Vanilla

  I let him hold me.

  We were quiet for a while before I said his name. He pressed against me a little more in silent response. I turned to face him, both our heads on the same pillow. He pressed his knee between my thighs so we could get belly to belly. The pressure felt good.

  I wasn’t expecting him to kiss my forehead. Nor the corners of my eyes. I didn’t think he’d murmur to me again in Spanish, words I didn’t know and yet somehow understood.

  “I like these here,” he whispered, again kissing my eyes at the corner. “The lines there. And this.” He brushed his lips to my temple. “The silver threads.”

  “Another man who pointed out the things that make me look old would get a knee to the nuts, Esteban.”

  He laughed softly and snuggled me closer. “Not old. Those things are your beauty.”

  He’d told me I was beautiful before. Of course he had. But this was the first time I believed it, and the tears that had been threatening me for hours at last forced their way free. I fought them back, but even so, a couple slipped out.

  Esteban kissed them away. Then my closed eyes. Then my cheeks. My chin.

  And then my mouth.

  I tried to turn my face, but he caught me anyway. His lips, soft on mine, didn’t demand. His kiss soothed as much as his circling palm on my belly, as his embrace. As everything about him always had, and craving that solace, I opened for him.

  The kiss got deeper, but not frantic. Slow and smooth and soft. His fingers tugged the pins from my hair and freed it. He moved his mouth over my jaw and chin and throat, never biting. Never hard, though often that was what I’d demanded of him. And he didn’t turn the kiss into something else, nothing urgent. He didn’t try to move his mouth down my body, or to get something from me I’d have had to reject. Esteban worshipped me with his mouth, never asking for anything for himself, even though he got hard again almost at once.

  We kissed like that for a long time.

  Then we stayed in the dark in silence, entangled. With my hand on his chest, I felt his heartbeat slow. His cock softened. He pressed his lips to my hair. I needed to get up and take care of bathroom business, but I didn’t want to move and break the contentment.

  There was no helping it, though. I needed to deal with biology, and beyond that, both of us needed to get home. I got out of bed and grabbed my bag. In the bathroom, I took care of things then gathered my discarded clothes and shoes and went back to the bedroom.

  Esteban hadn’t yet dressed...but then I hadn’t told him to. He’d turned on a single light. When I came out with my armful of things, he took them from me without a word. He folded my garter belt and stockings and tucked them carefully into my bag, along with my bra and then my still-damp blouse. He took his T-shirt from the chair while I stood motionless. He tugged it over my head, making sure to pull my hair free. He smoothed the fabric over my body.

  “It fits you,” he said and put his hands just beneath my breasts for a moment to give me a smile I found utterly charming. “Very nice.”

  Then he took my skirt and knelt in front of me to help me step into it. But when he moved to slip one foot into my pump, I shook my head. “I have flats in my bag.”

  With a nod, he took them out and put them on me. Then he stood. He put his hands on my hips. Face-to-face, I looked into his eyes. There were words I knew I should say, but I couldn’t find them.

  “You kissed me” is what came out, instead. Too soft, too full of emotion I couldn’t put a name to. Too open and raw.

  “You needed me to kiss you,” Esteban said. “When you’re hungry, you should be fed.”

  I hugged him then, fiercely. I clung to him, thinking in that moment that I should love him more than I did. For the first time, thinking that maybe I could.

  But I was still the one who broke the hug and stepped away from him. Chin up, shoulders squared, back straight. I touched his face, looking into his eyes, but I put distance between us even as I did so.

  Distance, but not coldness. “Thank you,” I told him.

  Esteban looked pleased, a flush rising in his chest and throat. His cock thickened a little in those few seconds, and I looked down between us to cup him there as I’d cupped his chin a moment before. He shivered. Our faces turned, our cheeks brushed, but we did not kiss again.

  I stepped away from him a second time. “Good night, sweetheart. Drive carefully.”

  He nodded. I gathered my things. He helped me into my coat. He kissed my cheek at the door, and then, as I always did, I left him behind in the hotel room and I went back home.

  23

  I knew Niall was going to back out of our date-that-wasn’t-a-date on Saturday before he even called me that morning. I listened to him fumble his way through it, letting him talk without saying much of anything myself. I didn’t have much to say.

  “Another time?” he asked. “I know maybe not that movie, but something else.”

  “Sure.” If he wanted me to tell him it was okay that he was canceling on me the same day we’d planned to meet, he was going to wait a long damn time. Truth was, I didn’t really feel like going out tonight. The night before with Esteban had been lovely, but strange, and though my period was already lighter today, I’d been thinking fondly of a night with Interflix and a heating pad.

  “Sorry about it being last-minute. I’m sure you won’t have any trouble making new plans, though.”

  I actually took the phone away from my ear to look at it in disbelief before I answered. “I wouldn’t, if I wanted to.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” He didn’t sound like he was trying to be a dick about it, but I didn’t know him well enough to tell.

  I did know how to be subtle and tactful, mostly because I’d long ago decided that I wasn’t going to be like my mother and sister. I knew how to bite my tongue. But I’d also decided long ago there was no point in being coy with people when they were fucking with me.

  “Why would you figure that?” I asked.

  “Because you’re...because you have...lots of friends,” Niall said. “I’m sure lots of guys would love to go out with you.”

  “Sure, I have a whole waiting list of dudes just sitting around waiting for me to call them up last-minute, see if they don’t mind being second choice on a Saturday night. Nobody minds not being top tier, do they?”

  “Hey,” Niall said. “That’s not what I meant. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “Don’t assume you know me,” I said.

