I hauled myself up, suddenly feeling overwhelmed. It happened sometimes—the world just felt too loud, too bright, too close—but especially at the end of a long day when I was tired anyway. And I didn’t want Christopher to see me like that, because for all that I knew nothing could happen between us, I still wanted him to think better of me than passed out like a drunk old man in a Barcalounger with a sandwich hanging out of my open mouth.
“Sorry, y’all. I’m just so beat. Do you actually mind if we close up early? I don’t think we’re going to get any more walk-ins tonight.”
“Sounds good,” Marcus said. Morgan nodded and started gathering her stuff.
“Thank you,” I said to Christopher. It sounded strained and awkward.
But he just smiled at me and picked something out of my hair. “Tomato,” he said with a faint smile.
I closed my eyes and shook my head. Attractive, Holtzman.
But then he cupped my cheek and the smile was gone. In its place was heat. He was looking at me, really looking at me. And that heat burned through me like we were the only two people in the room. His golden eyes smoldered and there was a humming in my ears, and I thought maybe I’d been wrong about how unappealing I’d seemed falling asleep sitting up.
Maybe I’d been wrong about a lot.
“Get some sleep,” he said. And though it didn’t sound bossy, it did sound invested. Like he’d just told me he had a stake in what happened to me, whether I reciprocated it or not. Then he waved, and was off.
I dropped immediately back down onto the couch, and Morgan and Marcus stood stock-still except for their eyes, which were madly telegraphing over my head. I buried my face in my hands.
“Dude,” Marcus said.
“Dude,” echoed Morgan.
“Just please don’t say it,” I said, my words muffled by my hands, and when I looked up, I was alone.
✕ ✕ ✕
Two days later, I was laying down paint as fast as I could reload my brush, my eye one step ahead of my hand. I loved when it felt like this, as if the image was already there on the canvas, and I was just filling it in.
I’d been painting for hours. Ever since we’d closed the shop at ten and, for the first time all week, Christopher hadn’t shown up with sandwiches.
“Damn,” Morgan had said around nine, when it became clear he wasn’t coming. “I didn’t plan dinner because I was counting on a delicious sandwich!” She rounded on me and glared. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing!”
I had kind of been wondering the same thing though.
“Maybe he just didn’t end up with any extra sandwiches tonight,” I’d offered, not meeting her eyes.
“Girl, get a grip. That shit is made to order. Don’t no one have ‘extra sandwiches.’ He brings those damn things to have an excuse to hang out with your obtuse ass.”
“I know,” I’d mumbled.
I’d come upstairs hungry and tired and feeling vaguely guilty for whatever I’d done or failed to do that had broken Christopher’s sandwich streak. The second I’d started to work, though, everything else had fallen away.
I stepped back from the canvas a while later and stared at my own work. It always felt strange, like hearing your voice on an answering machine, the way it was familiar and alien. I felt exhilarated and exhausted, and I fell into bed without even brushing my teeth.
The next morning I woke before robot-dog and had the petty satisfaction of turning him off before he got out even one bark.
I’d painted until about three a.m., and my phone told me it was only seven thirty. I wasn’t sure why I’d woken up so early, but I wasn’t going to argue with the extra time.
It also told me I’d missed a call from my sister. Calling me at seven a.m. when she knew I usually didn’t get up until around ten was completely like her. I made a mental note not to answer my phone without looking today.
I pulled on clothes and was out the door in two minutes flat, unsure where I’d gotten my energy, and I was at Christopher’s shop in another five. But when I slid my sunglasses off, it wasn’t Christopher I saw behind the counter. It was Bespectacled Lad.
“Oh, hey, um, is Christopher here?”
“It’s Ginger, right?” I nodded. “No, he’s not coming in today,” the kid said. “What can I get you?”
Disappointment shot through me, followed immediately by surprise at how much I’d been hoping he would be there. How much I’d wanted to hear his voice. If he’d been there, I could’ve told him I’d missed not seeing him last night. Asked if he was upset about something.
