I drove and told myself not to push it. That giving her a ride home was enough for now. It didn't take me long to realize it wasn't nearly enough.
"Lindsey wasn't wrong," I said when we were two blocks from her parents' place, where she lived in the apartment over the garage.
"Daemon."
"Six months, Nadia. You know it's not nothing."
She stayed silent for so long that I thought she was ignoring me. Then she whispered, "I know it's not nothing."
I pulled over. My dating history was such that I knew what that breathy response meant. We were no longer in friend territory. Not by a long shot.
I don't know which of us moved first. I'm not sure it mattered. What mattered was that she was kissing me like she'd been thinking about it for six months and had finally run out of excuses.
I had both hands on her face, her jacket was somewhere on the floor of my truck, and I was trying to remember how to breathe.
When we broke apart, she was looking at me like she was done pretending.
"Your place," she said. "Not mine. I'm not doing this above my parents' garage."
"Yeah," I said, unable to come up with anything more intelligent.
It was only after executing a U-turn and barreling toward my place that a thought hit me. My own living situation wasn't exactly set up for wild sex either. If anything, it might be worse than Nadia's.
Not that I lived with my parents. They were both gone, each in their own way. No, I lived with an eighty-six-year-old woman for whom being nosy was a way of life.
We made it through the gate, down the path at the side of the house, and into my apartment tucked under my landlady’s old Victorian without incident. This was frankly more than I deserved, given that I could barely string a thought together.
Inside, I reached for the light switch.
"Leave it," she said. "The lamplight's enough."
The hideous pink lamp cast its usual rose-colored glow across the room. I should have warned her about the decor. Now didn't seem like the right time.
She turned to face me in the diffused light, and the look on her face made everything I'd been planning to say irrelevant.
"Six months," she said. Like she was acknowledging something.
"I know."
"I'm not doing this if it's just?—"
"It's not." I stepped toward her without spelling out what we were talking about. We both knew. "I promise you, it's not."
She studied me before reaching for the lapels of my jacket and yanking me close, and I stopped thinking about anything at all.
I walked her back toward the alcove that held the bed, her fingers fumbling with the buttons of my shirt while I found the zipper of her navy jumpsuit. When I peeled it wide and looked at her in the pink-lit dark, I forgot every smooth thing I'd ever said to anyone.
"You're staring," she said.
"Give me a minute."
She laughed, and I kissed her before it could fade. I'd been wanting to hear her laugh that way since the day I first saw her. We fell onto the bed in a tangle of arms and legs, and that was exactly where any resemblance to my usual evenings ended.
I'd been with women who were beautiful and women who were willing, and those who ticked every box on whatever list I'd been running at the time. I knew my way around a woman's body. How to make her moan with longing, how to make her come so hard she cried.
But it had never felt like this.
This was six months of wanting compressed into every point of contact, her hands pulling at my shirt, mine easing the jumpsuit from her shoulders, both of us moving fast and then slowing down because fast wouldn't cover it.
