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The most astounding, crystal-clear blue eyes. Like ocean water in the Caribbean, the color you see in picture-perfect postcards. They somehow managed to envelope you with their warmth and send a shiver through you, too, like he could look deep inside you to your innermost secrets and desires.
I couldn’t pinpoint his age, but I figured it was late 20’s to early 30’s. He had the very beginnings of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, a mischievous crinkle that went with the gleam in his eyes when he grinned. The crinkling wasn’t the age so much as the tan, though – a beautiful golden brown. Not the type that says, ‘I go to a tanning salon,’ but ‘I just came back from two weeks in Hawaii.’
He was dressed in a dark suit – something exquisitely tailored and very expensive-looking – so it was a little harder to see his body, but what I could see made my stomach flutter. His shoulders were broad. His chest pressed but didn’t strain at his crisp, white shirt. He was wearing a blue tie, one that matched his eyes beautifully. He had loosened it and unfastened the top three buttons of his shirt, exposing a powerful, chiseled neck, more of that tan skin, and the upper edges of well-defined pecs. A few dark chest hairs peeked above the top fastened button.
His thighs looked like they were muscular under the expensive pants, though it was hard to tell. He had on these trendy, kick-ass shoes – probably boots of some sort, with a kind of rock ‘n roll embroidering, if that makes any sense. They would have gone as well with a $500 pair of jeans in a night club as they did with his $5000 suit.
And I swear I don’t care about these things, but… I couldn’t help notice that his shoes were pretty big. And so were his hands: well-crafted, masculine, and large, like Michaelangelo’s David. (No wedding ring, by the way.) I also stole a brief, very brief look at his… ahem, below his beltline, and while I’m not very well-versed in judging these sorts of things with all the clothes on, let’s just say that I wouldn’t be surprised if he filled out his underwear pretty well in the front.
I shouldn’t have said that. Oh God. But, hey, I thought it at the time, so there you are. Can’t take it back now.
If you want the short-hand version, he looked like a model in an ad for a highbrow, extremely expensive brand of scotch. The kind of guy who would have hung with Sinatra in the 50’s, or with George Clooney or Kanye West now. Hell, the kind of guy they would call to hang out with. The kind of man who would have kicked Don Draper’s ass in Mad Men. A Young Turk on a break from conquering the world. The kind of man that every guy wanted to be, and every woman wanted to get to know.
‘Get to know’ is a euphemism, in case you hadn’t figured that out.
As I walked up, Stanley and the stranger were finishing talking about sports – the Lakers or something. Then Mr. Movie Star looked over at me and his eyes lit up. He got that gleam I described earlier, and the corners of his eyes crinkled as he grinned.
“You must be Lily,” he said, and held out his hand.
My heart was already pounding, but when he said that, it did a triple flip in my chest. Hearing that voice on the phone? Super sexy. But not even half as good as hearing it in person.
The difference was like homemade banana pudding versus the stuff in a packet. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the stuff in the packet. But I loooove me some banana pudding made from scratch.
Okay, that’s kind of goofy (and now you know more than you ever wanted to about my dessert preferences). A better analogy would be real sex versus phone sex. Phone sex can be incredibly hot – but it doesn’t hold a candle to real sex.
Um… just to be clear… at that point in my life, standing in that lobby at 6PM on a Friday, I’d never had phone sex.
Yet.
One other thing: as I held up my arm to shake his hand, I smelled his cologne.
Ohhhhhh God.
I read somewhere that our deepest and most primal memories are connected to smell. If you think about it, as a baby, you probably responded to scents – your mother’s, your father’s – before you could figure out what the hell sounds they were making, or before your eyes even focused right.
Even now, when I think of Christmas, I smell baking cookies in the kitchen and that clean, pine scent of freshly cut Christmas trees.
Other memories are just as vivid: burning leaves on an autumn day. Clean laundry fresh from the dryer.
When I think of him now, I smell that cologne.
Masculine and heady, with the basic layers of musk and sandalwood, and just a tiny bit of sweetness thrown in.
It wasn’t overpowering at all. Just a hint. A tease. I mean, I was right next to him, and I caught the barest whiff.
