so she took her hand off and gestured him—what the hell, to go ahead.
“Tell me, Alana.” He finished pouring her wine and filled his own glass. “What’s wrong with the world and how can we fix it?”
“People need to be nicer to each other.”
“Good plan.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to being nicer.”
“And more polite.”
“Yes, please, thank you,
ma’am.”
“More accepting of each other.”
“Without exception.”
“More love. More—”
“Fabulous sex.”
She nearly spit out her wine laughing. “I suppose that would help.”
“I have another great way we can help change the world.”
She was about to giggle when she saw his face, serious in the dimming light.
“Let’s get some candles going and I’ll tell you.”
“Is this what you and Debbie were talking about that you said you’d tell me later?”
“Yup.” He used a long, slender butane lighter on several candles, which flickered in the still air and lit their immediate area with a warm yellow glow. “My dad has been asking me to head our foundation, which I resisted…until now.”
He told her the story, the building Debbie wanted him to buy, the studio spaces available, some individual artist’s stories, his excitement over improving Milwaukee’s position as a city that encouraged the profitability of creative arts. While he spoke, she felt a sweet ache widening in her chest. This man had real depth and a real desire to live his beliefs.
“So I am thinking seriously of pursuing the opportunity.”
“Sawyer, it sounds perfect for you.”
“I think so, too.” He took a sip of wine. “And…now, tell me how you got into building management instead of photography.”
“That’s what my Grandad did.” She put her glass on the table, couldn’t resist another Nutter Butter, even though they were definitely not meant to be served with red wine. “He managed the Milwaukee bank building downtown. I helped him through high school and college to earn money, then after graduation I was ready to leave home, so when a job came up in Chicago I grabbed it.”
“You enjoy it?”
“Sure.” She nodded slowly too many times. He waited, watching her expectantly, knowing there was more to the story than “sure.” “It’s good work. I’m organized, good at problem-solving, good with people. I learned a lot.”
“But…”
“Like you, I guess I want something that is useful to the world, but also feeds my soul.”
His turn to nod. He looked very smug and a little triumphant; she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. Plus they’d been talking nonstop all evening, but now silence fell between them. Crickets chirped, lightning bugs flashed yellow around the bases of trees and between bushes. An occasional car engine sounded in the distance. What was he thinking?
“Tell me something.” His voiced had deepened, he was swirling the red liquid in his glass, watching her. There was no longer anything smug in his gaze. “Alana.”
“Yes?” Her voice came out a little breathless. The way he was speaking, the way he was looking at her made the darkness seem to close in around them. “Tell you what?”
“Tell me what you would have liked to do that night we had together.”
“What?” She instinctively sat up straighter and brought her knees together. “Where did that come from?”
“Have you been able to think of anything else? I haven’t.”
“Melanie wants you, Sawyer.” She automatically reached for the issue with her sister as if it were a weapon.
“Melanie is out tonight with another man.”
For a second she was startled, thinking of that phone call, then she realized. “Edgar? He’s just a coworker.”
“Not Edgar. Some guy with a weird name. That artist she was talking about, the guy from the Third Ward. She said something about being good and not calling him, but then he called her and she couldn’t say no.”
Alana tried to get her wine-soaked brain to concentrate. This made no sense. Why would Melanie do this when all she talked about was getting together with Sawyer? “But she’s been flirting like mad with you.”
“Nothing is going to happen there, Alana. Melanie doesn’t really want it to and neither do I. Not with what’s between you and me.”
Alana kept her features calm while dark excitement rose. Deep down, she already knew nothing would happen between him and Melanie. It was a relief to admit it. And also mildly upsetting, which didn’t make sense. With the Melanie issue out of the way…Help.
“I promised not to touch you. I’m not going to touch you. But—” he put his wine on the picnic table and she braced herself “—you can always touch me…or yourself.”
Oh, no. This was crazy. She was on fire, at the same time clenching her thighs prudishly together. She’d never…not in front of a man.
“Listen to what I want to do to you, Alana. Everything I planned to do when we woke up together on Friday and never got to. I’ve been tortured by the thought of it ever since. I want you to be tortured, too.”
He spoke in a low, mesmerizing voice of undressing her slowly, watching her breasts emerge, free and heavy, from the bra she imprisoned them in and exploring her nipples with his tongue.
Her breath hitched in a gasp. He whispered her name, put his hand to his fly in a silent question.
