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“I’m in big trouble with you,” she said.
“That’s the mirror I’m looking in, too, but I like what I see, baby. So fucking much.”
They didn’t get back to the city until midnight, and it was too late to collect Scungy. Cal had him delivered, cranky and scared, but at least without the vomit, in the morning.
Over burgers that night, he amused her with stories about his mom’s exploits, from chaining herself to a tree for a month to being part of a human blockade. Katrice Sherwood was the most rad cat sitter ever.
On Tuesday night, they saw a movie neither of them bothered to pay attention to, mesmerized instead by each other’s hands and necking in the back of the half-empty theater. On Wednesday night, he broke another rule and came up to her hastily tidied apartment after they’d eaten dim sum and egg roll in Chinatown.
“It’s small and ugly, but it’s home,” she said, opening the door to her studio. You could do the entire tour from the doorway. Along with the distinctive smell of cat litter that needed cleaning, there was a soundtrack of outraged growling that added to the ambience of slumming it. She waited for Cal to make a comment that would make her feel small, mean, a Cinderella with a scrubbing brush.
All he did was examine the bedroom door, checking to see whether it closed.
“Something wrong?” she asked. Apart from the skin-prickling noise Scungy was making and her own feeling of impending doom, because if he made her feel bad, it was a fork in the bubble of her glittering happiness.
“Only nail marks I want on my back are yours. I get the feeling that bag of fur hates most people. I’m going to hate him right back if he ruins a perfectly good fuck,” he said.
“You’re staying?” She imagined he’d kiss her expertly at the door and leave like he had the last two nights because after their sex fest, she’d been a little sore, and they were still feeling their way in this relationship business that didn’t come with a brief.
“Finley.” Two strides and he had her chin in his hand. “I’m staying unless you don’t want me here. I’m staying as often as you want me here. That cat needs to get over it.”
That cat didn’t, not that night, but they made enough noise between them to drown Scungy out, and an almost naked Cal with rumpled hair and his sexy scruff making pancakes in her kitchen the next morning was more than Fin needed to feel like she wasn’t going to turn into a pumpkin and had won the lucky door prize at the ball.
They spent the next two nights in her bed, much to Scungy’s annoyance, and Saturday night they went to the opening night of a new art gallery. This wasn’t an official Sherwood event—they weren’t there to work, so it was another date—and they spent more time looking at each other than the art. It ended at Cal’s 49th St. apartment in Turtle Bay Gardens.
Fin made sure the first thing she did was check his bedroom door. She had to go up two floors to do it. The idea was to make her feel like they were equals. She swung his door back and forth between her two hands, trying to concentrate on that one act, so the absolute luxury of his place didn’t overwhelm her.
It did anyway. Even after all this time living in Cal’s world, seeing how people with serious cash made out.
“It’s a place to live,” he said. She was in his bedroom. He was on the other side of the door. She’d closed herself in, so he couldn’t see the effect an apartment with four bedrooms, a wine cellar, a library, a dining room that opened onto a patio and garden had on her. She could fit her whole apartment in Cal’s living room, twice over.
“That’s what all mansion owners say.”
“You’re right. That was crass. It’s rented, but your point stands. I’m sorry.”
“Have you always lived this well?”
“I’ve always made good money. But I give a lot away.”
“Who do you give it to?”
“You, if you want it. I would’ve offered earlier, but I was financially constrained.”
Why wouldn’t she want it? Why hadn’t he offered before?
“Open the door, Fin.”
“I don’t think I will.” He could easily open the door—she hadn’t locked it.
There was a thump and a slide on his side. “I’ll wait here till you’re ready.”
She put her back to the door and slid down to her butt, and they sat back to back with the door between them. “It might take a while.” The personal reality of Cal was a lot to take in.
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
She smiled at his enormous bed. Cal got what he wanted not by taking or asking directly, but by making you want to give it up to him. There were two exceptions to that rule. When he was acting as her mentor and when he was seeing to her extreme pleasure—then he could be a dictatorial son of a bitch. She didn’t hate it.
From the other side of the door he asked, “What’s going on?”
