by Shayla Black
“I know. Sheez, I know, and I’m sorry I dragged it all back out…” She trails off, clearly convinced I see her genuine contrition. “Just thank God you had the good sense to play coy until he repeated it, while you captured the whole thing on your phone. The ass chunk should just be happy he’s not behind bars, crying ‘fuck me harder, Bubba’ for the eight hundredth time.”
“Okay, okay.” I laugh it out while holding up both hands. “I got that the first eight hundred times you told me too.”
“Then it’s time for you to start believing me.” She recovers a blue candy from my desk and holds it up. “And to stop thinking of yourself as nothing more than this little blue dot.”
Right away, I go sarcastic with that one. “But what if I want to be one of the red ones?”
She rolls her eyes. “I’m getting ready to throw this whole dish at you, missy.”
“You going to help pick it all up too?” I arch my brows at the mushed dots beneath our feet.
“You know what I’m talking about here, damn it.”
“Oh dear God.” Back in my chair, I drop my head into my hands. “Not this section of the lecture again.”
“Oh yeah.” Edie leans forward. Yanks one of my hands into hers. “I think you need it, honey. Especially right now.”
I cover my eyes with my free hand. “I don’t need anything like that, okay?”
“Because another kickboxing class or therapy session is going to do it?” she ripostes. “Katherine Danielle Casey, you’re a mess of stress. I’m not the only one who sees it around here. Getting out there and going on a few nice dates, with a nice guy or two, doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you human. A normal twenty-nine-year-old woman.”
I lift my head. Give her a resigned glance. “And it means I’m not letting Brett win.”
It’s the first time I’ve spoken the words outside of my sessions with Dr. Braden, but already I see them as my personal wild mustangs. Happier out in the open. They’re even more joyous when Edie answers with a triumphant fist pump.
“Yesss!”
After she turns that fist and holds it out to “kaboom” with me, I chastise, “So this is progress, right? So I get to be spared the part about how if those nice dates turn into naughty fun, I’m not a perv or a slut or a—”
“And you’re not!” She pulls her fist back . At once umps it again, adopting a strange “solidarity” pose. “You have needs, honey. Normal, healthy, womanly needs…”
“That I’ve been taking care of on a regular basis, thank you very much.”
“And all hail the power of LELO,” she concedes. “But your little pink silicone friend isn’t the same as a beautiful cock filling you up, and making you—”
“Edie.”
“What?”
I shake my head and indulge a soft laugh. “Thank God I shut the door.”
She falls back in her chair with a delicate huff. Not once does she break pace on the thread comments on her phone. “Amen to that,” she mutters. “Because I’m also going to state, for the record, that having some normal, scream-off-the-roof sex with one guy would be an even better way to give Brett Fuckhorn the middle finger.”
I press palms to my cheeks, which surely match my laptop’s crimson wallpaper by now. “Ohhh, Christ on flatbread, honey.”
She takes out more chocolates but doesn’t eat them. Instead, she starts arranging them into some kind of a pattern on the other side of my pen cup. “It’s time for you to stop all this wallowing, Kate.”
I drop my hands. Clench my jaw. “I’m not wallowing.”
“You need to start living.”
“I am living!”
“Pffft.”
“What?” I narrow my eyes. “Going to that crazy bar with you Saturday night wasn’t living?”
“You know what I mean.” She doesn’t lift her attention from her M&M’s, which should be my first notification that there’s more going on beneath those blonde curls than I think—but by the time I catch on, it’s too late. She’s already saying, while batting those damn fairy eyes with deceiving innocence, “Have you thought about…calling Adan?”
2
I give in to a long groan while dropping my head backward. “Oh whyyy did I know you were going to say that?”
“Duh.” Edie doesn’t look up from her intent chocolate arranging. “Because he’s hot as hell? Because in every single picture you showed me from your ten-year reunion, he looks like he wants you to call? Because he gave you his business card, with his personal cell on the back, before leaving the reunion?”
