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Or a night.
There was a definite change in how she was with him last night, and it emboldened him.
As the gate area grew busier around him now, he pulled the phone out of his breast pocket and double-checked his calendar.
He was flying home Thursday afternoon, scheduled to arrive at seven p.m. He pulled up their thread of text messages and started a new one to her.
At airport waiting for my flight out. I should be home by 8 next Thursday night. I'll text you when I land. Meet at my place since you'll be in the city? Have a good week. Give 'em hell. -J.
He tapped “send” and, just as spontaneously, doubt arose.
Maybe it was too much. Maybe he should have waited a few days. Maybe he should play it cool, make her realize how much she wanted him.
But after last night, he knew she did; underneath the distance and the rules, he saw her emptiness, sensed her need.
His text would let her know he would be there for her—in exactly the way she needed him to be—at the end of what promised to be a rough day.
No harm, no foul. At least he hadn’t done anything dumb like suggest they have dinner first. A dinner where he could have an actual conversation with her over a good meal and a glass of wine, with dim lighting, flickering candles, soft, sexy music in the background . . .
Hello. Public space.
This was a friends-with-benefits thing only—she was clear about that.
Their wordless tango of control and surrender was some erotic fantasy come true. Still, it had been hard for him to hurt her purposely.
It wasn’t so difficult for him to blindfold her, or to bind her wrists with the leather cuffs he’d carefully chosen for the cushy lining, or to strum her clit with maddening vibration as he stood back and watched her writhe.
But blindfolding, restraining, and whizzing a toy against her all fell into a different category, at least in his inexperienced mind, than consciously causing pain.
But that night of her dinner, she tapped him to play a role.
I sent your driver away.
He hoped to hell he could hold on to the part.
* * *
In the garden,the beating afternoon sun warmed the top of her head, her face, her arms, and delicate early summer fragrance surrounded her—roses, peonies, lavender.
A furry bumblebee hovered and buzzed nearby while a seaplane droned in the distance, out over the ocean. With her forearm, she wiped the sweat from her cheeks and continued deadheading the peonies—stems thick and tough with age—that had bloomed early and now drooped over the edge of the patio.
The heirloom peony bushes had clinched their decision to buy the house almost two decades ago. She and Harris had toured it on a sunny Saturday around this time of year, when the blossoms’ scent drifted through the open doors and windows.
“I want to live with you here,” he had said.
The finances were a stretch for a promising but early-career lawyer, and she hadn’t yet signed her first book deal.
Neither of them had any inkling of her forthcoming success, or the heartbreak it would bring. “We shouldn’t,” she had said. “The money . . .”
He allayed her caution with a kiss. “We can do it—we’ll both love it here. We’ll figure it out.”
The bumblebee circled again as she cut the final stem with the pruning shears and stood to go to the roses. White spotlights filled her vision, the spinning reminding her she might have stood up too fast. She had been out here for hours now, without water or breakfast or lunch.
She got down again, sitting cross-legged in the shadow of a rosebush, and rested her head in her hands until the spinning slowed.
The scent of the flowers piqued her attention. She lifted her eyes and ran her finger along the browning petals of a spent blossom in front of her. She continued down the sepal to the stem with its sharp, smooth thorns, and tapped her fingertip against one.
A crimson droplet bloomed on her skin before she registered the prick of pain, a lot like how last night she had heard the crack of leather slapping her before she felt the sting.
