“When d’you think the owners will want it back?”
I grimace. “I don’t know. My parents say they really love it in New Mexico, so I think I’ve got a while longer.”
I give him a tour of the rest of the house, beaming every time he points out the cool things I’m secretly hoping he’ll notice, like the clawfoot tub in the master bathroom and the huge mahogany desk in the office. I even take him out to the garage, a standalone building set a ways back from the house that I think I’ve only set foot in once. The garage door hasn’t worked since I moved in, so I’ve never parked my car inside it, and anyway, it’s half-full of boxes of the owner’s stuff and a bunch of broken lawn furniture.
“Holy shit,” John says, staring at the large, cobwebby space like it’s the Shangri-La. “This is insane. You could fit a huge workbench in here. And is that another room back there?”
I rise up on my tiptoes. It does look like there’s a door hidden behind that pile of boxes. “Maybe.”
It takes ten minutes for us to shift enough boxes to see, and another five for John to jimmy the door open. A shower of dust and dead bugs rains down when he finally gets it open, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“There’s a whole other space back here,” he calls.
I’ll have to take his word for it. No way I’m walking through that dead bug shower.
John walks backward on the way back to the main house,admiring the harbor view. “This place is seriously awesome. You couldn’t find something like this in a big city,” he adds.
“If you could, it would probably cost about a million dollars.”
He snorts. “More like ten or twenty. Cities are insanely overpriced. My buddy in Toronto bought the tiniest two-bedroom apartment for one and a half million.”
“Is that the one whose wedding you’re going to this summer?” I ask, as we step into the kitchen.
“Mm.” He peers at the radiator. “Does this place have a wood furnace, or oil?”
“No idea.” I ignore his slightly affronted look and swing open the fridge. “Want a drink?”
After John takes a trip to the basement to confirm that it’s an oil furnace, we stretch out on the couch with sodas and popcorn and I pull up our first nostalgic movie of the night—A Knight’s Tale.I’m kind of expecting John to be one of those guys who’s too cool for any movie that isn’t a dark action film or violent thriller, but once again, he surprises me. He pays attention the whole time, even if he does have a habit of forgetting which characters are which. “Who’s that guy?” is his constant refrain. In anyone else, it might be annoying, but with John it just makes me laugh.
“That’s Heath Ledger,” I say, for the fourth time. “He’s the main guy.”
“Ah.” John nods. “He looks different now.”
He definitely doesn’t, but I just roll my eyes and hold my hand out for the popcorn bowl. He hands it to me without taking his eyes off the screen, frowning at Heath Ledger like he still secretly suspects it’s a different character. I hide a smile.
My eyes linger on him a few moments more, watching the lightsof the TV move over his skin. It’s still a bit weird seeing him out of his work clothes. In a T-shirt and jeans, you can really notice things like the swell of his biceps and strong lines of his neck.
He notices me watching him, and something shifts in the air as our eyes meet. There’s a pleasant warmth stirring inside me, but I just smile and turn back to the movie. It’s more fun this way, letting the tension build naturally.
The last guy I slept with was someone I met online and had a few dates with over the winter. He was nice enough, don’t get me wrong, but it all felt so dreadfully formulaic. Plus, I think he must’ve read somewhere that girls really get turned on by kissing. I like a good make-out session as much as the next girl, but this was, like,forty-fiveminutesof kissing. I kept trying to move things along, but he kept pulling my hands away and murmuring cringey things like, “There’s no rush” and “We’ve got all night.” I wanted to say, yeah, dude, I know we’ve got all night, so let’s move along to the fun stuff, please.
I probably shouldn’t be so harsh. I could tell he had good intentions, but I was so bored by the first ten minutes that he wound up doing the opposite of what I’m sure he intended.
I can already tell it won’t be like that with John. Over the next hour, we slowly drift closer together. I shift on the couch to lean against his shoulder. He puts his hand on my leg. I trace my fingertips over his arm. His thumb moves over my knee.
By the end of the movie, we both totally know where this is going, but I like that he asks me anyway.
“Do you want me to head out?”
I look up at him with a grin. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘hell no’?”
Laughing, he pulls me closer and captures my lips in his. I throw a leg over his knees, straddling him on the couch. Our kisses are bright and breathless, his hands warm as they slide down my back. They move lower, strong fingers digging into my flesh, and then he pulls me against him, a rhythmic, dizzying friction. He scrapes his lips over the shell of my ear, and a breath of startled laughter slips from my lips. He laughs too; I think he knows just how I’m feeling. For a year we worked side by side, barely polite acquaintances. Now his warm, bare skin is sliding against mine, and my breathing is ragged in his ear, and it’s all the more intimate after being strangers for so long.
His mouth moves down my neck, over my collarbone; a noise slips from my throat as it moves lower still, his tongue moving over raised flesh. My bra is on the floor—I vaguely remember discarding it—and the rest of our clothes follow shortly after. We break apart so I can hunt down a condom, and I laugh again as I sprint naked through the house, giggling harder as I duck under the windows.
“You’re so weird,” John says, laughing with me as I hop back on the couch.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say with a grin. A moment later, he pulls me back into his lap, and my laughter gives way to soft, shallow panting. His hands are on my hips again, recapturing that steady rhythm, but now there’s nothing between us. Everything gets hot and blurry, my world narrowing down to John’s skin, his fingers, his lips. He’s very quiet—not surprising—but I can feel his breathing changing as our movements become quicker. Then my head is on his shoulder, and I’m crying out and clutching him, and his groan is a rumble I feel inside my bones.
