Not in love

18

OUR CURRENCY

RUE

Idrove behind Eli’s hybrid, tailing him down the tree-lined streets of Allandale, through the soft glow of the bistro lights. He lived in a charming two-story single-family home, a mid-century construction with reddish bricks and a wide lawn that had me instinctively thinking of his ex-fiancée. Were we going to have sex in a bed he’d bought during a relationship-straining trip to IKEA? Was what had broken them up a disagreement over the Ekoln soap dispenser?

Irrelevant. None of my business. But I’d never been to a man’s place. Maybe by accident in college, with some guy I wouldn’t have recognized the following day if he’d sat next to me in Chemistry 201. This was Eli Killgore, though. Breaking my streaks. Ruining my plans. Making me want to do terrible, disloyal things.

“Still want to do this?” he asked, waiting for me at the door when I got out of the car. His voice had burrowed among the sulci of my brain and was now prominently featured in my dreams. A few dirty ones, which I could easily brush off, and lots of unsettling, preposterous scenarios. He’d stand behind and ask to observe my X-ray diffraction, or explain what a leveraged buyout was with Nyota nodding by his side. Whenever I reached out to touch him, he’d say, Let’s revisit this tomorrow.

It was finally tomorrow. “Yes.”

Instead of unlocking the door, he bent down and kissed me hard, a hand closed around my waist, the other palm pressing me against the wall. It was sudden, and instantly good, and the very opposite of the kind of restraint he’d shown back at the hotel, in Kline’s echoey hallways, an hour earlier at the rink. He wanted me to feel trapped. To know exactly how hard he was and how quickly. To be aware of his strength, deep inside my bones.

“Jesus, you feel good.” He trailed open-mouthed kisses down my throat. His fingers slid up to cup my breast, and his eyes followed suit. I’d never felt more beautiful than when he looked at me. Like I was the final prototype of someone’s entire fantasy life.

“We should go in.” My words labored against his lips.

“In a minute.” His fingers skimmed between my flesh and the waist of my jeans. I sucked in the night air. “It’s been a few long fucking weeks, Rue.”

“I know.”

With a predatory grin, he nipped at my throat. Chased that with a lick. Squeezed my ass in a way that could only be described as indecent. It felt like centuries before I heard the jingle of his keys, felt the push of his hand guiding me inside, watched the lights from the street disappear as Eli closed the door behind us, and—

I was assaulted. By a three-hundred-pound grizzly bear. It bellowed at me as its paws slammed into my torso with the force of a dinosaur-extinguishing meteor, sending me careening back into Eli’s solid front.

“Tiny, down.” His voice was warm but authoritative. The bear—dog, a giant dog—trotted back, wagging its tail. It stared at me with something that couldn’t anatomically be a smile, but fundamentally felt like one.

I plastered myself against Eli’s chest. One of his arms snaked around my torso, holding me close. “Is it . . . hungry?” I asked, eyeing the mutt suspiciously. He must have been crossbred with a horse. His fur contained thirty different types of brown, and his tongue rolled out of his mouth like an ancient scroll.

“Always.” With one hand still closed around my hip, he bent to give the dog several energetic pets, causing him to helicopter his tail and bark in bliss.

Maybe coming here had been a mistake.

“Are you allergic to dogs?” he asked, noticing my discomfort.

I shook my head, eyes never letting go of the mammoth. Was his name Tiny? What in the actual fuck?

“You’re not scared of them, are you?”

I wasn’t. Or maybe I was. I hadn’t had sufficient dog exposure to be sure. “I’m not a pet person.”

“I see. You hate animals.” He sounded amused.

“I don’t. I just like to maintain a respectful distance.” Bruce ruthlessly ignored me, which suited me just fine. But Tiny circled me happily, eager for the cuddles and praise he was sure I’d provide any moment now.

“Well, he sure likes you.”

As lush as his fur looked, I had no intention of reaching out. I’d read somewhere that dogs could tell good people apart from the bad ones. I didn’t care to know the verdict. “Do you, um, need to walk him?”

“Not this late. We have a big yard and he has free access. He wants a midnight snack, though. Are you going to freak out if I let you go?”

My nails, I realized, were digging in his forearm. “Sorry.” I released him, and he untangled himself with a smile that looked almost affectionate before he disappeared into the kitchen, followed by the beast. I heard puttering, cupboards opening and closing, and soft, patient murmurs. I caught myself smiling at the sound, and wasn’t sure why. What did I care if Eli had a dog, or quail, or a raft of otters? When he returned, wiping freshly washed hands on his jeans, I immediately asked, “Where is your bedroom?”

“Not so fast.” I cocked my head, and he smiled. “I want a story. Before we go upstairs.”

