The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(61)

There was an urgency under his skin every time he spoke to her. Hell, every time he thought about her. She was the very definition of out of his league. It was like something in his biology sensed that her liking him back was too good to be true, and he needed to act fast. Beneath the frantic beating of his heart was also a quiet hum of comfort, a sensation that scared him even more.

“What are the chances that if I put on Miles Davis, some of his suave factor will rub off on me?”

Naomi gazed at him over her shoulder. “I think you’ve got a better chance of my suave factor rubbing off on you.”

Those words in her lush voice made him fumble the pan he held, earning him one of her laughs.

Was there a German word for water rising over your head, but in a way where you wanted it?

Naomi asked him questions about his house while he made a mediocre Caesar salad out of items left in his fridge. None of his answers were particularly witty or charming. He was probably boring her. Pride blown to smithereens, Ethan tried to conjure up tips from the seminar series for navigating first dates, but they’d already gone so far off book.

According to Naomi’s second lecture, they were supposed to be in a restaurant right now with other people and bad lighting, atmospheric elements that presented barriers to the kind of hungry intimacy that seemed to fill his kitchen and spill out into the living room.

He wasn’t supposed to have her in his home this soon. Likely because now the evening kept presenting him with extremely inconvenient details. Like the fact that she was less than forty feet from his bed as they sat down at the kitchen table. Or the particular pink shade of her tongue as she licked sauce off her thumb while they ate.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” Ethan blurted out later as he cleared their plates. He didn’t particularly want to watch a movie, but he definitely didn’t want her to leave.

“Sure,” Naomi said, lowering herself down onto his couch in a way that made her silver dress curl dangerously high around her thighs, the material moving like water against her skin.

Ethan told himself to calm down and hunted for the remote.

“What kind of films do you like?”

She let out a little low huff and then folded her palm across her mouth.

“What?”

She didn’t remove her hand. “Nothing.”

Ethan dropped onto the couch next to her, close enough to smell her perfume but not nearly as close as he wanted to be.

“Come on, tell me. You’ll give me a complex. I thought that question was benign.”

“I’m sorry.” Finally, she let her hand fall into her lap, fingertips resting at the hem of her dress, toying with the fabric where it met her bare skin. “It was just the way you asked that question. I got this ridiculous idea.”

“What kind of ridiculous idea?” Something told him he wasn’t going to like her answer.

Naomi curled her lips together, obviously weighing her next words. He’d noticed she was careful around him in a way she wasn’t with other people.

Which one of them did she think she was protecting?

“I almost made a joke about how the kind of films I like are ones with fucking in them.”

He swallowed thickly. “Well, that’s okay.”

Naomi pulled her hair over her shoulder. “And then, because bad ideas are infectious, I started thinking about how wild it would be if we watched one of my performances,” she said, but not like a dare or even a real suggestion.

She said it like, Wouldn’t that be silly, high and light and like never in a million years would he agree.

Ethan had suspected before that she saw him as neutered somehow, and her answer now proved it. She painted him with an unnecessarily virtuous brush.

Annoyance flickered in his chest.

When he said “Good idea,” it came out harder than any other words he’d ever spoken to her.

Naomi’s reaction was immediate. The way her mouth opened as her breath caught. “Wait . . . you . . . want to?”

Which yes, of course he did, now that he had her permission. He knew she’d made a career performing, and the idea of watching one of her old videos had occurred to him pretty much an hour after they’d met. He’d immediately dismissed the idea, mainly because it was so clear that there was a difference between the way Naomi worked, sharp and shiny and untouchable, and the way she might be if he ever got to see her, to touch her, for real.

“Why wouldn’t I?” They’d have to have this conversation sooner or later.

“Because you’re religious,” Naomi said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Ethan tightened his jaw. “What exactly do you think that means in this context?”

“I don’t know”—she searched the living room as if looking for witnesses to back up her hypothesis—“but I figure if you can’t have sex before marriage, then we probably shouldn’t sit here and watch porn together.”

“You think I won’t have sex before marriage,” he said slowly, because his brain was sort of collapsing.

“Right.” She folded her legs beneath her. “I did some reading, and I know it’s a sort of a gray area nowadays . . . I assumed that, as a rabbi, you’d want to err on the side of caution, and so we, you know, wouldn’t.”

“Naomi, I—”