“Because he’s just nice that way?” I finally get in. “Because that’s just how he is and was, even back in high school?”
“Nice.” Her lips twist with sarcasm that should be trademarked. “Sure. And nice was why you pined away for him until you packed your bags for college.”
I turn up the force of my fume. “I didn’t ‘pine.’”
“It had nothing to do with the lickable arms, the Rocky Mountain abs, the hair a girl could write poems about…”
“Which half the girls at Westview High knew on an intimate basis?” I warn—as if the wench is even listening.
“The superhero stride, the gaze that draws you into the guy’s soul in one fell swoop…” she goes on. “And of course, there’s the aura.”
I lift my head. Narrow my eyes. “The aura?”
“Ohhhhh, yeah.”
“You’ve only seen pictures of the guy. How do you know about—”
“Because his is that good.” She nods so sagely, I’m not even tempted to refute her. “That man just has it, doesn’t he? That pull. That thing that makes you want to just reach between his thighs and—”
“Gah!”
I bean her with an M&M. It lands in her lap, and she pops it into her mouth without smearing a speck of her dark, trendy lipstick. Yeah, that does it. She’s a wench, but she’s also the wench who knows me better than anyone right now. That also means she knows when to slow her roll. At least a little.
“Fine. I’ll shut up. After I say one. More. Thing.” She emphasizes the final three words with matching finger jabs on the air. “You do realize that passion and fire and intensity and intimacy are what we’re wired as humans to crave? That wanting all of that and more, with mutual consent and desire, is one of the best things about being alive and young in an epic city like this?” She swoops that finger toward my picture window. Outside, San Francisco is bustling and rushing through the middle of its workday. The bay mist has cleared off enough for a view clear to the Golden Gate. “And you also get that most guys would be tripping over their own tongue to fulfill the sensual needs of a beautiful, smart, sassy, sexy, incredible woman like you?”
I burst with a chuckle. A small one. “And you hear how you sound like a LELO commercial now, right?”
She cocks her head. “If they hire me for the gig, you think I might get free shit?”
My mirth fades. Kind of. “And what happened to putting away the silicone friend in favor of a big, hard cock?”
“I think I said beautiful, but big and hard work too.”
My chortle admits defeat to a full laugh. “Christ on a pizza, Edie Treadway.”
She bats her eyes. Tinkerbell with a side of Marilyn Monroe. “Remember, you adore me.”
“Shockingly, yes.”
She leans in heavy on the Marilyn now, swooping a wrist over the printer I keep parked on my desk’s front corner. “And you know who else you might adore?”
I swivel and start adding a new column of numbers from my screen. “Do not even with this again, woman.”
“Someone has to!” she protests. “You won’t acknowledge it for yourself, damn it. That boy—”
“Man,” I intercede. “Adan Tyler isn’t a boy any longer. He’s a man, who likely has the normal needs of one—”
“And needs a stunning redhead to help him with them!”
“I was going to say that he likely already has a few willing volunteers f
or the job.” I get back up, feeling suddenly restless. I look out toward the bay, begging for the view of the sailboats and the sparkling waters to weave their calming effect through me. I stand here a lot when things don’t add up, usually pretty literally, and usually find that the attention shift gives me energy and clarity. But today, the best I can come up with is a dismissive murmur. “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he has them separated into phone directory folders. One for every type.”
Edie mewls as if I’ve just announced I want Thai food for lunch. The woman will endure Thai, but only for me. “He has…types?”
“You think I know?”
“Well, did he in high school?”
I pull in a long breath. “Girl, everyone in high school was his type.” I hug myself, chilled despite the sunny spring day view. My trendy cable-knit dress and matching boots aren’t helping. “Except me, of course.”
Except for one late afternoon in the library, where getting locked in with him led to the most magical two hours of my life…
“Well, who did he bring to the reunion?”