Ah, yes. Our currency. “An ugly one that proves how terrible a person I am?”

“Doesn’t matter. As long as it’s true.” He paused. “As long as it’s just for me.”

“They all are.” I’d told him things I’d never admitted out loud to another soul. It was the same for him, I knew without having to ask. And I had the perfect story. “When I was eleven, Tisha and Nyota—her younger sister—started pestering their parents to get a puppy. It involved PowerPoints, Post-its left all around the house. They even got character letters from their teachers. Tisha liked cats better, but if they were going to get a pet, an alliance was necessary, and Nyota was younger. Less willing to compromise, you know? Anyway, they ended up adopting Elvis, a Chihuahua mix. He was . . . loud, and small. He pretended I didn’t exist, and I returned the favor.” I swallowed. “I was maniacally jealous of that dog. Because he got to stay with Tisha and her family every second of every day. He was fed, taken care of, doted on. While I had to go back home and deal with . . .” My unpredictable mother, my little brother, who was getting more and more aggressive, the empty kitchen and the stench of mold. The certainty that if that was my life, I had to have done something to deserve it. “I had to deal with a lot. So I looked at Elvis and was so resentful and thought, ‘Why not me?’ over and over, until it felt like—like a cancer, metastasizing in every interaction I had with Tisha. It took me a long time to wean myself off the habit. Maybe I never fully succeeded.”

I waited for my cheeks to burn and for the shame to pour over me, like it always did. But it was difficult to blame myself when Eli offered no recrimination or disgust. He just accepted it openly, this story that I’d carried in my marrow for over a decade, like it was as natural a part of me as my lips or my arm.

So I said, “Your turn.”

He nodded. Took a deep breath. “Last Friday I was out of town. I got drunk off vodka with some colleagues, went back to the hotel, and pulled up your contact. I typed a long, long text describing every single thing I’ve imagined doing to you. I left out nothing. And it wasn’t a list, Rue. It was filthy, and indefensible, and exceptionally detailed. A fucking instruction manual. I have the faintest memory of writing it, and thankfully I fell asleep before I hit send, because when my alarm went off the following morning, it was there in the text box.”

At first I felt shortchanged, and almost called him out for cheating—this wasn’t our kind of story, cruel and bare and flustering. But that wasn’t for me to decide, was it? Maybe for Eli, confessing to his loss of control was all those things.

“Do you want to know the last thing I’d written?” he asked.

I nodded, heart pounding in anticipation.

“How badly I wanted to fuck you into compliance.” He shook his head, exhaling a rueful laugh, and gestured with his chin toward the staircase. “Still wa

I didn’t bother answering, but started the climb upstairs. When I turned to check if he was following, I caught his eyes glued to my ass. His smile was unrepentant, as though looking at my body was a sacrosanct right he pla

His bedroom was what I’d have expected from an adult man who hadn’t pla

“Stop,” he ordered.

I glanced down at my shorts. “Want me to leave these on?”

“Nah.” He came closer. “Let me do it.”

“Hardly efficient.” Nor sexy. I was wearing my grocery-shopping clothes.

“Come on, Rue. You have to know I’m going to treat tonight like the second chance I never thought I’d get.” Every catch of the zipper was loud in the quiet room. His large hands opened the front like he was unwrapping a present. Then, eyes fixed to me, he slid his hand inside.

The tip of his index finger tapped against the cotton of my panties. Brushed softly. “Nice.”

Wet, he meant. I’d felt the dampness between my thighs, and now he knew it, too. “You can’t be surprised.”

“I don’t need to be surprised to enjoy it.” My shorts came off. “You don’t really need me to say it, do you? That your body is the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen?”

I cocked my head, observing him observe me, greedy and acquisitive. His eyes lingered on my breasts, belly, hips, thighs, all too something to be anywhere near perfect. But I loved my body, even in its flaws. I loved the things it could do on the ice and off, the pleasure it was capable of, the way it looked in the dresses I enjoyed buying. I loved that it had kept going through my first eighteen years, despite the adversities it had faced. And I loved that Eli liked it as much as I did. “I’m glad you think so. Feel free to use it as you like.”

His throat jerked. “You have no damn idea what you’re saying, Rue.” He touched me like he was revisiting a yearly vacation spot, familiar and yet eternally yearned for. My lace bralette did not match my panties, but he didn’t care. He cupped his palm around my left breast, his thumb finding my already hard nipple to brush against it, and I let my eyes drift closed as I arched into him. “You like it, don’t you?” He did it again, and my breath hitched. When he pinched my nipple, I had to swallow a moan. “You know what I’d love to do to you?”

“What?”

He opened his mouth, then stopped himself. Laughed, wistful. “You’d be scared shitless if I told you.”

“I would not.”