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“I’ll text you my address.”
I swallowed. This was really happening. “Great. Max, is this officially a booty call?”
“This is me getting off the phone. I’ll see you soon.” He hung up, and I grinned. I’d never had an experience like this before. Mostly because I’d avoided it like the plague. I didn’t do things that ended up with people asking me to come over for sex.
Nerves settled in my stomach. I had almost no experience with this, and what I did have was…bad. I got off the bed. I could say no. It would be easy enough. I’d text him back and just be pithy about changing my mind.
Only I didn’t want to. No, I wanted to know what it was like to have sex with this man whose presence had woken me up inside in a way I’d thought wasn’t possible.
Can I go through with this?
I could.
I still looked relatively put together from dinner and quickly adjusted my makeup. On my way out the door, my mother’s painting caught my attention. I’d bought it in an auction my first year out of college. It was worth a fortune, and I’d never have been able to pay for it now. Then, however, I’d been living off my father without thinking about money and getting a paycheck for doing very little for his company. I’d wanted it with a focus I hadn’t had since.
Funny, I’d never considered how I’d bought it right after I got out of the hospital. I might not have been in the best frame of mind, but that didn’t matter anymore. I had it.
My mother had painted the sun coming over the horizon, only the colors weren’t bright. They weren’t the golden touchesof a new morning. No, they were blue, black, and dark purple. The sun itself seemed to be glaring at me.
She’d painted it toward the end of her life, and my father had sold it, and every other work she created, almost immediately afterward to pay the bills.
Then he’d gotten very rich.
The title of this one had beenSeptember. She would die in October. My birthday was in September. I sighed.
Before I could overthink it, I sent Justin a message.There’s nothing so bad we can’t fix it.
I had to believe that for myself too. There was nothing I couldn’t get past. I promised myself, my future sunrises weren’t going to look likeSeptember.
I grabbed my coat and headed outside to search for a future that might start because I had one night with a man that wouldn’t end in a relationship. Tonight could be about sex, and maybe if I could figure out how to keep it just that, I could start to let go of the past.
It shouldn’t embarrass me to tell Theo where I was going, but it did. I just gave him the address and then totally pretended I wasn’t embarrassed to have given them the address of where I was going to have sex.
I just stayed silent and pretended I was cool. I was a twenty-four-year-old woman. I could have sex with whomever I wanted without being judged by the guards employed to keep me safe. I sighed. My life was a little bit fucked up.
I texted my sisters.I’m going to have sex.
It took a hot second for Bridget to answer me.Congratulations?
She didn’t get it, and that was my fault, not hers. I put away my phone. The building was right in between Midtown West and Hell’s Kitchen. It wasn’t a neighborhood I frequented. His homewas on the corner of 48thand 10th. It was pretty there, so I made a mental note to check it out more later.
The building looked like it was a converted…something. I couldn’t describe it better because it seemed like all the apartments in the area had been turned from one thing into something else. The last apartment I visited in the area had been made from a converted schoolhouse. They’d left chalkboards hanging in the apartments to indicate the past of the structure. I sort of loved it.
But I didn’t know what his had been in its previous life. Some kind of warehouse, maybe? I wasn’t sure. My hands shook as I sent him a quick text that just saidhere. Of course, I could just turn around and run. I could. Theo might not even judge me. Luke wouldn’t care. He’d drive home and never mention it again. What was wrong with me? Twenty-four-year-old women went and had sex all the time. It was the thing to do. And yes, I—
My train of thought stopped as Max opened the door. I’d sort of expected him to buzz me in. With buildings like this, if the doorman was off or even if there weren’t one, then that was the way it worked. Mostly. But there he was. He’d come to open it up himself, and that was sort of…sweet.
I forgot I was nervous.
“Hi.” I smiled at him and left my worries on the street behind me. This would be fine. It would.
Max threw a look over my shoulder at the car, where Theo stood on the street, but then turned all of his attention toward me. “I was hoping you’d still be in that dress.”
“Well, I aim to please.” Not really, but it seemed like something a woman with any sense of how to behave in a situation like this would say. I even winked at him, which made him frown at me. I hadn’t meant that. Was I already fucking up?
He lived on the second floor, so we took the stairs because he told me the elevator was crazy slow. That was okay. I alwayspreferred to walk when I could, and it had the added benefit of showing me where the stairs were, something I also really liked to know. Oh boy. This might not go as well as I hoped. There was nothing like not being able to control my thoughts. Escape routes and strange frowns. I might be behaving a lot odder than even I realized.
Maybe.
