“I’ll call you tonight, OK?” she said.
“You better,” I said. “After the night I gave you?”
“Woah, Mr. Ferrari became Mr. Cocky over here!” she said as I playfully shrugged.
But it didn’t bother her, as evident by the long, passionate kiss she gave me.
“You’re something else, Nick,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”
“I sure hope so.”
With that, Izzy planted one more kiss on my lips before she got in her car. I stood at the steps of my house, watching her drive off, waving until she went out of view. And when the only sign of her presence was the engine of her Honda, I turned back to the house with the kind of content grin that would last me through the rest of the day.
We’d just had some of the most emotionally charged sex of my life. Maybe some other sexual encounters had more physical flair to them or broke more parts of the bed, but none had made me feel like Izzy’s had. Izzy made me want to follow her to work and sneak in as much sex as we could; sex in the office, sex in the bathroom, sex in the car, sex in the conference room…
And it wasn’t even the sexual release aspect of it, though orgasming was never something to say no to. It was the chance to be with Izzy in the most intimate fashion possible. I couldn’t get enough of that—and I didn’t mean that in the cliché, flippant fashion. I meant I could not get enough sex with her.
I looked down at my phone. Brett had left me a voicemail. Having nothing else pressing to do, I went through and listened to it.
“Hey, asshole, Brett here.”
Ah, yes, Brett is still Brett.
“Just got off the phone with Uncle Nick. Said business has been taken care of and Dad will be coming back here soon. Asked him about it, he got kind of cagey. Not gonna lie, sometimes I really do wonder if we’re in the damn mafia business or not. But anyway, just wanted to let you know that. Call me when you’re done being whipped so I can see the scars on your back.”
Damnit, Brett.
But I was in such a blissful mood that even Brett’s taunts about getting whipped by Izzy just put a smile on my face. I was going to strain my cheek and lip muscles at this rate from smiling so much. Wouldn’t that have made a great story in the papers—TMZ would have a field day photoshopping some of my images for that.
When it came time to lift, I found that, for one of the rare times in my career, I could not concentrate. It was odd that even in spring training, with Izzy and me in limbo, I could filter out everything, but now, post-coital…
Ah, well, whatever. The important thing was my meeting with my agent. He’d only scheduled it the night before, and even then, he’d wanted it to be at nine, something I had vetoed on the grounds of needing to work out.
Actually, scratch that.
The really, truly, honestly most important thing was that Izzy and I had finally gotten intimate. There was no more dancing around each other.
We were building to something real.
And nothing else mattered.
Chapter 14: Izzy
The instant my car left Nick’s property, the instant I found myself back out in the general public, even if that general public was still a pretty wealthy community, I found the same feelings of unease returning.
But they didn’t completely overwhelm me, and that was something of a major win. It was almost like instead of having soreness from exercising too much, I had a “good soreness” of having had some of the best sex of my life. The headaches and the paranoia might have started to come back, but it would be all but impossible for me to feel overwhelmed by them. Not this close in time to what had happened, anyway.
I made it straight to my mother’s house and picked up Ryan.
“He was so well behaved!” my mother said.
“Better than you were!” my father jokingly shouted from the kitchen.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “So no problems sleeping? Nothing like that?”
“Nope,” my mother said.
“OK, perfect, then I’ll—”
“Are you going back to work?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead, truth be told. But it was in my nature to want to get to work as soon as I could; work had provided me the distraction from Malcolm when he wasn’t in prison, and it was probably going to have to carry the same sort of weight now.
“Probably, yeah, I can just drop him off at daycare—”
“Oh, heavens no,” my mother said. “You’d trust a daycare more than me?”
Well, put that way, no, I most certainly did not. I was too much of a creature of habit.
“We need to know what it’s like raising a good kid!”
“Marshall Saunders!” my mother said. “We’ll take care of Ryan. He needs to spend more time with his grandparents, anyway. You can come and get him at the end of your workday.”
“OK, thanks, Mom. Just be careful.”
“Same to you, sweetie, OK?”
We shared a quick hug before I got back in the car and made a pit stop at the house so I wouldn’t walk into the office smelling like endless sex with Nick Ferrari. I did make sure that the top that I wore got tossed onto my bed and not into the laundry basket so that I could take him in later, though; if I couldn’t have him with me, inside of me, next to me, I would at least let his scent fill me.
I quickly showered, going through everything in record time, and threw on some work clothes without bothering to put on any makeup. Like, at all.
