Then he brought it to his lips, and she caught the sharp scent as his throat bobbed with each long swallow. Coke and something, definitely. As definite as the slick arousal growing between her legs.
It really had been too long, if the heat of his body and the sight of him swallowing were enough to make her jittery like this. She faced front and grabbed a shot. It went down easy, but she found herself making a face. It was sweeter than she remembered. And, speaking of memories—this had been a lot more fun when she’d shared a row of shots with her girlfriends, drinking one after the other, shrieking foolishly afterward like they’d done something shockingly wild. But Beth wasn’t here, Sarah wasn’t here, Catie wasn’t here, none of them were here, and this wasn’t ten years ago. She bit her lip and downed the next shot.
Then she felt Red’s hot breath against her skin again, smelled sharp alcohol as he spoke. “You okay, Button?”
She held up the last shot of cherry Sourz and shouted, “Will you drink this?”
“You don’t want it?” He narrowed his eyes.
Awkwardly, she told him, “I want you to have it.”
He nodded as if that made a lick of sense, took the shot, and downed it. She took his glass in turn and had a taste, pretending it didn’t thrill her that they were now sharing a glass. He’d ordered rum and Coke. She licked his drink off her lips and tried not to enjoy it too much.
“Hey.” He took the glass back, his free hand running down her arm in an action he probably meant to be soothing. It set her on fire. “Slow down,” he said. “Give yourself a second.”
She bristled, all—okay, most—of her arousal forgotten. She was seconds away from a scathing comment on men who thought they could tell women what to drink when he leaned down and spoke again.
“Getting properly wankered,” he said in an academic sort of tone, “is a fine art. It is if you want to avoid the messier side effects, anyway.” While she absorbed that, he caught the bartender again. She didn’t know how he managed it. Must be one of the benefits of giant gingerism: he was impossible to miss.
The bartender produced two bottles of water—boo—and four more shots. Red shoved a water at her and paid again. Then he finished his rum and Coke in two impressive gulps, and drank his own water, which made her feel less indignant.
“All right,” he said finally, splitting the shots in half. “You and me. Let’s have it.”
Surprise filled her, chased by pure pleasure. She swallowed her share easily this time, barely shuddering at the taste, and when he did the same, something inside her felt lighter. Warmer. Chloe giggled at nothing and let her head tip back onto his shoulder. For one dangerous second, his arm wrapped around her waist and squeezed. His hair spilled over her skin as he bent his head closer.
Then he let her go, as if it had never happened at all. He caught her hand, stepped back, and they were moving again, their clasped palms their only connection now. Chloe wobbled behind him like she was on stilts. She hadn’t realized just how integral Red’s chest had been to her structural stability during the last ten minutes. Stumbling after four shots? How mortifying. But fun, too.
Until she realized where Red was leading her, anyway. To the dance floor. Because that was what she wanted. She’d told him so in the taxi: she wanted to go out, get drunk, and dance. Except, now that they were headed in that direction, deep into a churning mass of bodies, she didn’t want to do that at all. It was flooding back suddenly, how much she’d always hated this part. With her friends, she remembered, she’d bobbed awkwardly at the edge of the group, feeling like a ninny.
That wasn’t how she wanted to feel tonight.
She tugged at Red’s hand and he looked back at her, raising his eyebrows in question. When she looked at the dance floor and shook her head, he changed course without a word, pulling her smoothly toward the sticky, shadowy booths in the corner. They slid into one beneath an alcove, and by some audio-architectural miracle, the volume lowered just enough for Chloe to hear herself think. Thank God. All this pounding and pulsing was making her vaguely homicidal.
“What’s up?” Red asked, his knee nudging hers. She looked at their legs beneath the filthy table and a thought danced wildly through her mind: he could touch her. He could slide his hand up her skirt right now, and no one in this hellhole would be any the wiser.
