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Evie didn’t look even close to ready as she looked at Seth, at the building behind them, and back at Ryan.
‘Ready.’
Seth stayed on the curb as they got into the truck. Ryan shot him a grin. ‘Don’t go climbing up any fire escapes.’
Once they were gone, Seth felt shittier than he had expected.
It wasn’t that he was losing lovers in Ryan and Evie, with whom he had been screwing around for the last month before it all blew up. He could get laid any time he wanted to, as his foray into online dating sites – specifically sex sites – had taught him.
He was losing his only friends.
It came upon him with a sickening roll in his stomach before belching up and settling in his chest, hardening at the back of his throat.
When the hell did this happen? he wondered as the moving van turned the corner and disappeared. Where the hell did everyone go? When his wife was alive, they’d been fairly reclusive but they still had their social circle.
Christ, the last time everyone had been together was for Rita’s wake just over two years ago. They came in clusters after that, bringing food (‘just some leftovers, and I know you like…’) and taking discreet looks around his apartment like they thought its cleanliness was an illusion to mask the decay he’d created in the wake of Rita’s death. The conversation wasn’t the same. It wasn’t just the absence of Rita’s foul-mouthed chatter. He could tell that they didn’t want to be there, that they didn’t know what to say to him.
Then came Evie and her little blue teapot. She knew about Rita and, while she always had apology in her eyes when she asked about his wife, she would still ask. He was going to miss their talks.
He turned from the street and looked down the walkway to the foyer, where the newest tenant of Winsloe Court was setting up a small fort of boxes along the stairwell. She looked so funny, a tiny woman in a yellow sundress and scuffed sneakers running her little folding trolly down the walkway.
He met her halfway. ‘Don’t you have movers?’
April stopped and leaned forward on the handle. Her pale skin was painted with a flush that made a map over her cheeks, shoulders and chest, complete with shining lakes of sweat on her brow and neck.
‘I have a couple of friends. They’re bringing the furniture after they get off work – and then I have to unbox it and put it all together.’
‘Brand-new?’
‘Every bit of it. Like I said, it’s my first place.’
‘My first place was nothing but hand-me-downs.’
She shook her head. ‘I had some money socked away. My place is going to look like an Ikea showroom, but it’ll look fabulous.’
In his head, Seth was picturing white stuffed furniture with colour-coordinated throw pillows and curtains, like something you’d see on a television show about single girls striking out on their own in the city for the first time.
He tried to hide his smile but failed, particularly with her beaming back at him. He grinned and gestured to the beat-up red hatchback overflowing with boxes and cloth shopping bags.
‘Need a hand? I can probably take twice what you’re taking.’
A prickle went along his spine as she gave him a quick but thorough once-over. If he had blinked, he would have missed the hunger in her expression.
‘You don’t want to do that,’ she said, her cheerful voice softer now, and a little thick with the remnants of that look. His body responded in kind, blood quickening and beginning that ache in his groin, but he was quick to banish it as she had seemingly done. ‘I saw you out here helping your old tenants move. You must be about done for the day.’
‘That was nothing. I don’t have anything else to do today except stick a label on your mailbox. Come on. We’ll get the stuff in the foyer out of the way and then come back for the rest.’
‘Oh, thank you.’ She smiled, and along came another ravenous flash, followed by something else that made him uneasy: expectation.
He cracked his knuckles and she led the way to the car. She was almost half his age. He didn’t want to go messing with that sort of trouble, even if that trouble did have a round ass beneath that dress he’d love to fill his hands with.
I just need to get laid again, and soon, he thought as he took three boxes from the trunk of her car.
Still, as April beamed at him he had the feeling that a hard screw wasn’t going to shake off the tingle in his chest.
Chapter Two (#ub1906fb1-8f13-5851-89a7-8aa2dd02f24e)
April had a plan when she went to bed the previous night.
On her first Saturday in her new apartment, she’d sleep until noon, when the timer on her coffee-maker was set to start gurgling some of that expensive coffee she’d bought herself as a moving-in gift. She’d drink it in bed while reading the latest Sophie Clairmont book. After an hour of sword-wielding bad-assery soaked in sex and gore, she’d shower and grab groceries at that little market around the corner, make a second run to the liquor store so she’d be stocked for tonight, and she’d finish unpacking.
The first hiccup came even before she opened her eyes. Snuggled beneath the duvet, she was roused by a repetitive sound.
Squink!
Squink!
Squinksquinksquinksquink!
She pushed up onto her forearms and cocked her head to listen.
