After Midnight Read online

  Next time.

  Where had that thought come from, and what was she supposed to do with it? He lived in Cleveland. She lived in Boston. There was no easy way to have a date, no easy way to make there be a next time, or at least not a next time with cuddling and shared afterglow.

  “So what are you doing this weekend? While I’m retiling my kitchen?” He sounded calm and contented and not at all eager to run away from her, and that made her feel better. He could be coming up with a thousand different excuses to cut the conversation short, now that he’d gotten his rocks off.

  “Grading lab reports. Cleaning my apartment. Buying new running shoes.”

  “It’s a full life.”

  “I’ll go out Saturday night.”

  “With?”

  She loved, loved, loved the edge in his voice. “Are you jealous?”

  Silence again. Had she gone too far?

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I am.”

  Her heart pounded and she got hot all over, even her fingers and toes and knees and ears. He was jealous. Jealous. He didn’t want her to be with someone else tomorrow night.

  “I’ll probably go out with my friend Rachel.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “A bar, usually.”

  Silence. Then, “Do you get picked up?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She heard him take a deep breath and she waited, but no words came from his end of the phone.

  “If it helps, I’ve been on a remarkable number of really bad dates since I last saw you.”

  “What made them so bad?”

  They weren’t you. “Oh, all kinds of things. Conversational voids, hygiene issues, epic lack of chemistry.”

  “We don’t have those problems.”

  She loved the low hum of his post-sex voice, close to her ear, intimate. “The hygiene issues are easier to avoid when you’re having phone sex,” she pointed out.

  “True. But the conversational voids can be really grueling. In person would be better. So much better.”

  Right then, laughing with him, she made a decision. A crazy, crazy decision.

  Of course, you could also question the sanity of things she’d already done. She’d picked up a random guy at a New Year’s Eve party, danced dirty with him, kissed him at midnight, and allowed herself to feel all kinds of things that better sense should have forbidden. She’d stalked him on Facebook and Twitter, tracked him down, and then stalked him once again, to the intimacy of his own phone.

  She’d had phone sex with him.

  Yet what she was contemplating doing next was crazier than any of those things. Stalker-lady crazy. Big-money, big-gesture crazy. No-turning-back crazy.

  But she was realizing something important.

  She was crazy about him.

  And in a twisted sort of illogical way, that caused all the other kinds of crazy to make sense.

  6

  In the early days after Deena’s departure, Miles had been too hurt and angry to do much of anything other than consult his lawyer, sulk, and drink too much. There were gaps on the bookshelves and in the CD and DVD racks where Deena’s belongings had been. Empty drawers where her knitting projects had lived. Squares and rectangles of lighter-colored paint on the walls where her paintings and posters had hung. He’d wallowed, too much, in those daily reminders of his right to be wounded and furious, and he’d indulged too much in those emotions.

  But after New Year’s, something had shifted.

  He’d watched Nora at that party. She’d never stopped moving, never seemed to lose her sense of direction. While he hovered at the edge, she dwelled thoroughly in the room, part of it. When he’d talked to her and kissed her, she’d invited him into her vibrancy and purpose somehow, made him feel as if he could take a few, uncertain steps forward, come unstuck. She’d made him believe he could stop fixating on empty spaces and absent objects. That he could touch the world again.

  He’d flown back to Cleveland and he’d poured himself into projects. Purging and rearranging the book and media shelves to erase the evidence of Deena’s departure. Repainting walls and hanging new paintings and posters in the gaps. And then, step by step, working on neglected bits of the house. He’d paid to have the floor refinished, but he taught himself to do everything else. He replaced all the quarter-round trim along the new floors. He hung shelves in his study. He re-sided the front of the house. With each project, he saw Nora in his mind’s eye, her luminosity undiminished by the intervening months, like a beacon shining at him through a tunnel.

  Sometimes he thought he might try to track her down, bring her out of his thoughts and into his life. But the thing that had stopped him was a fear that his darkness would diminish her brilliance. So he left her where she was, hovering in his mind as he gained a sense of mastery over not only wood and nails, anchors and the grumpy electric drill, but also his emotions. The anger subsided to a dull murmur, like the ocean on a calm night.

  He could go on like this for a long time, tackling one project after another, fighting entropy with his own sweat and effort. It was solitary work, but it was good work, and it made him forget how much he missed them. The people. His staff, the board members he’d scrapped with so many times, the children in the videos and on his trips around the country, the ones who thanked him for bringing breakfast to their schools and the ones who blithely informed him that they’d been happier with peanut butter crackers and soda and could take or leave his stupid nutritious lunches.

  He’d never wanted gratitude. He wanted them fed.

  None of those people—not his staff, not the board members, not the children—could look him in the eye. You had no idea how much you took people’s faith for granted until it was removed. Someday, perhaps, it would be restored, but in the meantime?

  There was comfort in brick and hardwood, in plaster and tile, in its blank regard. You couldn’t betray it, and it couldn’t betray you.

  This weekend, as he had told Nora, he was going to retile the kitchen, and his first step would be to confront the heavy orange-yellow hardback edition of Better Homes and Gardens New Complete Guide to Home Repair & Improvement, which he’d left on the kitchen counter yesterday afternoon.

