“Take it off,” I say, feeling daring.
And daring feels spectacular.
Like taking a chance. Like putting myself out there.
His hands dart out to the hem of my little black dress. With a rough swallow, he slides it up. He’s not hesitant. He doesn’t delay. He lifts it to my waist, only pausing when the bottom of my black teddy appears. His gaze lingers for a moment, then he’s back to the job.
The whisking off.
He yanks up the dress to my breasts.
The trembles I felt before? They’re nothing compared to the full-body shudder I experience as I record this moment.
His hands. The set of his jaw. The fullness of his lips.
One more swoosh of fabric and the dress goes over my head. His fingers brush my arms, my shoulders, my hair. The faint little touches set me aflame as he lets the dress fall to the floor.
I’m hotter than a sidewalk in summertime as I stand before him wearing only a lace plunge teddy and black heels.
The question he asked at the bottom of the steps reverberates in my mind.
Do I trust him?
He must know the answer. He must know how much.
Because I’m here, nearly naked, and he made sure I didn’t fall.
But sometimes you need to say it twice.
“I trust you.” It feels like jumping off a cliff.
“Same,” he says, like it’s hard to speak even that one word. My gaze slides down his body. His fists are clenched by his sides, and it’s as if I’ve walked in on him in a private act, so I return my focus to his face.
But that feels even more personal because he doesn’t stop staring at me, nor do I want him to.
I know that look. It’s how I devoured him the other night.
With hungry eyes.
He’s drinking me in, eating me up, and I want everything about this moment to stretch long into the night.
I want to be gazed at this way forever—with adoration, with lust, and with something I’ve never seen before.
Something I don’t know how to name.
The air is thick with desire, wrapped up in the fading notes of one of the sexiest songs I’ve ever heard and its final warning not to fall.
He breaks the trance. “Nice teddy.” His voice is a mere rasp.
“Thanks,” I manage to say.
For a long, delirious moment, the hero’s next words hover between us.
Now let me see how sexy you look on my bed, wearing nothing but that naughty grin.
I can feel them pulsing in my body.
But he doesn’t say them. We’ve already gone off-script. We’re writing new lines, trying new scenes.
And I don’t know what happens next.
Tristan scrubs a hand over his stubbled jaw, swallows, and glances away as if it pains him. He bends, grabs the dress, and hands it to me. “Want to go get something to eat? I’m starving.”
No, I want to shout. I don’t want to eat. I want to finish the scene. I want you to find me on your bed, wearing nothing but a naughty grin.
And yet, I can’t want that.
My disappointment is chased with relief that he suggested food, an exit.
I need to get out of this zone with him. This lawless land where I’m entertaining wildly dangerous thoughts about my best guy friend.
I have to reset right now. Or else I’ll do something we’ll regret.
“Yeah, I’m ravenous,” I say.
But not for food.
16
Tristan
Greasy food.
That’s the only solution to tonight’s dilemma.
Cheap, grungy, hole-in-the-wall grub.
Something to kill the mood of the black dress, the send-all-the-blood-rushing-south teddy, and that precipice.
That fucking precipice at the top of the steps where all I wanted was to haul her in for a kiss. To slide my hands through that silky curtain of hair. To bring her close and tell her I can’t stop thinking about her and need to have her.
Instead, I choose a Mexican joint that’s as dingy as winter is long. We order tacos, chips, guac, and two Diet Cokes, then snag a Formica booth at the back of the shop, the sharp scent of cleaning supplies from a nearby closet making my nose sting.
I’m not thinking of sex now. I have bleach nose.
Nor am I picturing that teddy I bet she’s still wearing under the hoodie and jeans she changed into. Fine, I am thinking of the teddy, but I’m trying not to.
I divert all my brain cells to the guacamole as I dip a chip then crunch into it.
“What’s Barrett up to tonight?” she asks.
“More play rehearsal. The theater department at his school is intense, especially as the show gets closer. He’s working on the set designs. He seems to really like it.”
She picks up her taco and takes a bite, then says, “I could see him being a set designer someday. Like for Broadway.”
I smile as I snag another chip then chase it with a drink of soda. “Definitely. And if not that, he’ll be a scientist. He digs science a lot. But hell if I know what it takes to be a scientist. I was terrible at any science classes.”
“Same. I wish there had been a way to be a psych major without taking chemistry. But alas, I couldn’t escape it.”
“You were dead set on studying psych,” I say, recalling our college days—business for me, psychology for her. “Did you ever want to be a shrink or a therapist?”
She shakes her head. “No. I just like understanding what makes us tick.”
“Ah. Have you figured it out yet, Gingersnap?”
“Still working on it.” She digs into her taco, taking another bite and swallowing before she says, “How is he doing though?”
I wipe my mouth with a napkin. “What do you mean? With the set design?”
She shakes her head and sets down her half-eaten taco. “No. Just in general. I know it’s been two years since your mom died, but how do you think he’s holding up?”
Ah, the million-dollar question. I ask myself that daily, but hardly anyone else does anymore. A few months, maybe half a year, seems to be some kind of statute of limitations on grief, when people stop inquiring.
But Peyton never followed those rules. She didn’t follow them in college when my dad passed away, and she didn’t follow them, either, when I lost my mom.
Ironic, in a terribly cruel way, that my mom died right when she’d finally started dating again. She’d met a guy she liked. She was moving on from her own grief, moving ahead into the next phase of her life.
But fate has a way of fucking with you, and the bitch had a field day screwing with my mom. One sunny summer afternoon, as she was heading to see her new guy and Barrett and I were at the movies, my mom suffered a heart attack in the park.
She died on the way to the hospital, no one with her but the paramedics.
Watching my fifteen-year-old brother break down, kneeling, bawling, clutching the hospital bed when we arrived damn near broke me too.
I was twenty-seven, and the pain of losing her was excruciating. But I’d lived a quarter-century already. I’d made it through my teenage years with both parents, and through most of my twenties with one.
My kid brother was fifteen and had no one but me. I’d have to be enough.
He moved in with me a few days later, and somehow we’ve fumbled our way through. I found a therapist for him, and over time, he navigated to the other side of grief.