He's Not My Boyfriend

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He's Not My Boyfriend Page 10

by Jackie Lau


  She nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Am I your fake boyfriend now?”

  “Nope. In fact, I’ve told my grandmother about five hundred times in the past week that you are not my boyfriend, which of course makes her even more convinced that you are.” She shrugged. “I just hope it means Roger won’t be coming over again, because I do not need a repeat of that.”

  He didn’t understand why this was happening, but he wasn’t going to say no to Iris.

  “I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  After work on Friday, Alex drove to the address Iris had given him. It was an old, narrow house near Chinatown. He parked on the street, got the box of chocolate from the backseat, and headed to the door.

  It was nice to have something to do on a Friday night rather than being brutal to his body at the gym, then going home and making a quick dinner and collapsing in front of the television.

  Still, he couldn’t help but be nervous.

  He knocked on the door and immediately heard yelling inside, which made him smile. A minute later, Iris opened the door, and his skin prickled at the sight of her. She was wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt, which made him feel slightly overdressed—he’d changed after work and put on a dress shirt.

  “Hello,” she said. “Come in.”

  An elderly Chinese woman with short white hair appeared beside her. “You are Alex?” After he nodded, she turned to Iris. “I think you made a good choice. Your boyfriend is very handsome.”

  “For the last time, he’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Is this true?” Iris’s grandmother asked him. “You’re not her boyfriend?”

  “I am not.”

  “Aiyah. Silly kids. It reminds me of oldest granddaughter, Natalie. She kept insisting Connor was not her boyfriend, and now they’re married.” She took the chocolate from his hands. “This for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like this kind. Very tasty.” She looked him up and down. “Yes, you are nice. I forgive you for not being a medical doctor like Connor. You have an engineering degree, like Iris?”

  “No,” he said. “I have a diploma in construction engineering technology.”

  She frowned. “You have no degree? Your parents allowed this?”

  Well, they hadn’t exactly been thrilled.

  “Stop it,” Iris said, laying a hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. “Alex is fine just the way he is.”

  “Ah, I understand.” Iris’s grandmother nodded sagely. “You have other talents. I read naughty books that Iris bought for me on my Kindle. I know all about these.”

  “Ngin Ngin!” Iris said.

  Her grandmother laughed and turned around, shuffling into the house. “Alex, you can call me Ngin Ngin, too. I’m old now. That’s what everybody calls me. Soon, maybe I will even forget I have another name!”

  Twenty minutes later, the three of them were seated around the dining room table with plates of tortellini and green salad, as well as chopsticks and jasmine tea.

  “My friend is Italian. She taught me to make pasta,” Ngin Ngin said, lifting a piece of tortellini with her chopsticks.

  “It’s very good.” It wasn’t what Alex had been expecting, but it was certainly tasty.

  “You have any grandparents left?” Ngin Ngin asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Well, now you have me!” She grinned. “You born in Canada?”

  He nodded. “My mother got pregnant with me soon after my parents came here from Hong Kong.”

  “You speak Cantonese?”

  “Yes, but not well.”

  “Probably better than Iris’s Toisanese.”

  Iris nodded. “This is true.”

  “She understands a bit,” Ngin Ngin continued. “But speaking? Not good at all. And she can’t read. All she knows are the characters on mah jong tiles. I have many more questions to ask you, Alex. Are you ready?”

  He hid a smile. “Okay.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Thirty-three and not married?” She shook her head. “Must get working on that. When will you propose to Iris?”

  “Ngin Ngin!” Iris exclaimed. “I already explained. We are not a couple.”

  “Then why did you bring him to meet your grandmother?” Ngin Ngin shot back. “You never brought a man to meet me before.”

  “I haven’t lived with you for very long. It’s different now that we live together.”

  Suddenly, Alex understood why Iris had invited him over. Because she thought he needed this, thought he needed the teasing, the bickering...the feeling of being part of a family, interfering relatives and all.