‘Look, right there. Get it.’ Squink! ‘My turn. I said, my turn. Ow–ow! No biting, you little fucker.’
It took her a moment to recognise the deep voice.
Hot landlord.
Still, his hotness did not negate the fact that he had torn a hole in her perfect Saturday morning. She slipped from the bed and grabbed her robe from the footboard, then knelt on the bench beneath the window. She couldn’t see anything, so as quietly as she could she removed the screen and poked her head out.
She could barely see him through all the iron of the fire escape, but through a crack she caught just enough. Sitting in his window with a slinky black cat between his legs, he held what looked like a small tablet computer between his big hands.
Though the screen was fuzzy from so high above, April could see something scuttling across the surface. The cat leaped at it with both paws, then again and again as Seth laughed.
‘You missed. My turn,’ he said, and held his hand over the screen. The cat pounced, and Seth hissed as he shook free. ‘Next time I’m going to bite you back.’
April bit down to keep from laughing.
So, her gorgeous and somewhat terrifying landlord liked to play iPad games with his cat. She supposed that, on a scale of weird, this wasn’t even midway – as long as she didn’t find out he dressed the cat in Renaissance garb on Saturday nights.
The cat leaped as a trill rang out. So did Seth, and, as he cursed and tapped at the screen, April guessed that it wasn’t a tablet at all he held but a phone – one he had no idea how to use.
‘How the fuck – shit – how do I answer this goddamn thing?’
She thought about calling down but didn’t want to give away that she had been spying. Instead she clapped her hand over her mouth to keep her giggles in as she watched him try and fail to answer the phone.
‘Damn it. Christ. How the –’ He held the phone to his ear, then hissed again as he looked back at it. ‘Where the hell did the numbers go? Jesus.’
The fire escape rattled as he got up to go inside. April did the same. She remembered that, when they’d done the walkthrough, Seth had an old-school flip-phone holstered at his waist, and as he’d taken a call she wondered how those thick fingers could possibly navigate the number pad without mashing all the keys at once.
It was a little surprising that he had gotten an upgrade. When she’d spoken to the previous tenant, Ryan, outside on moving day, he’d indicated that Seth was fairly set in his ways and owned the same brick-like laptop that had been his late wife’s.
That’ll be me in ten years, she thought as she went to her counter. She was already known as the curmudgeonly one amongst their friends, nit-picking and price-checking, ordering the same thing off the menu each time and making sure she put her 10 per cent into a savings account on payday. She went shopping with a strict list, whether groceries or the cosmetics counter.
Give me a decade, and I’ll be the nosy neighbour demanding others re-sort their recyclables.
‘Aaaaah,’ she said upon opening the cupboard. Four tiny handmade espresso mugs awaited her selection for her virgin apartment’s first cup of coffee. She wouldn’t be having espresso, but a cup from beans that were ground the night before.
I should call Mom.
She shook the thought right out of her head. She wasn’t going to think of her mother and how depressed she had sounded on the phone the previous afternoon.
She’d stayed home long enough. She could afford it now that she was working.
It had been the end of the world when she announced she was moving out. April had explained to her mother that she was a big girl, that she wasn’t going to get murdered in her bed, and that she wasn’t going to get an STD.
April made her coffee and took it, along with her tablet computer, back to her big bed. She made a wall of comfort with the oodles of throw pillows she had bought, then settled in, wiggling her butt until she had that sweet spot, and clicked her way to the opening pages of her book.
Yet she couldn’t concentrate. Barely four pages in, she set the tablet aside and looked around.
Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom had come cheap and to her exact desires. She’d taken nothing from her old bedroom. Not that she had wanted the white canopy bed and matching storage her mother had picked out when April was ten. She had gone with a sleek chocolate-brown with red and white accents. There was nothing new about the contents of her closet, but the narrow dresser in the corner was filled with her other splurge of lingerie. Nothing too kinky, just some sheer undies and colourful bras, and a garter belt and stockings she didn’t have to hide from her mother’s disapproving eyes.
And then there was the basket underneath the new bed.
She was looking forward to breaking that queen bed’s cherry with someone, using the contents of that basket. She’d had enough unpleasant experiences of screwing on unwashed sheets with the sound of rowdy roommates playing videos games just outside the bedroom door, and that was only when she’d had boyfriends who weren’t in the same boat as she was.
She could have gotten by with her old double mattress, but she’d wanted a bed made as much for sex as it was for sleeping.
And there was the new vibrator.
It cost almost as much as her security deposit and she could have better spent her money elsewhere, perhaps getting a coffee-maker that had more bells and whistles, but after taking her masturbatory sessions in thirty-minute windows when her family home was actually empty, she felt she had earned her stylish vibrator.