She nodded as if she were in a dream, watched him unzip his shorts, pull open fabric to release his erection, pull the outer skin down to the base so the shaft strained hard and long.
The sight nearly brought her to the edge; she began trembling uncontrollably from nervous excitement.
“Your turn.” His eyes shone in the candlelight. A warm breeze caressed her and she shivered, though she wasn’t at all cold.
Why not, Alana? There was no reason now other than her silly virginal reluctance, which the wine had loosened, and the strange dark fear burning in her chest.
She opened her legs slowly, shyly, moved the material of her loose shorts aside, then her panties. He made a sharp sound of agonized approval which spurred her fingers on to start a rhythm. She stared at the ground in embarrassment at first, then the arousal took hold and freed her to be bolder. Soon she could look up and watch his hand working…then make herself meet his eyes. The connection raised the excitement impossibly higher. She stopped trembling, let out a soft moan of pleasure.
He went on, detailing his slow slide inside her, the way she’d feel on his cock, the way he wanted her face to look while he pumped her.
Alana tipped her head back, braced one knee up against the arm of her chair, wanting him so badly she nearly gave in, crossed the few feet between them and straddled him. What was stopping her?
“Then I’d turn you over. Kneel behind you…”
Too late. She lifted her head, wanting to see him when she came. Her fingers worked harder. She focused on his thick erection, then as her orgasm hit, she looked up, met his eyes, let out a soft cry, and saw the rush of his own climax seconds later.
They both collapsed in their chairs, panting, sated, smiling in the private darkness of their evening together.
Alana took in a long, stuttering breath. How had this happened? Sawyer hadn’t touched her with his hands, but somehow he’d managed to touch her heart. The thrilling rush they just shared, which she’d never trusted another man enough to do, seemed as intimate as if they’d made love for real, skin on skin, arms around each other, bodies joined. What made her turn around so completely to trust this man?
It wasn’t only the wine.
Hours later, in bed alone, predictably, Alana couldn’t sleep. She could damn the red wine, but it wasn’t only that. She’d gone to bed late after sitting out on the lawn with Sawyer, talking for hours, until the candles burned down to stumps. Very late. Way too late to take a sleeping pill. So she turned and twisted and dozed and turned and twisted some more.
So restful.
Finally, after dawn started to break, she gave up and got up, put on a robe she’d borrowed from Melanie and went downstairs, started her coffee and sat at the counter, sexy memories of the previous evening still burning through her, feeling happy and guilty and confused and elated and just about everything else she could feel.
Halfway into her coffee, she heard steps coming downstairs and braced her
self. Not Melanie, too heavy. Sawyer? So early? She hadn’t spent the night with him. He hadn’t asked and she wasn’t going to get that involved, not when she was about to leave town. Why commit emotional suicide when she didn’t have to?
The footsteps turned the corner. Alana gaped at the unfamiliar male silhouette. Who the hell was this guy?
He crossed the threshold into the kitchen. Young. Torn, sagging jeans. Bedroom eyes. Piercing in his nose. Oh, Mel. The “dreaded” phone call, the date last night—the artist guy, here in the flesh.
“Hey.” The man raised a hand in greeting. “How ’ya doing?”
“Uh…good morning?”
“You must be Melanie’s sister.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Sledge. Nice ta meetcha.”
Sledge. Oh, God.
“Do you want some coffee…Sledge?” She could not call him that. She wanted him to leave. She wanted to go upstairs and haul Melanie out of bed by her feet and scream at her. Not to make more snap judgments, but “Sledge” had the look of all Mel’s other bad-boy mistakes. What happened to the new leaf she was turning over? What happened to Sawyer being The One? Did that make this guy The Two? Were The Three and The Four coming over tonight?
Her sister’s light footsteps sounded pattering down the stairs; she rounded the staircase, hand on the banister, swinging in a wide gleeful circle, stopped still when she saw Alana in the kitchen, then came forward. Cautiously.
“Hey, Alana.” Melanie glanced nervously at Sledge. “You’re up early. I thought you’d still be asleep.”
“Hoped, you mean.”
Sledge glanced even more nervously between the sisters. “Yeah, uh, I think I’m gonna hit the road, thanks. Nice to meet you, Alana. Mel, hey, c’mere.”
Alana stared at the table to avoid having to watch the slurpy kissing she could hear all too clearly coming from the back door. The exchange of thanks for a fantastic night. Sledge’s promise to call soon. Melanie’s wistful response, “That’d be nice.”
While She Was Sleeping... Page 11