After Midnight Read online

  She wanted to tell him how scared she had been, on the cab ride from the Cleveland airport to his house, that she was deluding herself. How she’d relived over and over the terrible fantasy that she would arrive to discover he had a secret life, one with no room for her, that all the talk about dates and getting together and how in-person would be so much better had been whistling in the wind.

  She wanted to confess, in a no-holding-back deluge of words, how much she liked him. Her taste buds, the little hairs that rose on the back of her neck, her freckles, liked him.

  She could have told him any one of those things, but instead what had popped out of her mouth was the kind of comparison she knew you weren’t supposed to make, even favorably.

  “Who’s Henry?”

  “Henry’s the man I was on the rebound from on New Year’s Eve.”

  He listened alertly, and she rested her cheek on his shoulder because it was easier to talk without him watching her so closely. “Henry messed me up. We’d been together three years, and I had this elaborate fantasy about how he was going to propose to me on Christmas. Or New Year’s Eve, maybe?”

  He touched her hair, the part where it lay raggedly against the nape of her neck. Stroked his fingers through it, a soothing repetition.

  “And, God, maybe he would have, who knows, but then I read an email he’d written to the other woman he was sleeping with. He’d been sleeping with her for nine months.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know, right? Anyway, at that party, I guess I was saying ‘fuck you’ to Henry.”

  He was quiet.

  She lifted her head. His gaze wouldn’t quite meet hers. “Wait, no, that came out wrong. That’s how it started, as a fuck-you to Henry. But that’s—I—”

  “Hey. I’m happy to have been the lucky beneficiary of the fuck-you party for Henry.” He pushed her spiky bangs off her forehead, the pad of his thumb moving gently across her skin, starting a line of heat there that connected to other vital parts of her. “He didn’t deserve you, you know. I hope you know that. I hope I’m stating the painfully obvious.”

  She sighed. “In my better moments, I do know that.”

  “I will do my best to remind you of it, often.”

  “Often.” A word that suggested time stretching before them, a relationship, all kinds of possibility. She felt full of emotions, like things too close to bubbling over on the stove. She touched his face, rough with dark stubble. His eyes were not quite as sad as they’d been on New Year’s Eve, but she thought it would still be fair to describe them as haunted.

  “Are you hungry? You must have gotten up at the crack of dawn.”

  “I’m starving,” she admitted.

  He helped her extricate herself and stand, then stood, too. “Food first? Shower first?”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “That’s a tough call. Food.”

  Watching him get dressed—watching how he hopped on one foot to insert himself in his jeans, how he disappeared into his shirt, that flat expanse of abs still peeking at her, and then reappeared, hair ruffled, already smiling for her—made her want to start the process again, to peel him out of his things and go another round. She reached into her satchel for a new pair of panties—turquoise lace bikinis—then dressed herself, as he watched with narrowed eyes. She half-expected him to intervene, but he didn’t, just watched like someone too polite to dive in to Thanksgiving dinner before grace was said.

  He led her down a narrow hallway into the kitchen. There was the dishwasher, with a neon-orange Do Not Use Me Post-it note, and the range, which looked as if it had cooked when Jimmy Carter was president. The ceiling was high, sunlight rushed in through enormous windows, and his things were scattered over the counters and on the kitchen table.

  His things. She had never realized how much intimacy there was in being able to see the mundane details of a person’s life, not until she had been introduced to Miles in this slow, backward way. She’d had sex with him before she’d gotten to see that his refrigerator was papered with New Yorker cartoons and photographs, before she’d had a chance to note that his dishes looked like hand-thrown pottery, before she’d glimpsed the T-shirt tossed over the chair or the stacks of unopened mail or the yellow do-it-yourself home-repair book.

  He got out a loaf of thick-sliced multigrain bread, jars of mayo and mustard, a clamshell of fussy greens, waxed-paper deli packages of ham and provolone. He began assembling two sandwiches on those slightly warped, irregular plates, blue glaze over a stony-looking first coat.

  “Did someone make those for you?”

  He lifted the tape on the lunch meat and spread the packages open. “My ex-fiancée was a potter.”

  An ex-fiancée. The history behind the sad eyes? “The plates are beautiful.”

  He didn’t volunteer more and she didn’t push it. “Do you want me to make my own sandwich?”

  “Just as easy to make two as one. Unless you want to make it so you can decide how much of what you want?”

  “Nah.”

  She watched the flex and shift of the muscles and tendons in his forearms as he made the sandwiches, the dark hair straight and feathery but definitively masculine. He worked slowly, carefully, spreading mayo and mustard to the edges of the bread, distributing the lettuce evenly. The same guy who would cook dinner alone in the kitchen, who would run his dishwasher every night.

  Hard to reconcile him with the guy who’d abandoned himself so completely to burying his face between her legs earlier. She loved that contradiction.

  They ate sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. He took big, manly bites and chewed with his mouth closed. He got points for both of those features.

  He swallowed and stared at her for a moment, and she knew something was about to happen even before he asked, “How long can you stay?”

  As long as you want me to.