  He squeezed her knee in gratitude.

  “I saw that!” Ngin Ngin said. “You’re touching. You must be a couple. When you get married, where will you live? You can live here. I don’t mind. Alex can do yard work without a shirt. I will enjoy it.”

  Iris shook her head. “I can’t believe you.”

  “I’m teasing! Why do you not like my jokes? But am serious about the first part—you can both live here with me. At night-time, I take off my hearing aid, so if you make noise in bedroom, I won’t hear.”

  Alex dropped the piece of tortellini he’d held in his chopsticks. He had no idea how to respond. His mother wouldn’t have said something quite like that.

  He glanced at Iris, who was turning as red as the tomatoes in the salad.

  He had to admit, he enjoyed seeing someone else rile her up.

  “Okay, okay,” Ngin Ngin said. “I’ll stop now. I’m worried Iris will never bring you here again, Alex, so I must behave.” She paused. “What about your parents? Are they retired?”

  “My father works for a bank. My mother is dead.”

  His parents used to talk about what they’d do when they were old and retired. Now, Alex wasn’t sure his father wanted to retire at all.

  Ngin Ngin frowned. “That is sad. Sorry I brought it up. When did she die?”

  “You don’t have to keep asking questions,” Iris said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “She died eight months ago.”

  They were quiet for a minute, focusing on their food. Iris poured everyone more tea.

  “You have other relatives in Canada?” Ngin Ngin asked.

  “Just my father and brother. Some of my relatives are in California, some in Hong Kong.”

  “You must marry Iris right away. Then you will have big family in Canada!”

  He chuckled. “What was Iris like when she was little?”

  “Iris was only grandchild who lived in Toronto as a kid,” Ngin Ngin said. “I saw her lots but could not communicate well because my English wasn’t good then. We drew lots of pictures together, and I sewed her clothes. Now I sew clothes for great-grandchild. He will be born very soon.”

  “My cousin is pregnant,” Iris said, turning to Alex. “She’s due in a few weeks.”

  “She’s big like watermelon! I think maybe she’s having twins.”

  “No. The doctors would be able to tell if she was having twins. They would see it on the ultrasound.”

  “I will tell you a story about Iris,” Ngin Ngin said. “When she was five, she stuck a soybean up her nose.”

  “Oh my God,” Iris said. “Please stop. I thought you didn’t want to tell stories like that in front of men because you didn’t want to scare them off.”

  “But you tell me over and over, ‘Ngin Ngin, Alex is not my boyfriend.’” Ngin Ngin raised the pitch of her voice when repeating Iris’s words, even though Iris’s voice wasn’t that high. “Now I finally listen to you.”

  Iris just hung her head. “You see what I have to put up with?” She turned to Alex.

  “I will tell you another story,” Ngin Ngin said, “since apparently you and Iris are not together. If you were her boyfriend, it might be discouraging, but if you are a friend, it’s different. You see, Iris is very bad in the kitchen. She cannot even make toast.”

  “
I can make toast!”

  “Fine, fine, you can make toast and boil water, but that’s about it. Anyway, first kitchen disaster was when Iris was six years old. I tried to be cool Canadian grandmother and make chocolate-chip cookies with her. I got the recipe from a friend, and we were making cookies, all was good, except Iris sprayed batter on the wall when she turned on the electric mixer at the wrong time. But that wasn’t the biggest problem. No, biggest problem was when Iris realized her rainbow bracelet was missing. She started crying, we looked everywhere for it. Finally, I took the cookies out of the oven and saw it baked into one of the cookies. Beads were starting to melt. How we didn’t notice, I’m not sure. She was so upset because it was her favorite bracelet. I bought her a new one, but she said it wasn’t the same.”

  Alex started laughing, and Iris glared at him. He wanted to kiss that glare off her face, but he wouldn’t do that in front of her grandmother, of course.

