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“No...no, it really isn’t good. Ben works at Oahu Air. He’s one of the VPs there. Luckily not of my department. He commutes from LA. Couple weeks in Honolulu. Couple weeks in LA. He says he hates LA, and I believed him, but I like LA so I thought I’d visit him there. A surprise. Happy surprise? No. Not happy surprise.”
“What happened?”
“I went to his house and rang the bell, and his wife opened the door.”
“Fuck.”
“My sentiments exactly. Two years. We dated two years. Nobody at work knew he was married. He kept it a secret for whatever reason. Probably so he could date in Hawaii, which he did. We were together two years before I figured out he was married. And I didn’t even figure it out. It had to be shoved down my throat.” She took a ragged breath. “So...as you can imagine, I’m feeling pretty stupid.”
“You shouldn’t feel stupid. Sounds like he had his game down pat.”
“Nobody at work knew. Not even my friend Kira, who worked with him in the LA office. Kira told me that the best way to get over one guy is to get under another.”
“It’s a sound theory, really.”
“When I got here I was on the phone with her. And I told her you were cute, and she told me to sleep with you. I told her to mind her own business. She’s not good at that part. As you saw. Again, sorry. That was awkward.”
“You’re having a bad week. It’s okay.”
“You know, Dillon never liked Ben. I thought it was because Dillon’s never met him. Ben would never come back to visit home with me. He’d only see me in Honolulu. Dillon must have known something was off. I should have known. That should have been a bright red flag in my face.”
“Do you remember what you said to me when Cassie dumped me my senior year? It made me feel a lot better.”
“I said something?”
“You said something.”
“What did I say?”
“You said, ‘Forget it. Wanna go see Batman Begins with us?’”
“That’s it? That’s the big thing I said to you?”
“It wasn’t a big thing. It was a little thing. It made me feel normal again, going to see a movie with you and Dillon. It made me remember that life goes on and that’s a good thing.”
“And it was a good movie.”
“Fucking A it was.”
“So you think we should watch a Batman movie?”
“No.”
“What should we do, then?” she asked.
He put his glass of wine down and moved his plate out of the way.
Then he moved her plate out of the way.
Then he leaned across the bar and kissed her lightly on the lips.
Joey’s eyes widened as he pulled back.
“I should have asked if I could do that before I did that,” he said.
“You can do that.”
“I already did it.”
“You can do it again.”
Chris leaned in again, kissed her again. By the time that kiss was done, she had her smile back.
“And again,” she said.
“Are you sure? This is a little weird.” Chris winced. He was even cute wincing and that was cute.
“Weird? Why?”
“Because I wanted to do this ten years ago. And then I didn’t think about it for, oh, nine years and six months or so. And now...here I am doing it. High school me is freaking out.”
“What about grown-up you?”
“He’s freaking out, too. But in a much cooler way. Like, so cool you can’t even tell.”
“I can tell,” she said.
“How?” The corners of his eyes crinkled a little when he smiled.
“Because I’m freaking out and I’m projecting.”
“You’re prettier than you were in high school, and in high school you were perfect.”
“You’re prettier than you were in high school, too.”
“And?”
“And...”
“I didn’t look perfect in high school?”
“You wore a chain wallet.”
“So there was a lot of room for improvement.”
“You improved. You definitely improved.” She leaned forward and kissed him back.
He deepened the kiss subtly and gently, but she felt the change. The first kiss had been tentative and sweet, the second kiss playful and now this third kiss...this third kiss was something else entirely.
Ben didn’t have a beard. No facial hair at all. And she was pretty sure she’d never kissed a guy with a real beard, not just a five-o’clock shadow. Very quickly she decided she liked it. The hair tickled her top lip and her chin while he softly kissed her lips, and when the tickling grew to be too much, she opened her mouth to him and he slipped his tongue between her teeth.
This was now officially a real kiss. A really real kiss. A kiss that was going places. She cupped his face, lightly stroking his chin and cheeks with her thumbs as she deepened the kiss. Chris made a soft sound in the back of his throat, a distinct sound, pure pleasure. She wanted to hear it again.
And again...
Joey couldn’t believe she was doing this, kissing Chris. Not because it was Chris so much as it wasn’t Ben. Kira told her the quickest way to get over one guy was to get under another, but that was Kira’s thing, not hers. Joey never even dated in high school and had one boyfriend in college. She’d never had a one-night stand, never took risks like this, making out—and maybe more—with someone who’d been a virtual stranger all of two hours ago.
Except he wasn’t a virtual stranger even if they hadn’t seen each other in years. This was Chris Steffensen. He’d driven her and Dillon to school for two straight years of high school. He’d taught her how to shoot a bow and arrow one summer at the lake. He’d walked on her brother’s left side while she’d walked on his right between classes Dillon’s senior year when the bullying was at its absolute worst and she had actual nightmares her brother would be the next Matthew Shepard. But Dillon had made it through that awful time and gone off to college in New York. Meanwhile Chris had gone to work and she hadn’t given him much thought since then.
“I wish we hadn’t lost touch after school,” she said against his lips.
“Losing touch isn’t that bad as long as you, I don’t know, start finding touch again.”
She smiled into his lips and touched his face once more. “I think I found it.”
