Flying Solo(68)

They handed the roll of paper towels back and forth, cleaning their hands and smacking grease onto the necks of their beers. And when they were full and a little buzzed, they decided to watch Ryan’s arc on Halls of Power. In only two episodes, his congressional aide had stolen a congressman’s documents, sold them to an opposing political operative, attended a state dinner, attempted to seduce the first woman president (President Hall, of course), and died in a yacht explosion. Ryan was good; he had a curled lip and he looked sharp in a suit, and even Laurie wanted to throttle him after about ten minutes.

She put her hand on Nick’s knee when the first title sequence hit. He put his hand over hers. When a senator was stabbed in the leg during a failed coup attempt, she hid her face in Nick’s neck, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. By the end of the first of the two episodes, she was turned toward him with her knees pulled up and her head resting in the hollow under his jaw. By the time the state dinner rolled around, they were tangling and untangling their fingers, tracing each other’s palms. She was holding his hand and looking at the inside of his wrist, how pale and soft the skin was, and she kissed it and looked up into his eyes.

They did not see the yacht explode, because by then, they were stretched out on the couch, and she was on top of him, kissing him like he was exactly what he was: just the most delicious thing. His hand slid up her back under her shirt, and she muttered “mm-hmm” without meaning to, like she was appreciating a cupcake.

“Do you feel okay about this?” she asked as he traced her ear with his tongue.

“Very okay, do you feel okay?” he asked as she pressed herself closer.

“Yeah, I feel okay. Nothing we haven’t done before, right?”

He pulled back from her a couple of inches. “I’m a lot better at this than I was in high school, I promise.”

She nodded. “I know. Me too.” She kissed his jaw. “There’s just one thing, though.”

He froze. “What?”

“This couch isn’t mine. It’s part of the estate. It technically belongs to my mother and—”

“Oh, don’t tell me that,” he said, burying his forehead in her shoulder, and she laughed.

“No, no, I won’t say the m-word, but…I’m just saying, not on my aunt’s couch.”

He made a wary face. “Not in your aunt’s bed either, though. That’s a lot of years of…I mean, it’s a lot of years.”

“No, no. I’m not sleeping in there anyway. I’m sleeping in one of the guest rooms.” She pointed. “It’s that way.”

“So we’re going that way,” he said.

“We are,” she answered, and climbed off him.

She took his hand and they started toward the stairs. “Should we bring the duck?” he said.

“I don’t like it that much,” she said.





Chapter Twenty-Two


“I don’t believe in undressing other people,” Laurie said into Nick’s shoulder as he kissed her neck up against the inside of the bedroom door.

He stopped and pulled back. “Why not?”

“I believe in them being naked, don’t misunderstand me, I just think undressing other people is inefficient,” she said, digging her fingers into his hair. “I’ve spent twenty years trying to figure out how to smoothly take somebody else’s pants off, and I always wind up feeling like it would be easier without me.” She kissed his jaw. Then she stepped away and pulled her shirt over her head in one rapid motion, tossing it onto the chair in the corner of the room. “See? Easy peasy. Would that really be any better if you did it?”

“I think,” he said, holding up one finger and then resting it in the hollow of her throat, “that the idea is that I would do it in some kind of very hot way; I would do it with a lot of oomph.”

“Well, yes,” she said, putting her arms around him and feeling the fabric of his shirt on her belly. “But I already have my shirt off, so how much more oomph do you want?” And when she kissed him now, it felt different, and she almost saw herself from the outside as a half-naked woman crawling up his body. “The trick is not to fall behind.”

He crisscrossed his arms to grab the bottom of his shirt, and as he tried to pull it off, it got briefly hung up getting over his head.

“Boo,” she booed, cupping her hands in front of her mouth.

He laughed through the shirt, which still clung to his neck. “Don’t boo me when I’m vulnerable.” The shirt came free, and he tossed it on top of hers.

When Laurie was a teenager, she didn’t like having a bigger chest than her friends, and then in her twenties she got to like it, but now that she was about to turn forty, she again wasn’t quite sure. Nick seemed to have no such reservations, and he put one finger under the bra strap on her shoulder and said, “Can I take this off?”

She narrowed her eyes, fluttery just from his finger on the skin of her shoulder. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you?”

He kissed her as he reached behind her back and undid the hooks; she typically tried at this moment not to think about whether men would notice, positively or negatively, that they had perhaps taken off a lot of two-hookers, and she had a four-hooker. But Nick moved to the corner of her mouth when he did the second hook, the other corner when he did the third, and back to the center when he opened the last hook and pulled the bra free. He held it up, pointing at the tiny bow between the cups. “Cute,” he said.