I sighed, too weary to fight him and my longings. His tongue found the breach in my lips and slipped in, and the caress left my whole body limp with longing. Feeling instead of thinking, my hands slid into his hair and helped his mouth continue to wreak heady havoc on mine. I swear, the bed started to spin, with my heart going counter-clock-wise. I heard a moan and hoped it wasn’t me. I tried to keep my eyes open, but it didn’t help. All I saw was him, all I felt was him.
Then his hands, which had been busy while I was expanding my understanding of the male physique, found an opening in my clothing. The feel of his hands sliding up the bare skin of my stomach heading for a place no man had ever gone before made my eyes cross. I teetered on the edge of giving in to pleasure, to crossing that threshold of knowing, of plunging into the secret world where male met female—when he stopped.
Not just stopped, he went totally limp.
From heady lover to Raggedy Andy in a heartbeat. Doggie painkiller takes down passion. I tried to oust regret and replace it with the more proper relief. It would have been easier if he had rolled off me, since my nerve endings were still sparking with delight.
“Kel?”
He didn’t move.
“Great.” I pushed. He muttered and buried his face deeper against my neck. Even unconscious he felt really good.
It was too much. I was too tired to fight against the comfort of a warm, male embrace on a cold night. I’d just rest a minute, let him get deeper asleep, then I could slip away and curl up all alone on the cold, short, uncomfortable, couch.
5
I was thirteen years old, when Freddie Frinker, the minister’s son, gave me my first kiss on the front porch of my house. It was squishy and slimy with too much tongue and too little yum. But the worst part was when he pulled back and I discovered we were still tenuously connected by a little strand of spit. With a tiny rainbow quivering at the center.
I’ve had other embarrassing moments, but nothing that surpassed the horror of making a spit rainbow with Freddie Frinker.
That is, until I woke up in my bed wrapped around Kelvin Kapone with a “K.” That he was wrapped around me did nothing to ease the situation. My head ached and I had the uneasy feeling that the kiss I’d been dreaming about hadn’t been a dream at all. In a moment of mutual consent we moved apart. My move rolled me off the bed. The thump against the floor rattled the windows.
I cleared the huskiness from my throat and watched him from under my lashes as I said in my teacher’s voice, “Good morning.”
The corner of his mouth quivered once, but his eyes were as grave as his voice. “Good morning.”
The silence stretched like Spandex until I produced my next inane remark. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I lost an argument with a truck.” He gave a half grimace, half grin and pulled himself into a sitting position against the headboard. His bare chest, crossed by bandages and a sprinkling of blondish-brown hair, immediately improved the plain expanse. It appeared that at some point in the night he’d shed Mike’s tent-like shirt. He looked pale, with the faint shadow of a beard adding an attractive texture to his strong chin.
“Um, would you like one of the pain pills Mike gave you?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, do you?” His voice was serious but his eyes, brightened by a highly suspect humor, met mine for a long moment.
He couldn’t remember what happened last night, could he? I wanted to gnaw on this thought, the same way an animal will gnaw a limb caught in a trap, but it was hard to concentrate when he directed his attention to my bedroom. Plain, white walls and spare, natural wood furniture. The bed, though deep and soft, was draped in prim white, except for the hideous purple afghan my mother had crocheted for me from some yarn she’d picked up at a yard sale. I have many other even more hideous things she’s made for me hidden in the hope-less chest at the foot of the bed. Would he notice it was a place where not much happened? How could he not? If he did, he kept his conclusions hidden behind a bland expression when his gaze returned to me.
“I’m sorry I flaked out on you. Uh,” he blinked a couple of times, “Isabel? Is that right? My brain is still foggy from the doc's painkiller.”
If he remembered my name, what else did he remember? I scrambled to my feet, feeling terribly morning after-ish despite being fully clothed. It didn’t help that he seemed more comfortable in my bedroom than I did.
“Everybody calls me Stan.” I don’t know why I said it again.
His brows arched. “Why?”
If he didn’t know, I wasn’t going to tell him.
“Why don’t you go first in the shower?” I suggested. It felt like the polite thing to do, let him go first and had nothing to do with my desire that he go somewhere away from here.
“I’m still feeling a bit groggy and you probably have somewhere to go?”
I wanted to tell him he had to get out of my apartment before my mother saw him, but even inside my head, it sounded lame, so I nodded. The five steps to the bathroom seemed more like five miles and the door, when I closed it was more vapor than cheap wood. With the uncomfortable intimacy of a mere door between us, my angst was made worse by the realization that all my clothes were back in the bedroom with him.
“Wonderful.”
I showered and dried myself at light speed, donned a minuscule terry robe hanging on the back of the door, made sure it was securely
