I wonder if Lilah senses that this is about her, that even as I make this seemingly innocuous statement I want to drive my seed into her womb, let it burn hotly there and then settle, gifting both of us with a child, our child.
“I bet Australia was awesome, though,” Finn says, smiling.
My insides twist when I remember wrestling with this kid in his backyard, Lilah inside with her mother, acting out some childhood play she’d written. I never even noticed her except perhaps to give her a piece of candy here or there as a friend of the family.
And now she’s a woman, my woman.
“It was,” I tell him. “You should see some of the creatures, Finn. They’ll give you some real fierce nightmares.”
It’s all small talk and gladness shoots through me when it’s over, because then I don’t have to force my eyes to look anywhere apart from Lilah.
Mark and I wander through the hospital, down the white hallways and across the shiny floor, riding the elevator to the lobby. I put my hands behind my back, like I often do, standing tall and staring straight ahead, mostly so I don’t have to meet my best friend’s eyes.
Is this wrong?
But then why the fuck does it feel so right?
“Are you alright, Dom?” he asks as the elevator rides down.
“Of course,” I say. “Why?”
I feel him shrugging beside me, but don’t turn to look.
“I guess I just wanted to make sure. You seem a little … shaken up? I know we’re all macho and that, buddy, but we can talk about shit if you ever need to.”
I almost laugh, but force it down into my belly to simmer and die. The elevator doors open and we walk into the lobby, side by side, my oldest friend and I and the unspoken thing hanging between us, the knowledge that I want his daughter, want her bad.
“I was going to ask,” Mark says as we walk into the blistering Floridian heat, the sun baking down even though it’s gone eight o’clock in the evening. “Would you mind picking up Lilah tomorrow? I know I’m being a total prick here, asking you to do it, but I know it’s your day off. So I just thought I’d ask.”
I turn to find that he’s trailed off, his lips twisted, and perhaps I’m staring at him like an asshole, making my best friend feel uncomfortable. I force something akin to a smile on my face and nod as warmly as I can with these notions flurrying around my mind.
“Of course I’ll do it,” I tell him. “You don’t even need to ask.”
“Thanks,” he sighs, as though a large weight has been lifted off his shoulders. “Work’s busier than a motherfucker at the moment and Jess is working a double. I don’t want Finn to miss school and, well, you’re the only person I trust to do this, I guess. I know she’s not a little girl anymore. She’s got a license. She’s legally an adult. But I don’t want her to drive, not so soon after the fire. Sometimes I just look at her and see a baby, know what I mean?
“No,” I say firmly. “I can’t say I do, Mark. But I’ll give her a ride, no worries.”
A baby?
The woman is sex painted in sin wrapped in a ball of desire, one-hundred percent woman, with the curves and the fuck-me eyes to prove it, and a mouth that would be perfect for meeting with mine.
I’d kiss down her body slowly, making her savor ever touch, her skin pricking with goosebumps as I go lower and lower. I can hear the sounds she’d make as I’d peeled down her panties, her wetness hot and tangy-scented.
Then I’d slide my finger between her lips, prying them apart and revealing the pink openness of her sex, pushing my finger inside and then tasting it, tasting her wetness and her womb and everything about her.
And these are thoughts I should stomp on with her father standing right fucking beside me.
Mark puts his hands on his hips and squints across the parking lot in a way that tells me he wants to say something.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I just wish you’d find somebody sometimes,” he murmurs. “You’ve got so much to offer.”
“You know how I feel about that,” I mutter.
He lets out a breath, shaking his head slowly. “Yeah, I know. You want to find the woman of your dreams. You want to just know the second you lay eyes on her. You know, Dom, that’s always seemed a weird part of your personality to me. Like it doesn’t fit.”
“How so?”
“Because you’re not exactly old-fashioned or obsessed with Hollywood movies or anything like that, I guess.”
“That’s the problem, how I see it,” I growl. “It’s become old-fashioned to want to claim one woman and treat her right. Forever. Men like me, men who know what they want and won’t let anything stop them from going after it, we’re respected in business and sports and everything else. But when it comes to relationships, we’re sexist, we’re old-fashioned, we’re whatever-the-fuck.”
“Sorry, Dom, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
I laugh, throwing my head back in something like a howl.
“You didn’t offend me,” I say, as we share a look straight out of our childhood. “We’re just talking. Anyway, I think I might’ve found somebody.”
Mark blinks, then smiles. “What, really? That’s great.”
“But it’s complicated.”
His smile widens. “When is it not complicated? If you’ve found somebody, don’t let anything stop you. You just said that yourself.”
I sigh, almost roaring the truth right then, but it doesn’t make any sense to voice these private, intense desires before I’ve even made them explicit to Lilah.
Why tear a hole in a decades-long friendship if Lilah doesn’t even want anything to do with me?
And yet, back in the hospital room, I thought I saw something in her eyes.
A flicker, a look, a blush to her cheeks that seemed like the same desire now thrumming through me.
Chapter Four
Lilah
I sit up in bed with the script laid out before me, staring down at my lines, a nasty thought whirring in my mind as the sun rises and fills the room with blood-orange light.
My body shape isn’t right for acting.
I try to shoo the thought away like the horrible traitor it is, but it just resurfaces again and again. It just keeps rising with more steam.
The only person who seemingly ever found me attractive was Craig, and that wasn’t exactly the attraction I was interested in. That was more like a hyena latching onto me for some messed-up reasons of his own, deciding that I was his in the most warped way imaginable.
I don’t want a hyena.
I want a lion, somebody who will roar out for me, whose strength will help to evolve mine and who I can grow with.
I don’t want the immature little boys from my high school – thank God for graduation – but I want, I want …
And then, as if the universe is playing a cosmic trick on me, the man I really want pokes his head around the corner of the door, something vicious and primal on his face.
Definitely not a boyish smile, that’s for sure.
Dominic Dallison is wearing a steel gray shirt that matches the gray in hair, his suit pants tight, his shoes shiny. Sweat pricks him because nobody is immune to the Miami summer sun, and for a moment my vision wavers and I see him, not as he is now, but as he was when he charged into the building and rescued me, never stopping to think about his own safety.