Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(107)

“And kissed me.”

His eyes were dark on her face. Steady. “Yes. But then, if you’ll recall, I tried to beat some guy up for also kissing you.”

“True. Not smart. But kind of a turn-on.”

“We can be glad our exes were such idiots,” he said.

“Definitely.”

He stepped toward her then and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, rested his head against hers. They stood there, and she could feel the forces that drew them together, but quieter now, at bay for the moment. Later tonight she’d want him to tear her clothes off again and make love to her slowly, thrusting and withdrawing, his body over hers, his breath against her cheek when his mouth wasn’t on hers. But right now she wanted this. This time together, a sacred space in the madness, an acknowledgment of the magic.

*

“What made you want to be a sixth-grade science teacher?”

They sat at a cozy table in a corner of his favorite restaurant, the Farmhouse Table in Cleveland Heights. Two music venues and the art-house theater were right near there, and they could linger as long as they wanted at dinner and then decide what they were in the mood for next. And Miles had in the back of his head that maybe they wouldn’t be in the mood to go out after. Maybe they’d be in the mood to go back to his place. That was what he was already in the mood to do, because he’d spotted a scrap of royal-blue satin on top of the pile of clothes she carried into the bathroom to change for dinner. He’d bet it was somewhere on her person. He bet if he peeled off her pretty flowered top and lifted her long brown skirt, he’d find it.

She paused with her fork still in the papardelle-and-mushroom pasta she’d been demolishing. “I started out wanting to be a doctor. I was pre-med in college, took a ton of science classes. And then someone very wisely suggested I spend a day shadowing a doctor. So I did. And I stood there, watching what she did, thinking, oh, God, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to take people’s lives in my hands like that. Not every day. Not ever, actually.”

She was so animated when she talked, hands moving, her skin glowing, cheeks pink, her eyes bright with excitement. He thought of the conversation he’d had with her on the phone, the urgency of the desire she’d called up in him. Even without visual contact, all her vivacity had found its way across the phone line and under his skin. That was her power over him.

“And then I thought, wait, if this is the best way to understand what a job is like, I should shadow some other people. I asked everyone I knew, my parents’ friends and stuff, if I could go to work with them. I went to work with, like, ten different people, and it all left me cold. Then I went to work with a woman who had been my babysitter when I was a little kid. She was a seventh-grade science teacher. And, honestly, she wasn’t that good at it. I kept thinking, Wait! I have a better way to explain that! I wanted to butt in so bad it hurt to shut up. So I knew.”

He’d like to watch her teach sometime. Maybe he’d go visit her in Boston soon, and he’d ask if he could see her in action.

If there was no criminal charge against him. That would probably put a damper on his ability to spend time inside a middle school.

When she’d asked him if he’d embezzled the money, every little thing inside him ground to a halt. It had become so quiet in his own head that for the first time in months he’d been able to hear something else. His heart. He wanted, with a kind of fervor he couldn’t understand, to tell her everything. How terrible it was to be accused, how terrible it was to be doubted, how quietly desperate it felt, knowing no one believed he was innocent.

It was connected somehow to the moments he’d first seen her, at the party. To the way she’d been then: So open, so completely in the world. So willing to pull everyone else in with her. If only he could pour everything out to her, he could be there, too. With her.

But when he had opened his mouth, none of that came out. Only the barest facts, the simplest delineations of what you could read in a newspaper. His assertion of his own innocence had felt like way too little, way less than he needed her to know. Not an invitation into the world, just a reminder that he was in a place no one else could live in with him.

“Miles?”

“Sorry.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I was thinking about—” But he didn’t want to return them to the darker topic, didn’t want to suffocate her ebullience. Didn’t want to subdue the sparkle that was all over her skin, something he could lick off later and hope would get into his own blood. “You’re lucky you had someone to tell you to do the shadowing. I don’t think enough people think to do that.”

“They don’t,” she agreed. “How’d you figure out what you wanted to do?”

“I was in I-banking after college. Not because it was the right thing for me particularly, but I was graduating and I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it was there. They came right on campus to recruit us, and it was a solution to not knowing, so I did it. And I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money—”

He heard the words coming out, felt them like a slug in the gut. He’d said that phrase a hundred times, probably a thousand times, told the same story to countless people, but for the first time, it was ugly.

“Shh,” she said. She took his hand across the table.