  The paper-towel holder was still sitting where he’d set it last night after the sound of Nora yelling “Now!” over and over had made him spurt all over his fist and the kitchen floor. There was doubtless a specific biblical prohibition against coming on the kitchen floor, or maybe it was okay as long as you sacrificed something afterward and buried the paper towel in the backyard according to rules laid out in Leviticus.

  The whole thing had happened so quickly, from the moment the unknown number had first popped up on his screen a week ago and he’d thought, Boston. What are the odds?, to the moment he’d finally laid the phone down late last night. The emotions had come like a chain of cigarettes smoked: Unexpected relief when he’d heard her voice on the other end of the phone the first time. Oh, shit, when he remembered why he’d thought it would be a bad idea for them to follow up on their brief New Year’s Eve contact. Pressure in his chest every time they talked, all the words he’d wanted to say to her, and fear, all the things he hadn’t wanted to talk about. A thrill when their conversation last night had turned sexual, and a buildup of pleasure so fast and hard he couldn’t believe it had happened without the visual or tactile reality of her. Release and peace, their murmured, half-whispered conversation about nothing and everything, a susurrus of Nora until he’d fallen asleep with the phone in his hand. And the sense of peace still with him this morning, even though he should worry that he’d let things get so out of hand, that he’d let her in so far and built her expectations up so high.

  Where did things go from here?

  He’d have to tell her the truth the next time they talked. I’m the prime suspect in an embezzlement investigation, and with the way things appear to be going right now, I’m going to be charged before Christmas.

  Oh, well, then, by all means
, let’s take this thing to the next level!

  No, that was not the response he imagined from her. More like that same look of suspicion Deena had worn on her face. And he wasn’t sure he could bear to see it on Nora’s.

  You won’t have to see her face if you tell her on the phone.

  Coward.

  He consulted the index and turned to page 42, where he was instructed about how to choose and buy ceramic tile. Graph paper. Right. He had some somewhere—

  The doorbell rang.

  What are the odds?

  The words filled his mind before he had a chance to imagine something more likely. Cub Scouts selling popcorn, Girl Scouts selling cookies, student athletes selling gift cards. Environmentalists, politicians, Mormons.

  Nora.

  He hadn’t showered or looked in the mirror this morning. He’d pulled on another pair of jeans and a different long-sleeved T and come downstairs, probably with his hair in disarray, to confront the book as early as possible so he could get to Home Depot or Ace Hardware and get this show on the road.

  No time for vanity now. Besides, the Cub Scouts didn’t care.

  He pulled open the heavy front door—restoring its frame was on his list of to-do items, too—and found her there, messenger bag slung across her shoulder. Pixie hair, freckles, pale-blue eyes full of uncertainty, teeth worrying her lower lip.

  He stood for a moment, staring, because even though he should have been surprised, he’d known it would be her.

  She shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. She wore jeans and a pretty top, a deep blue that made her eyes even bluer, with a soft neckline that draped like a scarf, exposing just enough of the curve of her breasts to make his mouth water.

  “Did you fly here?”

  She nodded. “Owen gave me the address.”

  “Wow.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “I’m . . .”

  “Speechless?”

  “Yeah, kinda.”

  “It seemed like a good idea last night when I bought the tickets,” she confessed. “But I’ve been getting steadily more and more nervous as I’ve gotten closer, and, honestly, if you kicked me out because I’m a crazy stalker I totally wouldn’t blame you. I mean, I’d be bummed because I came a long—”

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her. Just once at first, to shut her up, and she gulped air and blinked at him in surprise, but then she grabbed him, too, threading her fingers into his hair and kissing back. It was reunion kissing, which maybe was the best kind: kissing someone you’d been familiar with a long time ago but had forgotten about, reaquainting yourself with exactly how they fit and how well they knew you and how perfectly your lips slid and nipped and clung.

  She did this thing with her tongue that made him want to bite her. She kind of teased it in and stole it back, and it made him insane, hungry, and somehow his hands were all these places on her body that he hadn’t meant to put them yet—on her ass, yanking her up so he could mold her body against his, on her breasts, cupping and shaping and teasing over the hard nub of her nipple until she whimpered.

  “We’re on my front stoop,” Miles said inanely, on a par with, “I’m standing in my kitchen,” as if geography were the only thing on his mind at moments like these. In some sense, it was: the terrain of her mouth, the landscape of her under his hands, and all that goddamned unexplored territory, which he would claim just as soon as he got her off his front stoop.

  He maneuvered her around the door and shut it behind her, lifted her messenger bag over her head, and deposited it on the floor next to her. He had grand plans of carrying her to some softer surface, but his brain didn’t seem to be in charge. Nor was it capable of any higher-order thinking at all, nothing civilized. The animal ruled, the beast that lifted and pressed her against the front door so she could wrap her legs around his waist and he could press his erection between her thighs. She whimpered into his mouth and wriggled against him with so much conviction that he had to break off the kiss and instruct her, “Hold still.”

  “Don’t wanna.”