  She was worried about this, this lack of caution on the part of her subconscious. It concerned her that it might say something against her better judgment. She’d open her mouth and words like that would fall out. Or she’d beg him for something. Like me as much as I like you.

  That would be embarrassing. And, on a deeper level, she worried that the lack of caution, her willingness to do one crazy thing after another, would eventually hurt. A lot.

  You’re so trusting.

  Henry had meant that her trust in him had been misplaced, but probably she was also too trusting in general that things would work out okay. Look at her willingness to hop on that plane and put herself in a position to get smacked down. Miles could have opened the door, taken one look at her, and called in a restraining order.

  Restraining order, heh, Beavis and Butt-Head supplied, and she swallowed a giggle. “My return flight is Sunday afternoon, but I don’t have to stay here. One of my college roommates is here, and I told her I might crash with her, if . . .”

  If you’d done what any sane person would have done and assumed I was a crazed stalker.

  “You don’t have to do that. You can hang with me.”

  That was good—Christmas-morning good—and like a kid on Christmas morning she was greedy for more. She wanted it wrapped up and tied with a bow. She wanted him to ask.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, he added, “I want you here. As long as you can stay.”

  It was almost too much, the warmth and thrill, and she had to look away from him so he wouldn’t see everything in her eyes. Declarations and confessions, hasty and too trusting.

  “Okay.”

  He took a bite of sandwich. Chewed. Set the sandwich down. Gazed at her for a long moment, until her face got hot and the heat sank into her breasts and belly. “It’s weird that you’re here,” he said.

  “Is it too weird?”

  He looked at his sandwich, the corners of the kitchen, the stacks of mail, as if the answer were out there somewhere, just out of reach. “No. It’s too normal.”

  She knew exactly what he meant.

  7

&n
bsp; Nora was upstairs showering, the water running through the house’s old pipes. Miles sometimes worried that something big would go wrong with the house, something to do with plumbing or electricity, two categories of fix-it he’d vowed never to touch. He didn’t have the funds to deal with something big like that. Not the furnace or the roof or any kind of systems failure. Without an income, he could make ends meet for only another six months or so—yet another reason he didn’t feel like a good candidate for a relationship.

  He felt “unfit.” That was the word that kept running through his head.

  He hadn’t meant to ask her how long she was staying, but a thought had risen to the surface as he’d sat across from her, watching her eat her sandwich. I want to keep her.

  Not a well-formed thought, just the sort of thing that bubbled up from your gut when you were unguarded and couldn’t help it. Almost ugly, the idea of keeping, but that was what it was. And she’d said he could, until tomorrow afternoon, and for a brief moment it had felt like enough.

  But he was unfit. A suspect, not in a position to support himself if this went on much longer, not in a position to introduce someone else into his half-assed existence.

  He made up his mind. Monday morning, he would begin to look for a new job. For a long time he’d kept hoping that things would happen fast, that he’d be cleared and would be able to resume his old life. The lawyer had kept telling him to hang on, not to do anything rash, that he’d have his life, his old job, his sense of self, back soon. But that hadn’t happened. The investigation had moved glacially, leaving him caught in this peculiar limbo for weeks and then months. A few days ago, he’d passed the one-year mark.

  It was time for him to figure out how to build a new life in his reshaped reality. It wouldn’t be easy to get work, with the shadow of an investigation hanging over his head. He wouldn’t find anything that reflected his skill and experience level, but the economy had rebounded, and there were houses going up again—maybe he could do handyman jobs. Something, anything, to begin the process of making room for Nora in his life.

  The water was still running upstairs—he imagined her sliding her soapy hands all over her body. He wanted to go up and get in the shower with her. Enjoy her, the sweetness of her mouth, the heat of her body, the restless hunger of her fucking, the way he could watch her mind work during the silences in their conversations, sometimes to the point where a private smile crossed her face. He wanted to know exactly what was behind those small hints at her inner world. If he could, he’d get inside her head and listen to her thoughts.

  He stopped to pull another condom from the box in her messenger bag, took the stairs two at a time, knocked on the door, entered on her invitation. She was behind the glass door, behind a veil of steam, but Miles could make out her rosy curves and the dark circles of her areolae and the triangle of red hair where her thighs met. He was hard before he had his clothes off—he’d been on his way before he left the kitchen.

  “Good,” she said. “I was feeling a little miffed that you didn’t want to get in here with me.”

  “I want. Give me the soap.”

  She handed it over without protest, and he soaped his hands and washed her. Not carefully. Not lovingly. Just to feel the unfettered slip and slide of skin over skin, everywhere. So few things moved like that—frictionless, slick—and it was like sex in another guise, as if you could unhitch sex from the specific body parts he’d always associated it with and turn it into a full-body, all-over experience, as if the palms of his hands were as sensitive as the head of his cock. He’d somehow gathered her into his arms and was kissing her hard, rubbing his whole self all over her, her breasts with their taut nipples slipping back and forth over his chest, her belly against his, her thighs against his, his leg between hers, his cock moving against her skin with the pressure of his body and the pressure of her body on either side, her moaning into his mouth, and—

  “Give me a sec.”

  He stepped out of the shower and got the condom he’d brought up, rolled it on. Stepped back in.