With the bar in the way they couldn’t do anything but kiss. So they had a couple choices—just keep kissing or find somewhere more comfortable.
“You want to go somewhere more comfortable?” Chris asked.
“You read my mind.”
Chris pulled away from the kiss and crooked his finger at her.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I was thinking the couch. It’s a new couch. It needs christening with a good make-out session.”
“Or,” she said.
“Or?”
Joey would blame Kira for this tomorrow. Tonight she had no one to blame but herself.
“The bed’s new. Why don’t we go christen it?”
Chris looked at her a moment. “You sure?”
“We can fool around.” She almost said “bang” and that was definitely Kira’s fault. “Or we can rent Batman Begins. But for either of those things, I’m sure it’s more comfortable than the couch. We’ll see where it goes, all right?”
“All right. Lead the way, then.”
She was shaking with nervousness and excitement as she headed up the stairs. They really were very nice stairs.
“You do such good work,” she said.
“I hope you’re still saying that an hour from now.”
“I was talking about the woodwork.”
“That’s one name for it.”
“Chris.”
He pushed her gently back against the wall and kissed her deeply again, not too hard but hard enough she wanted more. A strategic kisser, Chris was—he knew how to make her want more.
And more.
And more...
“You gave me my first kiss,” she said.
“You remember?”
She nodded breathlessly. “I’d almost forgotten. It was here at the cabin.”
“Out back,” he corrected. “We had a campfire.”
“Mom and Dad went out to dinner and left the three of us here.”
“We got in the liquor cabinet and had a couple shots,” he said. “That was a bad idea.”
“What? Making s’mores while drunk was the most fun I’d ever had.”
“You got chocolate all over your lips,” he said. “You told me to help you get it off.”
“Where was Dillon?”
“He’d wandered off to piss in the woods.”
“Oh, that’s right. He got lost and it took him an hour to get back.”
The memory was hazy. She’d been fourteen, Chris sixteen, Dillon seventeen, if she remembered correctly. Chris had his hair pulled back in a blond ponytail, and he wore board shorts instead of his usual ratty jeans. That night he’d looked almost handsome and she’d been a raging ball of vibrating estrogen capable of orgasming from a hard sneeze and able to fall in and out of love with total strangers all in the span of one day or less. The Jack Daniel’s they’d all dipped into had made her head fuzzy and Chris ten times more talkative than usual. He’d told her dirty stories like the one about the three guys who had to share one bed up at Timber Ridge Lodge, and the guy on the right of the bed wakes up the next day and says, “I had a dream somebody gave me a hand job,” and the guy on the left of the bed says, “Crazy, I also had a dream somebody gave me a hand job,” and the guy in the middle of the bed said, “Weird. I had a dream I was skiing.”
That was what it was. He’d told her the skiing/hand job joke and she’d snort-laughed chocolate from her s’more all over her mouth. And she’d told him he had to help her get it off since it was all his fault that she’d laughed while eating and made a massive mess of herself. She’d expected a napkin, a towel, a leaf, something to clean herself off.
Instead, he’d kissed her. Not a kiss, a lick. He licked her lips, and quickly it turned into a real kiss, her first kiss. Before anything else could happen, they heard Dillon tramping back to camp. She’d hated her brother right then and right there. Why couldn’t it have been number two instead of number one, Dillon? Until that moment in her young life, she had no idea having a male tongue on and in her mouth could be the single greatest sensation of all the sensations she’d ever sensated. He’d tasted better than a s’more, and if that wasn’t the highest compliment a fourteen-year-old girl could give a guy, she didn’t know what was.
“I still think about you when I eat s’mores,” he said. “Is that weird?”
“I still think about you every time a Nirvana song comes on the radio.”
“That’s the sexiest thing any woman has every said to me.”
He kissed her again before she could laugh and then she didn’t want to laugh anymore. All she wanted was to kiss and kiss and kiss some more. He was a wonderful kisser and she was quickly getting used to the soft tickle of his beard on her lips and chin and cheeks. And a small evil part of her was relishing the knowledge, even reveling in it, maybe also wallowing in it, that Ben would blow a brain gasket if he knew what she was doing right now. He’d always had a jealous streak, which she’d found flattering at first and increasingly irritating over the past few months. It had seemed out of place, uncalled for. She’d never given him a reason to be jealous. Now she knew he’d been projecting, covering up for his own guilty conscience. Well, fuck him. He had no say in what she did anymore.
She pulled back from the kiss only to open the bedroom door. Chris flipped the lights on but only long enough to turn on the lamp and then the overhead lights were off again. There was a definite chill in the air so she sat on the edge of the bed patiently while Chris threw a few logs in the woodstove and started a fire. It was a pleasure to watch him work. He had quick and efficient large hands that moved with surety at every task. Door open, logs in, newspapers in, more logs, match lit and then...fire. Warmth infused the room, which might have had something to do with the fire in the stove and might have had something to do with Chris taking his shirt off. Not the T-shirt, not yet. Just the flannel he wore over it, but the sight of his strong bare arms was enough to raise her temperature a degree or two especially since he was taking it off while walking toward the bed.
“You’re not supposed to be this sexy,” she said as he came to stand in front of her.