Then she looked up, met his endless eyes, and could’ve sworn he was thinking exactly the same thing. Each flash of strobe lights in the room lit up another facet of the hunger on his face. But he didn’t move. He sat and waited patiently to hear that she was okay.
And suddenly, she was bored with lying to him. Must be the alcohol. “I don’t like it here,” she shouted.
He gave her a look that seemed to say, Color me shocked. But there was no gloating in his response. “Want me to take you somewhere quieter?”
“Yes. No. I—” She hesitated, her mind whirring. This, tonight . . . It wasn’t what she’d really wanted. Because she hadn’t known what she’d really wanted when she’d put this on the list. She’d been hunting for an indescribable thrill, a feeling she remembered from nights out with her friends, but she’d misunderstood where the feeling came from. It wasn’t about drinking and partying in some dingy club.
It had been about the people. The constant laughter they shared, too high on each other to care that they were being obnoxious. Group trips to the bathroom like a small army unit, where the mission objective was helping each other squat over filthy toilets without their dresses touching the seat.
Belonging.
Maybe her list wasn’t quite as perfect, or as clinical, as she’d assumed. Because this was the first item she hadn’t enjoyed crossing off, and she couldn’t deny that she was disappointed.
But she could fix this, couldn’t she? Plans changed, didn’t they? Wasn’t that why she’d written the list in the first place—to become the kind of woman who turned disappointments around, who thought flexibly and did what she wanted to do?
Yes, she decided. Yes. That was exactly why.
She turned back to Red, found him waiting with those three little lines of concentration between his eyebrows. “I want to go somewhere else,” she shouted.
He nodded. “We can do that.”
But she wasn’t done. “I want to know what you do for fun.”
His frown cleared, replaced by a startled, hesitant pleasure. “Yeah?”
“Yes. Show me.”
* * *
They left the club, and Red put his jacket over Chloe’s shivering shoulders. He wouldn’t miss the warmth—when he was around her, he burned from the inside out. She must be tipsy as fuck, because she didn’t push him off or say something smart; she just smiled all pretty and held his hand as they cut through the cold, wet night.
Since the moment she’d decided to abandon their plan, she’d been electric. Vibrating brilliance, her walk slow and loose hipped, all the barriers and little hesitations he was used to from her fading away. Like she’d turned fearless.
He liked it. He liked her so happy that her soft, full lips had a permanent curl, that her eyes sparkled and her cheeks plumped. Tiny drops of rain spattered the lenses of her glasses, beaded on the flyaways frizzing from her hair, slicked her skin until she gleamed under the streetlights like a jewel. He slung an arm over her shoulders and she let him. Joined together like that, they strode through familiar, sleepless streets.
Leaving this city for London had been Red’s first mistake of many. He’d thought he needed to do things in a certain way, as rigid then as Chloe was now about her list. But being around her was really driving home how wrong he’d been: there was no single way to reach any goal. He should’ve been flexible, should’ve stayed in the city he loved and tried to succeed as himself, instead of going somewhere else to be someone else beside a woman who’d never really given a fuck about him.
He still wasn’t sure how to take things back to the start, how to build the life he wanted on his own terms—but tonight, he looked up at
the stars and knew, really fucking knew, that he’d figure it out. He was figuring it out.
The funny thing about Chloe was, when he wasn’t busy panting after her . . . she made his head a hell of a lot clearer.
“I think you’ll regret asking me to do this,” he admitted, his voice rising over passing traffic and distant music and the shouts of drunken students waiting at a nearby bus stop.
“Why?” Her shoes made little squeaking noises against the wet pavement. “Are your hobbies so depraved?” Her voice was rich with a flirtation he didn’t quite trust. If she could sound that unreservedly into him, she was a little bit drunk.
Lightly, he said, “I think you’d like it if my hobbies were depraved. But no, they’re not. They’re boring.”
“I’m supposed to be the boring one. You’re supposed to cure me.”
