Vera went to pay for breakfast, and she stared at her phone screen open to a text. What she wanted was to spend the rest of the weekend with Grip. It wasn’t what she should want.
She typed Hi. Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth. Do you have time to talk today? And hit send before she could think herself out of it.
That’s all they do—talk. They owed each other that.
And by talk she hoped Grip knew she meant kiss, touch, strip, suck on each other’s piercings and screw each other senseless.
FOURTEEN
Grip eyeballed the text from Mena. She wanted to talk. He wanted to bend her over several surfaces, including his piano, and do depraved things to her. His eyes felt sunk in his head and he needed a shower and a shave and a bacon and egg roll to cure his hangover—and a kick up the bum for having the hangover in the first place.
And since when had he been willfully self-destructive about a woman?
Only one other time, a bender that had lasted a week when he realized Philly wasn’t going to show up at another gig again and he’d lost his chance with her.
He stared at the word talk in case it was secretly another word altogether. It had the same number of letters as fuck. Maybe it was an autocorrect and what Mena really meant to say was, do you have time to fuck today? Because yes, he had so very much time for that.
He hit the shower, cleaned himself up. Put on his lucky jeans, which had once belonged to Jay, in a desperate attempt to convince himself Mena wasn’t about to tell him they were one and done.
He needed to see Mena like he needed never to drink alone again, and if all she wanted to do was talk, he’d do what he could to talk her into wanting to do more, in some way that didn’t make her feel pressured—that he might’ve been able to come up with if his head wasn’t so sore.
Unless she’d accepted his invitation to come over simply to make him choose. Financial advisor or lover. There was probably a third option in there, something like both, but his head hurt to think about it.
By the time Mena buzzed his intercom in the early afternoon, he’d eaten, gulped down a disgusting hangover cure, taken some headache tablets as backup and was feeling less like the scummy gaffer tape stuck to the bottom of his shoe after a show.
If she only wanted to talk about the weather, he could do that. He could find out what season she liked best, if she chased the sun on holidays or got frightened by lightning storms. So far all he really knew about her was that she was a good listener, nerdy with numbers, owned a fabulous renovator’s delight terrace house, hated spiders, smelled complicated like the ground floor of David Jones where all the perfumes were, wore lingerie like a pinup girl, dressed like she meant business, liked his tattoo and did a good job of adoring his dick.
There were other things he knew, like how soft her skin was, how sensitive her perky nipples were, how she had dimples in her thighs and that her hips were the right size for his hands. But if he focused on those things, on the fact that this incredibly smart, ambitious, beautiful woman made perfect ham and cheese toasties, and loved being on her knees for him, he’d make a mistake with her and what they had was already a fragile thing that maybe relied too much on the idea of it being forbidden.
It wasn’t nothing. It was a whole lot more than he’d known about a lot of women he’d slept with, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough.
For all that, he had an inkling Mena could see him through the noise that was being Mark Grippen, financial fuck-up, larrikin drummer of Lost Property, and if he was right about that, he was going to do his best to make her think he was transparent like glass.
The last vestiges of his thickheadedness had gone off to play in the traffic when Mena rang his doorbell.
Too late, he only realized he hadn’t put on a shirt when he opened the door to her, and she made a little squeaking sound.
“Mena. Hi. Sorry. I’ll. Shit. Shirt,” he heel-bumped his forehead. Smooth, dickhead. “Come in.”
She laughed, a great gust of it. She looked different, looser, more touchable. More sunshine. Wearing a dress with flowers on it, big roses in soft colors, the fabric light and summery, slides on her feet and a bag that wasn’t for work over her shoulder. Her hair was tied back in a simple ponytail and though he couldn’t see her eyes through her sunnies as she moved past him to come inside, he got the impression she was laughing there as well.
His chest got tight. There were a million ways he could screw this up.
“I’ll go put a shirt on.” He closed the door and took a steadying breath before he turned to face her. She’d pushed her glasses to the top of her head and her eyes weren’t exactly laughing.
“You don’t need to put a shirt on.”
They were . . . hungry? “Okay.” He’d grab one anyway. They weren’t at the wander around half dressed before sex stage of anything together. “I’ll give you the tour.”
She stepped out of her slides and now they were both barefoot. “You don’t need to give me a tour.”
He stared at her, trying to work out what exactly was going down here while his senses ran riot. She was hungry. She wasn’t here to