  “Anyway,” Ngin Ngin continued, “this was the beginning of Iris’s problems in the kitchen. One time, she exploded my rice cooker!”

  “Okay, okay,” Iris said, laying a hand on top of her grandmother’s. “That’s enough. How about I clear the dishes and serve dessert?”

  “What is your favorite dessert?” Ngin Ngin asked Alex, then continued without waiting for an answer. “I made tiramisu. I hope you like it.”

  “You made tiramisu?” Iris said. “Wow, that’s impressive.”

  “Wait until you taste it to give compliments. But I tried a little already, and it’s very good. Every time Alex comes over, I will make something special.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to do that,” he said.

  “Ah, are you saying you will come another time?” Ngin Ngin beamed. “That makes me happy.”

  * * *

  By eight-thirty, Alex had eaten three portions of tiramisu at Ngin Ngin’s insistence. It was, indeed, delicious. Ngin Ngin had gone upstairs to read and said she would take out her hearing aid so he and Iris could do “fun things,” at which point Iris had made a totally horrified expression. Now they were sitting on a couch that looked like it was from the seventies, with its brown and orange color scheme.

  “Was that okay?” Iris asked him, concern on her face. “You hardly got a chance to say anything.”

  “It was good,” he assured her. “I’d missed that. When it’s just me and my father, there’s too much silence.” He pressed a kiss to her cheek. It had been difficult to avoid touching her and kissing her all through dinner.

  “It takes so much energy to deal with her, as well as my mother, but...” She looked down. “I would miss it. It’s true.”

  He thought of what he didn’t have anymore, and he pulled Iris onto his lap so she was straddling him. He held her as tightly as he could.

  I wish you could have met my mother, he almost said, but he held the words back.

  Instead, he kissed her again and lost himself in the kiss. He slid his hands underneath her shirt and circled his thumb over her nipple. Her hands slipped under his shirt as well, brushing over his abs, and he hardened beneath her.

  He’d seen her several times in the past month, but aside from the kiss last week, he hadn’t touched her until today. Now she was here, in his lap.

  With a groan, he pulled himself back. “We should stop before things go too far.”

  “Too far?” She gave him a saucy smile. “What’s wrong with that?”

  He could hear his heart beating in his chest. “You want to go to bed with me again?”

  “I always did,” she said, her voice catching a little. “And tonight, I won’t stop myself from having what I want. But not here. We’ll go to your apartment.”

  * * *

  They stumbled into Alex’s apartment and immediately started kissing. It was like last time: he pressed Iris against the door and kissed her hard, pinning her hands to the side as he devoured her.

  It was like last time, and yet it wasn’t.

  She’d been a stranger in a bar, and he’d brought her home because they liked the look of each other and wanted to fuck. He’d asked about the ring on her pinky finger, what kind of engineer she was, and she hadn’t answered.

  Now, he’d seen her at work.

  He’d seen her with her grandmother.

  He’d been alone with her, when they weren’t getting ready to have sex.

  Alex rocked his hips against her. Slowly, deliberately, his erection pressing into her stomach. Her breath caught.

  “Iris,” he said. Just her name, nothing more.

  He continued to rock his hips as he kissed her, sliding his lips down from her mouth to her throat, to the top of the simple T-shirt she wore. She trembled against him and shut her eyes, tilting her head up to expose more of her neck as he kissed his way back up to her lips.

  He needed her so badly, in a different way than he’d needed her before.

  Now, it mattered that it was her. It wasn’t simply about satisfying their basic needs.

  He let go of her wrists and reached for the bottom of her shirt, pulling it off in a hurry, and then undoing her bra and throwing it to the ground. Her nipples were tight, pebbled, and he dipped his head and sucked one of them into his mouth, which made her gasp and clutch his back. He shifted to the other nipple.

  “Alex,” she groaned, her fingers clawing at him.

  When he released her nipple, she unbuttoned his shirt and her hands were on his bare skin. It was a relief to feel her right against him, and yet it made him more desperate at the same time.