Was that what she thought? His chest tightened, his frown automatic. Chloe Brown was the furthest thing from boring on this planet. He didn’t say that, though, because she wouldn’t hear it. “This definitely won’t cure you.”
“Oh.” She pouted. He tensed every muscle in his body to stop himself from leaning down and biting that plump lower lip. Then she stopped walking, cocked her head, and murmured, “Let me guess. We’re here?”
He looked up with a start, and shit, she was right. He hadn’t even noticed. She split time into something endless and wonderful, like crystal splitting light into rainbows. Or maybe he was so fucking hungry for her he was slowly losing his grip on reality. One of those.
“Yep,” he confirmed. “We’re here.”
In a tucked-away section of the city, the kind lined with boutiques where only the rich bothered to window-shop, there was an alleyway. It was the kind of alleyway that would look suspicious and possibly dangerous in any other part of town, but here it just seemed mysterious. It helped that they could see light twinkling at the other end, and hear raucous nightlife a few streets over. It also helped that the alleyway itself was lined with art, fairy lights wrapped around the easels.
The first piece was an abstract vinyl print that, when you squinted just right, looked like a huge, pale, flower petal. When you squinted just wrong, it looked like dead skin. The second was a stark, stylized oil painting of a panda on acid. The third canvas, the last dropped bread crumb, looked like Roy Lichtenstein had taken on Klimt. He didn’t hate it, exactly.
“Random art in an alley,” Chloe said. “Is this really what you do for fun?”
He tensed a little, wondering if she’d say something that stripped him painfully to bloodied flesh, like Pippa would have. But then he remembered that Chloe was nothing like Pippa, which was why he’d brought her here. Because watching her chase what she wanted made him realize it was time. Because this would be easier with her than it would be alone. Because she’d asked him to show her something honest, whether she realized it or not, and this was as honest as he knew how to be.
And because she was too careful, too sweet, too cautiously loving to ever smash anyone’s heart to pieces for a laugh.
“Yep,” he said finally. “This is what I do for fun.”
They were a few paces from the open doorway that was his goal. A distressed sign hung over it that read julian bishop art gallery.
“Adorable,” she murmured.
Sounded like she was talking about him, but she couldn’t be. He looked at her. She was. He started to speak, but his voice came out a little too rough, so he stopped, cleared his throat, tried again. “You calling me cute, Chlo?”
“I am. You giant, blushing art nerd.”
Well, if he hadn’t been blushing before, he surely was now.
Stepping over the threshold after avoiding this world for so long was like getting something pierced. He’d had his nose done when he was twenty-one, which had been a mistake on a face like his, and now he remembered the sudden, sharp push and watering eyes. He felt half a second of panic before deciding he couldn’t be arsed to make a big deal out of this, even inside his own head. He was here. It was done.
Because of Chloe. Strange, that.
The gallery’s entryway was tiny, housing a flight of spiral stairs. “You all right with those?” he asked.
“If I said no, would you give me a piggyback?”
His lips twitched. “Yeah.”
“Good to know,” she murmured wryly. “But don’t worry, I’ll manage.” She turned, studying the little space around them. It was sparse and pretentious, which was all part of the fun. The white paint on the walls flaked horribly and the floors would probably give your bare feet splinters, but the paintings left to stand in the street had price tags in the low thousands. The stuff upstairs would be even more expensive.
Artists were all a lost cause, he thought, himself included.
The only interesting thing in this cramped space was the pink-painted garden chair jammed into a corner. A sign was tied to its seat with clashing red silk: don’t sit on me, i’m famous.
Chloe arched a brow. “Gosh. A chair that reminds me of my grandmother. I feel so at home.”
Here was something he hadn’t considered: how hilarious Chloe’s sarcasm would be in a place like this.
“Always wondered what the chair’s famous for,” he said.
