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“Just a gut feeling, I guess,” she finally says, looking straight into my eyes.
I don’t like it, this ‘gut feeling’ of hers. Maybe because you can’t reason with feelings. Maybe something else. Straightening, I advance toward her. “What if I told you I don’t have any kind of principles? Not the sort that you would like anyway. That I don’t have a do-gooder bone in my body?”
Surprised by my response, she unconsciously backs away, but in this small bedroom, there’s nowhere to go. The back of her legs bump against her twin-sized bed.
“You had my sweater cleaned,” she says. “That was a good deed.”
I stand right in front of her. “I didn’t do anything. You can thank Cheryl, my manager.”
“Well, you apologized for being rude about my sweater.”
“Did I?”
“And you let us have drinks on the house—that was nice.”
“Maybe I just wanted to help JD score points with Amy.”
She looks down, searching for a response. I cup her chin and lift her gaze to mine. How did I not notice before that her eyes were so pretty? Guess ’cause I’m usually looking at other parts of the body.
“You didn’t have to return my sweater,” she says hastily, as if that will get me to back away. “You didn’t have to give me a lift to the grocery store. That was nice of you.”
If she knew what was going through my mind, the sorts of things I’d like to do to her, she would not think me nice.
“Is it ‘nice’ if I had ulterior motives?” I return, sliding my thumb along her lower lip.
Her breath quivers, making the blood throb in the area of my groin.
“Ul—Ulterior motives?”
“It probably wasn’t such a good idea to invite me up to your place,” I say, talking to both myself and her.
“What kind of ulterior motives?”
I could go there. Would she stop me? Maybe, maybe not. But for my own sake, I back off. A little. “Like finishing the foot massage.”
“We weren’t done?”
You weren’t done. But aloud I say, releasing her, “No, we weren’t.”
“Oh, well um, Simone’s in her room. She’s got her door closed, but…”
“But? What are you worried about?”
“Nothing.”
I sit down on the bed. “Okay, then.”
She thinks for a moment, decides to close the door, then sits on the bed beside me. I pull up her legs and lay them across my lap. I unlace her shoes and pull them off, followed by her socks.
“Giving someone a foot massage is a nice thing to do,” she says as I start to rub one foot.
Ulterior motive, I remind her silently. But I hang back. I don’t have to go further than a foot massage. I should just go back to The Lotus and hang out with a woman who only asks superficial questions and won’t criticize my lack of woke-ness.
Bridget is tense and nervous. I can feel it in her body. But she could have passed on the foot massage, so the fact that she didn’t means she wants this.
“Maybe that’s the only nice thing I’m capable of,” I say as I dig my thumb into her stiffness.
“You can’t be all that bad. You obviously care a lot about your cousin.”
