From one extreme to the other, she considered that maybe he was making up for earlier. In a straight choice, she’d take having him up close over being ignored every time.
Though he still wasn’t actually touching her, so he wasn’t quite as close as she’d like.
“Open your mouth.”
His unexpected command was so lascivious that she smiled. “Score,” she whispered, fighting her urge to squirm. “Beeks and Fish will be here any second. Dinner is in the oven—”
“Open your mouth.” Her excuse hadn’t swayed him, and she wasn’t supposed to refuse orders. Letting her lips part for a second then close, she licked them before opening them further. “Show me your tongue.”
Closing her mouth, Shyla breathed out a laugh. “I feel stupid.”
Score wasn’t laughing, in fact, he appeared to be getting annoyed. “Do it, Shy.”
“Okay,” she said, rolling her lips together and clearing her throat in an attempt to scare away her urge to laugh. “Okay, sorry.”
This time she closed her eyes as her mouth opened. That made it easier to poke her tongue out. Anticipating that he’d kiss her, her head fell back. Instead of his mouth, the brush of his fingertip grazed her tongue for the briefest of moments.
Her eyes popped open when she realized he’d left something small and cylindrical behind.
Score stepped back and nodded at the glass of water. “Swallow.”
It was a pill. Taking the glass to her lips, she couldn’t begin to guess what he’d given her, but she swallowed as instructed. Score took the glass and leaned over her to put it on the island.
While looming over her, he leaned down to murmur above her ear. “When I move inside you, there won’t be a damn thing between my skin and yours.”
His body ebbed from hers. Stunned, still draped against the counter, Shyla was in a daze, so it took a second for her to figure it out.
“A birth control pill,” she whispered. “It’s birth control.”
“Yeah, the rest are in your vanity,” Score said, standing behind his seat at the dining table, holding the back. “Why are there only three places?”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d changed your mind.”
After how he’d been earlier, she assumed he wouldn’t want her to eat with him. Trying to seem as normal as possible, she took water and glasses to the table.
“Set your place, Shy.”
Score sat down. She took the food from the stove before grabbing another one of everything to set the place to his left. As Shyla was about to go back into the kitchen, something stopped her. Something like the question he hadn’t answered. Studying him, she tried to figure out what had changed between her going to bed and him waking up. What was the difference between the current moment and the ones earlier on?
She couldn’t put her finger on it until boom, it hit her. “You don’t want them to know,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, but he looked up. “You’re ashamed of your attraction to me.”
“What?” he said just as the elevator doors opened.
Beeks and Fish came across to the dining table engaged in another of their debates. More than half the time, she didn’t know what they were talking about. Still, it was nice they had each other to spar with. Shyla went into the kitchen to retrieve the food. The men always ate family style, she preferred that to dishing out portions for them.
“Hey, you’re gonna eat with us,” Fish said, taking his seat. “I always wondered why you didn’t.”
“She’s not less than us,” Score said, wearing a scowl as he pointed to her chair. “Sit.”
Her revelation made things awkward. It wasn’t like she expected him to take out a full-page ad declaring what had happened between them. Especially when in the most technical of definitions, nothing had actually happened. Except, to her, everything had. Maybe she was facing a symptom of her naivety.
Slipping into her chair, she coiled her fingers in her lap. Her mind was on anything but food. To her surprise, Score stood up with her plate to serve her meal before anyone else got anything. He dropped it down in front of her and moved on to fill his own.
Only after he sat down did Beeks and Fish serve theirs. Score’s knee bumped hers beneath the table, but she couldn’t bring herself to look up. Taking her fork, Shyla scooped up some food and kept herself hunched over her plate.
All his talk of wanting trust and them being something different didn’t erase the differences between them. A man of Score’s experience couldn’t think about a long term relationship with a woman like her. She couldn’t be a gangster’s moll. What did she know about organized crime? Nothing. She didn’t even know how the girlfriend of a nightclub owner was supposed to act. Shyla’s singular experience of going to a nightclub ended in disaster.
Maybe Score was a step ahead and had come to realize they were incompatible. That would be a reason he didn’t want to claim her in public. If it wasn’t for the birth control pill she’d just been fed, Shyla might even assume he’d decided friendship was the most they could have… Being the only woman in his apartment, maybe proximity was all she had going for her.
Her mental speculation continued through dinner. It was still going on after the trio disappeared into the elevator to return to the club.
Being upset was ridiculous. Her disappointment was completely her own fault. After one evening together, she’d turned their prospective relationship into something it could never be.
She went through the motions of cleaning up from dinner, then turned off all the lights except the recessed lighting in the