  She was so hot where he was wedged that he could feel it clear through two pairs of jeans, but he wanted to be closer to the heat, so he deposited her back down on her feet and went clumsily after the button of her jeans. She helped and shed the jeans on the floor, along with red patent-leather clogs and a pair of wool socks.

  She wore bright-red boy shorts, as she’d described last night, nearly all lace except for a V-shaped panel in the front that made him want to get down on his knees and bury his face at the point of that instructive arrow.

  “Those are hot.”

  Then he obeyed naked instinct and knelt and pressed his face against her, breathing in the at-the-source scent of the arousal he’d been so entranced by on New Year’s Eve—like some direct line to his dick, which was jealous of his face for getting to be buried in her crotch. He found the damp fabric between her legs and rubbed his fingers from there up to the spot that made her whimper and clutch his head, and then he licked her, too, and bit her.

  “Miles!”

  “You like the friction through the cloth, right? Like this?”

  “Miles . . .”

  She was rubbing against his face and fingers, and things were all so muddled up that he was licking his own fingers and the cloth of her panties. Finally he just pulled them down and parted her labia with his tongue, teasing her clit. She had red curls, a neat, well-groomed triangle of them. He drew back for a moment and cupped his hand over her, and she groaned and draped herself over his head. “You’re killing me,” she said.

  “Told you,” he said. “All that was just foreplay. Even the phone sex. Is there a matching bra?”

  “There is.”

  He stood and peeled off her shirt. “Oh, man.” He sucked a nipple into his mouth through the lace of the bra, got his hand around the sweet, sweet curve of her, and, fuck, he was hard—he wanted in her so bad, and the more of those whimpery little desperate noises she made, the worse it got.

  “Miles,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Fuck me.”

  He groaned against her skin, then pulled away, fisted his T-shirt, and dragged it off.

  “That was hot,” she said. “You can do that anytime.”

  Her hands were on the button of his jeans, which she made short work of, and then she eased his zipper down, so slowly that it qualified as a form of torture, slid her hand into the V of his jeans, and grabbed him through his briefs. Her fist was way better than his fist, and he thrust experimentally into her grip a few times before he decided that that was a bad idea and stopped. She ran a thumb over the ridge of his head and massaged the spot where his briefs were damp from pre-cum, then she took pity on him and shoved his jeans down and eased his briefs over his hips, freeing him.

  “Show me what you did last night.”

  He showed her, fist tight around his dick, but it was the look in her eyes that was doing it for him, avid and uninhibited. “You can do it if you want.” He meant it as an offer, but it came out more like pleading.

  She did want, and the sensation of having someone else take him in hand—the last couple of years with Deena had been all married-sex utilitarian non-touchy stuff—pretty much blew the top of his head off.

  “Or maybe you should wait on that.” He stayed her hand.

  So she touched his chest and stomach instead, running her small, cool palms over him until the touch heated up and felt nearly as dangerously hot as the jerk of her fist.

  “There’s a condom in my bag,” she said, and there was—a whole box of them, in a plastic drugstore bag. Holy shit, she’d been thinking of this the whole time she was headed his way. He tore the packet open and rolled it on. He was at that poised-on-the-edge place where even putting the condom on felt like too much, until he’d rolled it all the way down and the added tightness at the base of his cock calmed things down a tiny bit. He picked her up and backed her into the door, lowering her slowly unti
l he could feel her liquid heat on the head of his cock. He could feel her dripping, running down his cock, even through the latex, which made him stupidly desperate and not quite as gentle as he meant to be when he thrust into her.

  She didn’t seem to care. She yelled his name when he filled her and several times as he withdrew and reseated. Her breasts moved against his chest, the nipples hard points that gave him something to think about other than the lunatic pressure building in his groin, and he tweaked both nipples and watched her face as she came, her mouth open in a silent cry, her face flushed, her head thrown back. When she lost control of her silence and made a harsh, stuttered “Aaaah” sound in the back of her throat, he came like a fucking avalanche.

  When he regained full use of his brain and limbs, he was kneeling on the floor with her resting on his thighs, and he was still buried in her. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten from standing to kneeling.

  “We are going to have to extend the Richter scale to twenty,” she said.

  Miles laughed, and Nora felt the hard muscles under her thighs, his sculpted biceps under her hands, vibrate with the motion. His body was like some kind of Renaissance sculpture, all clean, smooth, living marble. She had time now to appreciate, to trace the line of his shoulder to the well-muscled cap, to stroke a hand down over his pecs, the male curves and angles of his torso—not too bodybuilder-processed, with real-human-being slight ridges on his flat belly—to where the trail of coarse hair disappeared between their bodies. She sighed her happiness.

  “It wasn’t anything like that with Henry.”

  Possibly that wasn’t the sort of thing she should say. Probably she should have kept her mouth shut. But her orgasm had taken her inhibitions with it, and she mostly wanted to crawl inside him and have him know everything that was in her head. How much she loved his house, at least what she could see of it from the front hall—a wood stove in the room to the right, a wall of leaded-glass windows to their left, the kind of old-fashioned radiator that clanked at night, behind an elaborate screen of lacy patterned metal. The kinds of details people had once cared about.