As soon as the caffeine had kicked in, she rolled onto her side and slid the basket out.
Hello, Miss Scarlett.
It was a top-of-the-line rabbit, with words like ‘ergonomic’ and ‘dually stimulating’ and ‘supple’ in the description, and she’d almost talked herself out of it, given the number of less expensive toys she should have bought, but the reviews had enticed her.
Two orgasms in five minutes.
Never came before I used this.
Almost passed out.
April flopped on her back and closed her eyes, then turned the vibrator on.
She gave herself just a bit of pressure through her panties. The little rounded ears of the rabbit hummed, and for a second April listened for movement. Realising she was alone, that no one was sleeping across the hall, nor would they come knocking at her door for some silly reason, she relaxed and increased the power by one setting.
Good, but not not great. She was definitely feeling the effects of the toy, but there was something missing.
The mindfuck.
Her fantasies weren’t usually about real people. She made them up in her head, like she was the J. R. R. Tolkien of masturbatory fantasies.
She’d never admit it, but her fantasies would have been perfectly at home in a paperback romance: meeting the bad boy at midnight on a lonely stretch of beach or burning off sexual tension in an office hate-fuck.
She scrolled through the chapters of her sexual anthology, but it was the blank pages at the end that caught her attention.
Big arms. A crooked grin. Intense blue eyes.
Viking? Too cheesy. Biker? Maybe. Construction worker? Getting warmer.
A late-night panic. A smoke alarm that won’t go off. A knock at the door. Getting wet watching him stretch to reset the alarm. Realising her nightgown was too low cut and too high up on her thighs. A lingering ‘good night’ at the door. A longer ‘good night’ up against the door with her back pressed to the surface and her leg wrapped around his waist.
‘Oh…oh, there we go,’ she puffed out as she really started to feel the effects of the vibrator around her clit. Her next flash was of her landlord looming over her, naked and glorious, that naughty smile as good as the vibe he teased her with.
April wriggled out of her panties and spread herself open as her imaginary lover did the same. Fingers parted her folds and the effect of the vibrator went from good to fucking phenomenal.
Living at home, she’d mastered the art of a brain-melting orgasm in perfect silence. Now, with no need for a buffer, she couldn’t hold it in. She was soaked and throbbing as in her mind he leaned over her and jiggled the vibe around her clit.
April sucked in a deep breath, and then fantasy and reality exploded in powerful waves and she cried out.
She didn’t drop the vibe between her legs when the pleasure became too much. She let the fantasy linger and, like the man of her imagination, she didn’t relent. She took it as long as she could, until her body took over and bucked to be free.
‘Oh. Wow.’
Her legs were so wobbly she didn’t think she could stand if she tried, and she was slippery everywhere. Leaving the vibe on the bed beside her, April closed her eyes and shuddered with the aftershocks.
The vibrator had given her the biggest bang for her bucks, but it was the thought of being exposed like that for Seth Axworthy that made it that much more delicious. Even as she sprawled there like her bones had been liquified and the thrum of her climax could still be felt along her inner walls, she couldn’t wait to have a second round with both her vibe and the fantasy that went with it.
With a great sigh, April pushed up onto her elbows. That’s when she saw her voyeur.
The black cat, Marco, sat prim and proper on the window sill staring at her.
‘You little pervert,’ she called to him as she swung her legs off the bed.
The previous tenant must have let him in, she thought, as she went on wobbly legs to the bathroom. She cleaned the vibrator and left it to dry on the edge of the sink, then drew a bath.
‘Well, that was something else,’ she said out loud as the tub filled. She washed her face and clipped her hair up, then pulled out a lone strand.
‘I wonder what I’d look like as a redhead,’ she said out loud, and, as soon as the tub was ready, she cut off the water and quickly called the salon for an appointment while she waited for a second cup of coffee.
Back in the bedroom, the cat still peered inside. He stood on his hind legs and pressed his paws to the glass, and April was won over.
‘Just for a minute,’ she said as she pushed the window open.
The cat wasn’t shy. He butted his head against her palm a few times, then stepped up onto her knees. One quick sniff at her coffee cup and he made another sound, then leaped past her into her apartment.
‘Make yourself at home,’ she called after the cat as he strutted through the small labyrinth of cardboard boxes and plastic bins left to unpack. She continued to sip her tepid coffee while keeping an eye on the cat, and contemplated the possibility of getting one her own, some unwanted gentleman from a shelter or a kitten with the energy and ambition to shred her brand-new sofa.