My face felt hot and I made the executive decision to ignore this new information because it was scary and uncomfortable. Yes, excellent strategy. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.
“Oh. Uh, just a large coffee. Thanks.”
I walked out the door with my coffee. It tasted thin and weak after nearly two weeks of quad shots.
✕ ✕ ✕
The sound of someone banging on my door jolted me awake far too early. It wasn’t the interior door, only accessible from the shop; it was the door in from the fire escape, which no one ever climbed except my landlord, John, and the occasional itinerant soul hoping it led to the roof. And since the homeless folks never knocked…I was gonna kill John.
I stomped the five steps from the bed to the door and ripped it open.
“What the hell!?”
But it wasn’t John. It was Christopher.
“Oh, thank god. I thought maybe some dude with a baseball bat was going to answer.”
I blinked at him, stupidly. He didn’t have a coat on, though it was chilly out, just worn jeans and a maroon T-shirt.
I wasn’t sure why, but it got to me, that color. He always wore those three-in-a-bag V-neck T-shirts, but rather than plain black or white, his T-shirts were dark blue, maroon, forest green, dark brown, once a neon orange one—weird colors, like he bought the ones no one wanted. They were the colors I imagined in a smoking lounge or the nineteenth century library of a posh British guy. Well, not the neon orange one.
Usually we were seated, often with a counter between us. But now, standing this close to him, I was struck by his sheer physicality. He was a lot taller than me—maybe six one or six two—with broad shoulders and the kind of effortless strength that came from regular physical work. I could see the tension in his muscles and the gold-dusted hue of his pale skin. He carried himself with the confidence of someone who knew what his body could do.
I could imagine what he could do to me—powerful arms pinning me against the wall of Melt, or hoisting me onto the counter. Thick thighs spreading my legs as he pressed us together… But I could also imagine the colors I would use if I painted him. The creams and pinks, oranges and blues. His skin, his hair, his eyes… I blinked, overwhelmed by the beauty of how he was made up and the realization that I wasn’t quite sure how long I had been standing there, looking at him.
Desire hit me. I’d thought about kissing his full mouth, about running my hands through his hair and mussing it. I’d thought about him a lot more than I’d wanted to. But my impulse now was to slide under his arm and wrap my arms around his waist. Bury my nose in his neck and inhale. It wasn’t an impulse of lust, but, unexpectedly of intimacy.
His physical power was potent, but there was something in his expression that looked lost.
“You didn’t come in for coffee the last few days,” he said finally.
I put my hands on my hips. “Well, you didn’t come in to the shop.” Wow, Holtzman, congratulations on sounding like a petulant five-year-old.
He sighed and turned to look out over the railing. Even though no one else used the fire escape, I stood out on it often. On the rare occasion that I had a night off, I’d watch the sun set. On the more common occasion when I hadn’t gone to bed yet, I’d watch it rise.
Christopher’s profile was clean, striking, and now that I didn’t have a convenient distraction—coffee, a bagel, a sandwich, my friends—I couldn??
?t stop staring at it.
“Can I maybe come in?”
I gestured him in and locked the door. “Uh, just one sec,” I said, suddenly aware of what I was wearing. I ducked into the bathroom and slid a bra on under my Kidneythieves concert T-shirt that was so thrashed it was more hole than shirt. My long john bottoms weren’t too bad. Probably.
I didn’t even let myself glance in the mirror. When you woke someone up from a dead sleep you had to deal with what they looked like, end of story. But I did quickly brush my teeth because it was impossible to talk to someone so gorgeous with my mouth tasting like something died.
When I came back into the living room, Christopher was standing at the foot of my rumpled bed, looking at the painting that hung above it. It was a self-portrait, and stylistically a lot like the work I was doing for the show in January. It was from behind and off to the side, mostly my hair, the short stubble exposing a glimpse of my ear and neck on one side, the curls spilling over my shoulder on the other.
“Is that you?”
