She let me go when I stepped back again. She was back to being angry and I was about to join her. “I want you, but I can’t have you now, and I have to go in to work and not be thinking of you, because if I do then I can’t do my job.”
“You used to like it when I teased you.”
“When I knew I was coming home to you and the teasing would be satisfied, yes, very much yes, but not like this, Reggie.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s a game, like you do X and I react Y. I love the sense of power it gives you, because it turns you on, and that turns me on. I love that you touched me today, that you let me touch you, hold you, kiss you, but I have to go, and I can’t be wound up like this and have to leave, and have to go home alone.”
“You really haven’t been with anyone else since we separated, have you?”
“No, of course not.”
She looked at me like she was trying to memorize my face. “I’m sorry, Zaniel.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For a lot of things, but I’m sorry I teased you and then you have to go to work. I’m sorry I’m not ready to have you come home tonight and let me make good on the teasing. You’re right, this was mean if I didn’t mean to follow through.”
“Thank you for the apology, but if you didn’t mean it, why did you do it?” It was my turn to study her face. I wished she wasn’t wearing the huge sunglasses. They were new since I’d moved out. I didn’t like them on her; they hid too much of her face, more like a mask than glasses. Then I thought, This is Reggie, I know her, stop being a lovestruck teenager and be a grown-up cop. I didn’t need to see her whole face to read her.
“Couldn’t I have just wanted to be close to you?” she asked, but the moment she worded it that way I knew that wasn’t why she’d done it.
“No,” I said, just that, while I forced myself to notice her body language and what parts of her face I could see rather than her body.
“What do you mean, no? I want you, Zaniel. The sex has always been amazing.”
I didn’t want to have this conversation in the parking lot. It was just us, but there were security cameras; they almost certainly wouldn’t be able to hear what we said, but it still seemed too personal to be out in the open. “This doesn’t seem like a conversation for the parking lot,” I said.
“Why, because you have to rush off to work?” she said, falling back into the irritation bordering on anger that had been her typical with me for a while.
“No, because I don’t want to talk about our personal life in a parking lot with security cameras.”
She looked up as if she were searching for a bird that had just flown overhead. “I don’t see them.”
“Try the building entrance and the secondary entrance just two cars past here.”
She looked where I directed and saw them. She looked out at the parking lot behind us. “Is that another one attached to a light pole?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have looked for them.”
“It’s my job to notice things like that.”
“Okay, you’ve made your point,” she said, still irritated, but calmer.
“I want to talk more, Reggie, but just not here.”
She licked her lips, which meant she was nervous, especially when she was wearing lipstick. “I don’t want to wait a week to finish this talk,” she said.
The fact that she wanted to see me sooner than our “date” ran through me like something electric, as if hope could have current to jolt from my fingers to my scalp. Why did that make me feel more hopeful than her rubbing herself up against me? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.
“Yes, I mean, I agree I’d like to finish this talk before we meet for dinner.”
She smiled then, and even with the sunglasses on I knew that the smile filled her eyes with that light that was warm and mischievous and sexy, and which I’d learned lately was only a few drops away from cruel, but it wasn’t cruel today.
“Dinner date,” she said, voice low and throaty, her phone sex voice again.
I should have just accepted the win, but it was too confusing, so I said, “Just a few minutes ago you were mad when I called it a date.”
“Zaniel, I’m calling it a date now, don’t push it.” The voice was not sexy when she said it, but she wasn’t irritated with me, just impatient.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She grinned at me, not sexy, but just her. “You’re the only man who ever said that to me, like you’re saying ‘Yes, sir.’ ”
I smiled back. “In the army it means the same thing.”
“I remember,” she said. “Let’s do a lunch this weekend where we can talk this out, so when we have the dinner it can be a real date without having to worry about all this.”
I wasn’t sure what all this was, and I really doubted that one lunch conversation would clear up everything that had gone wrong between us, but I didn’t push it. “Sounds good,” I said.
“Good, I know when you’re on a case this serious that you don’t know your schedule, but let’s try for brunch or lunch tomorrow. My mom will be happy to babysit Connery if she knows we’re trying to work things out,” she said, and there was that easy confidence in her that I hadn’t seen in weeks, maybe longer.
“I won’t know my schedule, but I promise that I will do everything I can to see you tomorrow for at least an hour. I want to work things out, Reggie, I really do.”
“Me, too, Zaniel,” she said.
We had that awkward moment where we weren’t sure if we should kiss goodbye. In the end she said, “We better not risk another kiss, or we might get carried away, cameras or no cameras.”
I was almost certain she didn’t mean it, but I took the upbeat teasing and ran with it. “That would be a shame,” I said, putting the heat and eagerness into my words and face that she wanted. If she’d pushed it, I wouldn’t have gone through with it, and probably she wouldn’t have either. She was a high school teacher; she couldn’t afford that kind of scandal. Even with her husband. As a cop, getting caught making out with my wife wouldn’t be encouraged, but I wouldn’t get in serious trouble.
Reggie laughed then, happy with my response. “I’ll move my car so you can go catch the bad guys.” She moved past me between my car and the one parked beside us, so that she had to brush lightly against me. It wasn’t the body language of earlier, but it still stole my breath for a moment. She trailed her fingers down my arm as she moved past, getting her keys out of her pocket. She always kept a small key ring so if her purse got stolen, they wouldn’t have her house keys. A friend in college had gotten mugged and then the guy had cleaned out her apartment with the keys later that week.
I don’t know what made me go for broke, but I called after her, “Would it be pushing it if I told you I love you?”
She flashed me that sexy grin over her shoulder as she rounded the back of her car. “No, I love you, too.”
Another little jolt of electric hope shot through me. It felt like my hair should be standing on end from it, but I knew it didn’t show like that.