  He watched her face as he unzipped her shorts and slid his hand inside her panties, his middle finger stroking from her clit down to her entrance and back again. She arched against him.

  “Alex,” she said again.

  “You have a very small vocabulary when I’m touching you.”

  “I...”

  He smirked as he pushed a finger inside her before she could finish that sentence.

  “You’re an ass,” she said.

  He immediately withdrew his finger and held up his hands. “If you think I’m such an asshole, I can stop touching you.”

  “Damn you,” she muttered.

  He removed her underwear and shorts before touching her again. She was wet for him, and he easily thrust two fingers in and out of her as she struggled with his belt and the fastening on his jeans.

  And then she wrapped her hand around his cock.

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  She moved her hand up and down. She used a gentle touch, such a gentle touch, and yet it was enough to ignite a fire within him. He fucked her more roughly with his fingers, and she squeezed his dick as she shattered. It took everything within him not to finish then and there. But he wanted to finish inside her.

  He held her as she came back down. “You ready?”

  She nodded, her head jerking unsteadily, and he pulled a condom out of his pocket and rolled it on. They were both breathing rapidly now.

  “Do it,” she whispered.

  He picked her up and brought her down on his cock.

  Oh, sweet heaven.

  She wrapped her legs around him. He didn’t move for the longest time; he just held her against him. He was inside her; she was all around him, and nothing mattered except the fact that she was with him—he felt terribly, terribly lucky.

  As he started to pump inside her, he held her gaze, and it was almost too much, but he couldn’t look away. For so long, he’d been living in a shadow, and now she was here, and everything was vivid and bright and topsy-turvy.

  He clung to her and walked toward the bedroom, where he set her down on the bed, still inside her. She was on her back, her legs still wrapped around his hips, and he thrust into her again and again. She made the most precious moans. He buried his face between her breasts and lavished attention on them. She was so perfect beneath him, this little spitfire of a woman who took whatever she wanted, and he had the power to make her whimper and thrash as he fucked her.

  He slowed his pace
as he started thrusting more deeply, wringing out everything he could from the union of their bodies. She pulled his head down toward hers and kissed him frantically.

  “So good,” he murmured, then pressed his lips back to hers.

  He touched her clit as he sped up again, and when she came beneath him, he shoved into her a few more times and found his own release.

  Afterward, he went to the washroom and took off the rest of his clothes before joining her in bed, his body curled around her. She was shivering, despite the warmth of the summer night, and he pulled up the blankets so they were cocooned together.

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “Lying in bed.”

  “Smart ass. You know what I mean.”

  “We’re sleeping together.” Which was also a non-answer, just stating the obvious, but he didn’t quite have an answer for what she was asking.

  What was happening between them...it frightened him because it wasn’t something he was used to, because he’d spent the past year forcing his heart into a box. Yet it was okay that he didn’t have the answers, because she was in his bed, and if she was with him, everything would turn out okay.

  They were quiet for several minutes. He trailed his hands over her breasts, over her stomach, and lost himself in the feel of her body, without the desperation he’d had before.

  However, when she started rubbing herself back against him, he got hard again almost instantly. He turned her onto her back and rolled on top of her. She giggled as he nuzzled her hair.

  “You want me to fuck you again?” he asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  “You’ve developed manners. This is new.”

  She swatted his back.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “Under one condition.”

  “What is it?” She sounded ready to do just about anything.

  “You have to stay the night.” He nuzzled his way down her neck. “I don’t want to wake up in the morning and find myself alone in bed.” In fact, he didn’t think he could bear it if that happened.

  “I’ll stay the night. I promise.”

  That was enough to make him feel like he’d won the lottery.

  Chapter 12

  When Iris woke up the next morning, she was warm and cozy. Not because Alex was wrapped around her—no, he was on the far side of the bed. They were not touching at all.

 

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