Edie’s prompt is a merciful hook back to the present. I wheel back around, though don’t relax my tight shoulders. “He was with—” I interrupt myself, suddenly perplexed. “Huh. I don’t remember.”
I don’t tell her the reason for that. I don’t divulge that for me, seeing Adan again was like being sixteen all over again. That looking at him was like gazing at the sun. Everything in and around his orbit was fried into nothingness.
“That’s because he wasn’t with anyone,” the woman fills in, now folding her arms too. But unlike my move, she’s a serene sphinx with her pose. “Which explains why, in every photo from that reunion, he was eyeing you like a desert rogue about to dive at an oasis.”
A huff bursts from me, but I’m not sure if it’s laced with laughter or insult. Maybe a little of both. “Did you just compare me to a crop of flea-infested palm trees surrounding questionable water?”
“No.” The Sphinx gets haughtier. “I just compared you to a lush, languid lagoon in the middle of that man’s desolate dystopia. Now all you have to do is make sure he knows where to go for his…drink.”
As soon as her lips quirk with wicked grandeur, I throw up my hands. “Go. Now. Before I decide to redecorate my floor with an Edie rug!”
“You’d be so lucky.”
Only after she’s sauntered out, laughing like a combination of Tinkerbell and Aida the whole time, do I realize she’s left her M&M’s pattern intact. It’s a heart made out of the red candies, with two entwined initials inside.
K and A.
I justify my instant destruction of the letters, tossing a few into my mouth in the doing, by letting my thoughts drift down Memory Lane by ten years. Suddenly, I’m the Poindextress-on-High again, so anxious to show the boy who dominates my dreams how I’ve concocted some new ways for his BMX stunt team to get better performance out of their practices. The team has been rained out of practice, so Adan agrees to meet me in the library after school. I’ve just pulled up my schematics on a machine in the computer lab and am explaining how textured mountain trails are as important for their skills as half-pipes and ramps, when the whole sky ignites with lightning. The whole building trembles from thunder.
And all the electricity goes out.
Westview’s security system instantly thinks we’re on a security lockdown. The doors auto-lock—and the exits from the library are automatically jammed.
We’re stuck.
And I’m in heaven.
“So as long we’re stuck here for a little while, do you just want me to talk you through what I was showing you on the computer?”
“Not really.”
“You want to play a game on my phone?”
“Not really.”
“Homework?”
“Definitely not that.”
“Well, geez, Adan. What do you want to do?”
He’d showed me. Right away. With the full pillows of his lips. The perfect sin of his tongue. The mesmerizing dips and slides and thrusts of his fingers…
“You’re so gorgeous, Kate. I can’t believe how pretty your pussy curls are.”
“You…umm…you’ve never been with a redhead before?”
“Not a real one, I guess. But that’s not the most stunning thing about you.”
“It’s…not?”
“That comes from the life in your eyes. The way you look at me. As if you’re memorizing me.”
“Probably because I am.”
“I like it. Don’t stop. But I do wonder sometimes…”
“W-W-Wonder? About what?”
“If your eyes look any different…when your pussy is coming.”
“Well…wh-wh-why don’t you try to find out?”
And he had.
And I had.
And I swear to God, things haven’t been the same with anyone else since.
I’ve tried. Holy shit, how I’ve tried.
I even repeat exactly that to the space of my office, hoping it imparts the same Brett-banishing boldness I was practicing with Edie. Massive affirmation fail. More than half my mind is still lost to that rainy gray twilight on the library beanbags, half-naked for the boy with the wild honey eyes, the tongue of exquisite magic, and the fingers of knowing skill.
“Come for me, Kate. Let me see it on your face. Let me feel it around my fingers.”
And though raindrops stream down the windows, I’m consumed by his sunlight. Conquered by his glory. Surrendering to a connection I haven’t felt for anyone again…
My nervous cough crashes into my sweet cloud of memory. It turns into a full-on choking fit. I collapse into my chair, grateful that nobody’s witnessing Up-To-Eleven’s new chief operations officer as she strangles on air because of recalling the first time a guy stroked her clit.