  She smiled coyly at him, then turned and faced the shower wall, her palms against it, and he almost came right then and there. She pushed up on her toes, her ass tilted up to give him access, her flesh blotched pink from the heat and arousal, and he could see her inner lips, red and wet and ready.

  He failed again at careful. At respectful. At anything you’d do to woo someone you wanted to impress. He just—he banged into her, really. A nudge to position himself and a mad thrust as deep as he could go, and, fuck, she was thrusting back against him. Making low, harsh noises punctuated with little squeaks. He tried to figure out how to maximize the squeaks for her, but she reached back and grabbed his hip and said, “More,” so he threw all the rest of his restraint away and gave it to her, and—“Oh, Nora, sorry!” he said, because he was coming, whole body spasms gripping him, and he had to brace himself against the wall, too, and even so he almost blacked out.

  He had some trouble restoring his sense of which way was up.

  “Sorry,” he said again, when he could. “Neanderthal.” He wasn’t yet to the point of being able to form sentences. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “I came.”

  “You did?”

  “Uh-huh. Before. When we were all soapy.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. That has never happened to me. It was right after you shoved your leg between mine. Everything was so slippery. And your chest hair kept rubbing against my nipples. You were kissing me, so you probably didn’t realize how much noise I was making.”

  “Nora?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “You’re turning me on again.”

  “Sorry!”

  “No, not a bad thing. Just . . . give me a few. I’ll be at your service.”

  She laughed. “I’m not worried.”

  She poured some shampoo into her palm and rubbed it into her hair. She handed him the bottle so he could do the same, then stuck her head under the nozzle and rinsed.

  “I swear, I am also capable of having sex not standing.”

  “Sure you are.” She rubbed her fingers over her hair, and it emitted a squeaky sound.

  He took her place under the shower, rinsing his hair. “I’m taking you out tonight.”

  “What, like a date?”

  “Yeah, like a date.”

  “A first date,” she said, almost reverently.

  He wasn’t as sure about that. A first date implied a string of other dates, implied a future, and he . . . he wasn’t sure he had a future, let alone one in which he could include her. “I guess.”

  “Because we never had a first date. Right? We can’t count the party, because we were both already there. That was where we met. We can’t count the phone, because, well, it was the phone. And can’t count any of this, because it’s not a date. We’re at your house.”

  “True. So tonight. Dinner and live music.”

  “I can totally deal with that,” she said. “I even brought a skirt and nice top. Not that—I wasn’t thinking—”

  He grinned. “Cut the bullshit, Nora. You called my friend to get my address. You flew a thousand miles. You’re allowed to admit you had some . . . expectations.”

  She laughed. “Okay. Yeah. Let’s call them hopes, though. Sounds a little less stalker-ish.”

  They got out of the shower and he tossed her a towel.

  “Hey, Miles?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to help you work on the tile project. Before we go to dinner. I don’t want you to waste this weekend.”

  That made him laugh. “This weekend is the furthest thing from a waste I can imagine.”

  “But you were going to get that done, and then I showed up. Torpedoed your real life.”

  This is way better than my real life.

  But it reminded him that he had a real life, and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t. And if they were going to do something as official as have a first date, he had to make
sure she knew what she was getting herself into.

  “Get dressed,” he told her. “I’ve got something I need to tell you.”

  He’d left her alone in the bathroom to get dressed. Who said, “I’ve got something to tell you,” and then fled the scene? That was bad manners.

  In the empty, echoey bathroom, her feet cold against the ceramic floor tile, Nora’s vivid imagination had a field day.

  I’m married. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a recovering ax murderer.

  Maybe he had a few kids by a previous marriage. She could handle that.

  But if it was really bad, she could still walk away, right? A midnight kiss, a few phone calls, some phone sex, plus the sex on the floor of his front hall and in the shower—surely she was not in so deep that she couldn’t extricate herself.

  Surely.

  She shook her head at herself. If it’s really bad, Nor, you need to walk away.

  But all the other bits of her brain, the ones that should have said, Uh-huh! Yeah! We hear ya! We will!, were silent.

  She stepped out of the master bath and into his bedroom, which occupied most of the upper floor of the house, under the eaves. Skylights everywhere, a low platform bed against the far wall. His quilt was black and white and the walls were gray, and—maybe it was the faint masculine scent of soap and aftershave—the room reminded her of men’s dress clothes. Of the excitement of seeing a finely dressed man appear before you when the last time you’d laid eyes on him he was a grubby guy in jeans.

  Being with Miles felt that way all the time, she realized. The treat of his physical beauty, the way he was so assertively male. A lean grace to how he moved, how he spoke, how he treated her, his demeanor as pleasingly hard as male muscle.

  Right now he was standing in the middle of his bedroom, wearing a pair of jeans low on his hips and nothing else, and that would be how she would fantasize about him tomorrow night when she was back in her bed by herself. Flat abs, the slanted ridge of muscle at his hips that dove under his waistband, the trail of curly dark hair that directed her gaze downward. And when she tore her focus from his crotch and looked back up, the planes of his pecs with their dusting of half-curls. Her own nipples tightened, remembering how that hair had felt.