“Yeah.” I was aware that some people would find it the height of vanity to have a picture of yourself hung over your own bed like Jay-Z or a Kardashian, but Christopher’s tone didn’t seem to imply that he was one of them.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“Thanks.” Then, aware that I was pulling a total Daniel by giving away no information whatsoever, I added, “I just really like the difference in textures. Long hair, buzzed hair, skin. It’s interesting to paint. It’s not that I’m totally obsessed with myself.”
“Wait, you painted that? Holy shit.” He walked around the side of the bed and leaned in to look more closely. “I thought it was a photograph, I seriously did. Jesus,” he murmured, long eyelashes nearly touching the canvas.
When he turned to me, his eyes were intense.
“You’re so damn talented,” he said. Then, before I could even say thank you, “How come you stopped coming in for coffee?”
I liked the way he talked. Like honesty cost him nothing.
“I got a coffeepot,” I said.
“Oh. Bummer. I suppose I should have expected that eventually.”
Currents and cross-currents and undertows and fuck, it’d been ages since I’d been in this place. This slow unfolding into another person’s life. This delicate, tentative new attachment that demanded a kind of nurturing I wasn’t used to giving. I knew we were at a crossroads. We’d been hovering around it the last few times we’d seen each other. That moment when you either acknowledged you were attracted to each other, or let it go.
Part of me thought I should just kiss the fuck out of him and avoid talking altogether. Unfortunately, he was way taller than me, so that would be less sexy spontaneity and more me dragging his head down like I was trying to get him in a stranglehold. Which. That had possibilities of its own, but perhaps not for a first kiss.
Besides, hadn’t I already decided there was no chance this was happening? And yet, here Christopher was…
I slumped down on the couch and rested my chin on my knees. He sat down next to me, slowly, like maybe it wasn’t allowed.
“So listen,” Christopher said. And while that was generally not the start to any comment that ended well, he didn’t sound anxious or concerned. I looked at him warily, getting lost in the beautiful contrast of orange-gold and blue of his eyes. “Do you date men?”
“Uh, yeah. Well, I mean, not very successfully, but yes, in theory.”
Christopher grinned. “Okay, great.”
I laughed at how delighted he looked. “At least someone finds my lack of successful dating to be a positive.”
“Well, it’s working out kinda well for me at the moment, so.”
“Huh. You sure about that?”
Bravado, pure bravado.
We were both leaning in slightly, and suddenly things shifted, like a picture filter had been stripped away. His eyes were on mine and I could feel the energy simmering between us.
“No,” he said slowly. “But I’ve been wrong before and it hasn’t killed me.”
He looked at me—a slow, raking look, and I felt it like a physical touch. I wanted to come out with a comment like a knife to cut the tension that hummed between us. But I had nothing to say. The moment stretched on and Christopher’s lips parted slightly, like he needed more air.
Before I could talk myself out of it—before I could list the cons, or evaluate the risk—I closed the distance between us and paused an inch away. His eyelashes fluttered closed and he kept stock-still. When my lips touched his, it was like lightning arcing between us. I wanted to sink into his kiss and never come up for air.
Christopher groaned and slid a hand to the back of my neck, pulling me close and deepening the kiss. His tongue slid against mine and his stubble roughened my face, shooting heat through my whole body. I was breathing heavily, my heart pounding with desire.
I cupped his jaw and tried to memorize the heat of his mouth, the velvet slide of his tongue, the strength his hands and mouth promised but held in check. I wanted to pull him down on top of me on the couch, feel the weight of him, spread my legs and see if he was as affected by our kiss as I was.
But that was what I always did. I slept with someone and then I either felt awkward around them or I lost interest. And I didn’t want that with Christopher. I wanted the opposite. It was scary, now that I let myself be aware of it, how much I wanted him.
I broke the kiss reluctantly at that thought, my heart pounding now for a far less pleasant reason. I pulled just far enough away that I could see every detail of Christopher’s face. His pupils were blown wide, eyes heavy-lidded, cheeks flushed. We breathed heavily, inches apart.