She flashed him a look. “You don’t know?” Her face took on the faintly bored, slightly amused expression he’d seen on countless classy women in galleries fancier than this one. He’d never been in on the joke, even when his girlfriend was leading the jokes, but Chloe was about to bring him in. “Madame Chair comes from money, of course.”
“Oh, of course. I remember now. She was on Celebrity Big Brother.”
Chloe arched an eyebrow, bit down on her growing smile. He could almost see the laughter trapped in her throat, but she refused to let it out. “Was she, indeed? And how did she do?”
“Not great,” he sighed. “Long story short, Madame Chair got into an argument with a Hollyoaks actress about the ingredients of fast food. Ended up stuffing a frozen chicken nugget down the poor girl’s throat live on national TV.”
Chloe choked, coughed, wheezed. Red patted her helpfully on the back. Apparently that knocked the last of her control loose, because she dissolved into helpless laughter. He stood there and watched as she bent double, clutching his jacket and gasping for air, completely carefree and unrestrained. Watching her made his heart feel oddly warm and . . . glowy. Like he could stand here and soak up her happiness forever.
That sounded a little bit like heaven.
After long, joy-filled moments, she straightened, dabbing at her eyes beneath her glasses. Her voice slightly hoarse, she said, “Now, then. Shall we go up, or did you bring me just to see the chair?”
Chapter Thirteen
Despite the poky hallway downstairs, Chloe wasn’t surprised to find that the gallery itself was a loft space with cavernous ceilings, bright, clean lights, and scarred, white walls that gave the space an ancient sort of quiet. There was an exhibit, and people with champagne glasses wandered around muttering seriously to each other. Red ignored every curious and censorious stare aimed his way, leading her inexorably toward his destination.
Because there had been a destination all along. She realized that when he stopped in front of a trio of paintings and nodded at the little plaque beside them. It said, joanna hex-riley, courtesy of the wrathford art institute. He said with a happy exhalation, “Joanie.”
“Do you know her?”
“Met her in London. We were friends. Heard this was here a little while back.”
“London?” she asked, and his face closed off like she’d yanked out his plug. She wet her lips and tried again. “What happened with your friend?”
He shrugged, coming back to life. A touch of amusement played at the corners of his lips. “Nothing happened. I left. I didn’t stay in touch.”
“Why not?”
“Lots of reasons. Lately I’ve been wondering if they were good ones. No, that’s not true.” He smiled wryly. “I know they
weren’t. So I’m gonna work on that.”
Then he went all silent and brooding, which was highly unusual behavior in a man who handed out smiles the way traffic wardens gave out tickets. Luckily Joanna Hex-Riley’s paintings were fascinating enough to stop Chloe from doing something silly, like hugging him until he softened again.
She couldn’t begin to guess at how the artist had done it, but the pale, naked woman who took over each canvas managed to look almost transparent in places, as if pieces of her were fading into nothing. It was an interesting effect. It gave her interesting . . . feelings. Not entirely pleasant ones, but she was still impressed by them.
It was a while before Red spoke again. “We can go somewhere else if you want.”
“I’m fine here. Will you tell me something?”
“Maybe.”
“When did you know you wanted to do this?”
He didn’t bother asking what this was. “School trip. I was nine. Almost didn’t go because we didn’t have the money to spare. But at the last minute my granddad scrounged it up from God knows where, so I went.”
She smiled. “He sounds like a useful sort of man.”
“Yep.” Red held out one of his hands, those thick, silver rings shining dully under the bright lights. “He always wore these.”
“And now you always wear them.”
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
His face tightened slightly, painfully. “Years and years ago. He was old. I only miss him sometimes.”
“My Nana died when I was twenty-six. My mother’s mother. I know what you mean.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and the tips of his fingers brushed her bare skin, close to her neck. A shiver seemed to roll through her and into him, like he’d hooked into her current and now they were connected. Their eyes met. His were dark and hot and secret as a jungle, his mouth slightly parted in surprise, or maybe something else. She wondered what he’d taste like. Right now? Alcohol, probably.