Time for Memory Lane to get lobbed into my rearview. Hard.
After glugging a quart of water, I recover enough to treat myself to a healthy laugh about this whole thing. After that, I officially declare my office—and my brain—a no-Adan zone for the rest of the day. I demonstrate my dedication to the referendum by swiping the rest of Edie’s design into my trash bin.
I give the red bits one last, wistful look before whispering, “It was beautiful while it lasted, Adan. I promise I’ll never forget you, and that amazing afternoon, for the rest of my life.”
3
The day flies by, as it usually does in the world of Up-To-Eleven on the first day of the month. Springtime is especially hectic for the operations team, since we’re preparing for the upcoming trade shows and demo events. The world of serving the extreme sports crowd is a year-round commitment, but summer and winter are when our products shine the brightest.
I leave the office with a sense of satisfaction. I’ve closed out the stats from last month and gotten a good start on the new one, though it meant missing the six o’clock kickboxing class. I’m not exactly bawling about it, knowing exactly what’s waiting inside my duffel, but hurrying to make the eight p.m. session is a great excuse for putting off Brett’s package of shitty tidings a while longer. Good thing I wore boots instead of pumps today—and also that I can haul ass for at least three blocks in them, despite the sky-high stiletto heels.
As soon as the elevator takes me down four stories, I rush out of the lift and across the middle of our company’s atrium-style lobby. The unique design also serves a valid purpose. Up-To-Eleven doesn’t take anything to market that hasn’t been extensively tested by our beta team. All hundred and twenty-one members of the Eleven Squared Squad have to approve a product before it enters the next stage for production. If more than three people on the squad give Red X’s on the gear, it goes back to the engineering or fashion teams for further work. To make the testing easier for everyone, our building has this twenty-four-hour “arena” feature. At any given time of the day or night—like right now—there are a dozen or so people in the arena, sweating and jumping and leaping
and climbing on the realistic challenges. There’s a bouldering course, a rock-climbing wall, a BMX track, a Sequoia forest “trail,” an “urban jungle” obstacle run, and even a true-to-life “jungle” that’s covered in vines and has a working waterfall. Inevitably, it means people are shouting over one or all of the noises, even at night—sometimes especially at night, when the squad members don’t have to worry about dodging delivery people and company visitors.
And, apparently, operations team people who’ve worked late and want nothing more than to get to their kickboxing class. In stiletto boots. While checking their phone and fishing in their purse for their gym pass.
Hey, kids! Can you say, “Perfect freaking target?”
Of course you can.
All I’ve neglected to do is paint a huge X on my back—not that it matters to the man who’s decided to swing, nearly Tarzan style, from one of those surfaces down to ground level. A bunch of the fabric engineers are cheering him on, though I’m tardy on acknowledging that detail—just like I’m too late to dodge his sudden swoop. I get only a fleeting look at the well-muscled maniac, clad in nothing but a tight black T-shirt, a prototype pair of our new nylon climbing pants, and a beanie that’s slipped down over half his rugged face, before he takes me out like a hawk going for a mouse.
With five times the force.
Just before we collide, I register his frantic and oh-so-eloquent version of a forewarning.
“Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit!”
“Aggghhhh!” And then my exquisite ingénue version of a response. “Oh hell!”
Yes. So exquisite. So ingénue.
So mortifying.
“Sorry. Oh damn, miss. I’m so—”
“Sorry,” I growl. “Yeah. I got it, Tarzan—the first time.” I struggle to yank down my skirt, which isn’t hiked high enough to show off the red lace underwear I had to opt for today, thanks to my Vicky’s Secrets basics being delayed on backorder. Another inch and I would’ve flashed half the design team with secrets they don’t need to know.