I draw back to see him smiling at me. “Is this one of those college rites of passage we missed?” he asks.
“Seems more like high school,” I point out. “We would have just fucked in a dorm room in college.”
“Would we?” He seems to think it over. “You’re probably right, though we’d have been working around our roommates’ schedules.”
I’m not thinking about schedules. I’m thinking about how things would have been then. What if we had fallen in love at eighteen or nineteen? Is the Ian I’m getting now so different from the one I knew then? Is this relationship we’re creating such a huge jump from what it would have been back then?
Different, but the same. I don’t know how to explain it.
“Ian, I?—”
Thunk!
Something hits the car, and I scream. Ian tries to grab my hips, but I scramble off him and snatch a handful of tissues from the console.
Mopping up should probably be my last concern when we’re about to be murdered, but Lisa did say this was a $2,500 dress. I scramble to tug it down around my thighs as I look around frantically for the source of the attack.
“What was that?” My voice comes out breathless, and I don’t know if it’s from the sex or from terror at the serial killer trying to get into the car. “Oh God, this is like that campfire story where the crazed murderer has a hook for a hand and the couple finds it stuck in the car door.”
Ian grimaces as he zips himself back into his pants. “It wasn’t the door,” he says, ever the practical one. “It sounded like the top of the car.”
“So what, alien abduction?”
He stretches up and pulls back the cover on the car’s sunroof. It takes me a few seconds to figure out what I’m staring at.
“Is that a butthole?”
Ian nods solemnly. “Yep. The feline variety.”
Hearing our voices, the cat that has seated himself on the sunroof peers down with a disdainful gaze. If cats could talk, this one would say, “what the hell are you looking at?”
I can’t seem to stop staring. “Where on earth did a cat come from?”
“Lots of businesses keep them around to control mice,” he says. “Or it could be from one of the feral colonies around here.”
The cat stays seated with its stink-star pressed against the glass. He lifts one paw and begins to lick it, in no big hurry to end this unexpected post-coital show.
“Should we check him for a collar?” I suggest. “Maybe he’s someone’s lost pet.”
“I’d just appreciate him removing his cheerio from our line of sight.”
The instant I reach for the door handle, the cat bolts off the top of the car. I take my hand back from the door and fold it in my lap. When Ian starts to laugh, I join in. He slings an arm around me.
“Well, fiancée,” he says. “I can’t promise you romance, but I can promise you laughs.”
“And cat buttholes,” I add.
“And cat buttholes.”
And who knows, maybe that’s enough.
Chapter 10
Ian
Two days after our dinner with the Wyeth Airways team, Sarah calls in a panic.
“The guy who’s supposed to teach my fitness class tonight has food poisoning.” She sounds out of breath, and there’s a familiar clang of dumbbells echoing in the background. “I’ve got six residents showing up in half an hour expecting someone to teach them to lift weights, and I don’t know who else to call.”