“God,” he murmured finally, pulling back and running a hand through his hair.
Suddenly, the world rushed back in, everything overly loud. My brain started cataloguing the sounds—hum of the refrigerator, beep of a truck backing up, plane flying overhead, car radio, shouts from the street, a cell phone ringing.
Then Christopher’s face fractured into pieces, the way I saw figures when I tattooed or painted them. A collection of lines, planes, colors, angles, textures that I could catalogue and render. And that was familiar. That was manageable.
“Um. Do you have to open the shop?” I asked. My voice sounded rough and uncertain.
Christopher kept looking at me, seeming dazed. When he registered my question, though, he looked suddenly sheepish. “Uh, yeah, no, Stevie’s got it.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I don’t actually open every day. Usually. I just.” He ran a hand over his face. “Well, I was dropping stuff off the day we met and then I thought maybe you’d come back, and then you did, so I wanted to be there. So.”
“Whoa.” I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at that. That was sweet as hell, and if I’d been in his position, no way would I have admitted it.
“Yeah.” He drawled the word self-consciously. “Turns out I actually really like opening though. I like seeing the neighborhood wake up. And early morning’s when all the cool regulars come in. Like, the eighty-year-olds who’ve been living in the same spot for fifty years. So there’s that.”
“I just thought you were one of those ridiculous morning people.”
“Well, I can be. I’m versatile.”
He winked. It was playful and flirtatious, but now that I knew how incendiary our chemistry was, I would never think of his winks the same way again.
“So, the other day when you weren’t there, you just…weren’t there? It wasn’t because”—I rolled my eyes at myself so hard because, Jesus, could I have jumped to a more self-absorbed conclusion—“I was kind of rude to you the night before at the shop? Because I did come in.”
“Stevie told me.” He smiled, and ran the backs of his knuckles over my cheek.
We were still in kissing distance, and I shivered at his touch. He slid his hand to my shoulder. There was a rip in the seam of my T-shirt so I could feel the heat of his hand against
my skin.
“No. It was actually… My older brother, he’s coming back to town to stay with my parents for a little while. We’re not sure when exactly, but that’s where I was the other morning. At my parents’, helping them get some stuff ready for him. Besides, I, uh. I was starting to feel a little weird about coming to the shop every night. Your friends looked at me like I was kind of pathetic.”
“What? No way, dude. They love you—and not just because of the sandwiches. They were probably looking at you with pity because you were being nice and they know me.”
“Oh yeah? What do they know about you that’s so awful?”
He reached his hand out and gently ran a finger down a lock of my hair, the curl sproinging away. I traced a finger over his eyebrow.
We were learning each other in small, manageable pieces—mapping each new inch of terrain slowly, to see how far into each other’s territory we could venture.
“Not awful, just…they could see that I was acting all weird and awkward with you.”
“You didn’t seem awkward to me. Just a little annoyed.”
The hand on my shoulder moved down my arm, raising every hair as it went.
“Well, um. You don’t really know me very well.”
“I want to,” he said. His eyes were on mine and his voice was rough with desire. The simple sweetness of it rang through me like a bell.
Then I thought of how Christopher liked knowing his customers’ coffee orders and liked bringing people the sandwiches they’d want. Could that be all this was? The interest of someone who was interested in everyone? The possibility hurt worse than I expected it to.
“Why?” I found myself asking. Because I had to know it wasn’t that. I had to know I wasn’t having actual feelings for someone who was just a really nice, flirtatious guy who liked to make everyone feel good.
Christopher sat for a minute while he seemed to consider the question. Then he said, “Did you ever find a new band or author or director or something, and you were instantly fascinated? You heard one song and wanted to get all the rest of their stuff. Sure, you didn’t know what it’d be, and yeah you probably weren’t gonna like every single second of it the exact same way you like the bit you just found. But you can just tell from the part you’ve found that you want to know the rest?”