  We were both quiet then.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Something came up, that’s all.”

  “I’m in a bad mood. I’m sorry.” I apologized with a little less grace than he had. “No worries. Things happen. I get it.”

  “Another time,” Niall said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” I sounded wary and knew it, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  Now it was hard to stay irritated with him, uncertain as I was about what the hell, exactly, he was trying to do. Blow me off, let me down easy? Maybe the movie thing hadn’t been meant as a date at all in the first place. Maybe I’d jumped the gun inviting him along to the Hershey show. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

  I remembered now why I’d stayed away from dating.

  “Great,” Niall said.

  24

  One of the things I’d made clear from the start with Esteban was that I didn’t mind if we didn’t talk every day, but I could not abide having messages go repeatedly unanswered. He’d always been good about it, so I didn’t worry too much at first when a day passed without getting a reply to my last message, a breezy little joke I thought would make him grin. Then two days. Then three, four, five and I found myself checking my app to make sure nothing had gone wrong with it. I sent myself a message from another device, and that came through all right, so it wasn’t a glitch in the server or anything technical. He simply wasn’t talking to me.

  I did not message him again.

  I thought about it, though. Whether I should drop a casual He
y, how are you? or an angry Where the fuck are you? Or a concerned Is everything okay? In the end I sent nothing, because then I did not have to risk getting nothing back. I’d had enough of that in my life, and though I’d managed to resist any late-night messages to George for the past few weeks, I couldn’t forget how terrible sending them always made me feel.

  I had enough to keep me busy anyway with work and helping to get William where he needed to be and doing my best to ignore my mother and sister. I also had to practice the Torah portion I’d be reading, and since it had been a long damn time since I’d done anything like that, it meant more than an hour of effort. I had to put the time in, and there wasn’t much time left.

  “I don’t want to embarrass myself. Or William,” I told Evan one night when I was dropping William at the house after his extra study session with the rabbi. “How’s he doing, by the way?”

  “Better. I think he feels more confident with the extra studying. He’s his mother’s kid, that’s for sure.” Evan shrugged.

  I leaned against the counter and cracked the top of the can of cola he’d handed me. “Hey, how’s it going with Mom and Jill?”

  “What do you mean?” Evan looked at me over his shoulder from the stove, where he was mangling scrambled eggs. How anyone could ruin scrambled eggs, I didn’t know, but my brother was.

  “Are they all settled down, or what?” I shrugged.

  Evan scraped the eggs onto a plate and put the pan in the sink, adding a squirt of soap and water. “I guess so. I tune it all out. Susan was on my case about some kind of napkins or something. Whatever the hell that’s about. I told her to just do what she wanted. You want to stay and eat?”

  I glanced at the clock. By the time I got home, it would be past dinnertime, and I’d still have to cook something. I tried to gauge the emptiness of my stomach against the likelihood that Evan’s dinner would taste like shit.

  “Where’s Susan?”

  “Book club.”

  “Step aside, brother dear, and let me make something a little bit better than that mess you’ve got there. I mean, dude, you burned them. Who burns eggs?”

  It didn’t take long to put together a spaghetti dinner with some jarred sauce and garlic bread from the freezer. We were just sitting down when Susan came in through the garage. She had a tote bag slung over her shoulder, and the tips of her hair were wet.

  “How was book club?” Evan asked. “Elise made dinner. I messed up the eggs.”

  “It was yoga,” she told him, exasperated. “If you’d been paying attention, you’d have known that. And I met some friends after for coffee and had a sandwich, so I don’t need dinner. Hi, Elise, thanks for getting William. How was the rabbi’s lesson?”

  “Fine,” William mumbled, mouth already full.

  Susan gave us all another round of blank, distant looks. “I’m going to go put my stuff away.”

  Evan waited until she’d left the room before saying, “I thought it was book club, excuse me.”

  I turned the subject away from potential domestic discord and got my brother and nephew talking about the latest Galaxy Vision game I’d bought the kid for his birthday and given to him early so he didn’t have to wait months to play it. William invited me to hang out for a while to play, but it was already late enough that I wanted to get home where laundry and bill paying took up my time.

  I checked my phone, but nothing from Esteban.

  Online, I logged in to my OnHisKnees account, suspicious suddenly that I’d somehow been replaced. I looked up Esteban’s profile, but couldn’t find it using the search box. I opened some old, saved messages to click through that way, but got an error message. He’d deleted it.

  I sat back, concerned. The worst I’d expected was to see him online, or at least that he’d been online recently, playing around instead of talking to me. But he’d disappeared.

  I scrolled through the unread messages in my mailbox and searched also through the list of profiles that had viewed me. I had about ten different private photos I’d been granted access for, even though I hadn’t been logged in in forever and hadn’t requested any. Close-up, slightly blurred cock shots, men in restraints, some with leather zipper masks. One bold gentleman had sent me an artistically framed photo of his asshole with the caption “Use Me, Mistress.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” I muttered and flagged it as spam.

  The site clearly showed the time of last log-in, which meant that all these desperately horny men were either not paying attention, or they simply didn’t care that I hadn’t been on the site in weeks. Probably both, since anyone who’d bothered to look at my profile would’ve seen that I’d checked off “not interested in acquiring.” But that was the problem with a site like this—it might cater to people looking for specific kinks in a way that vanilla social sites did not, but that didn’t mean anyone who used it was any less an idiot. Especially when it came to their hard dicks, I thought with a sigh. Submissive? Only when it suited them.

  “Do not address me as Mistress. I’m not yours. Don’t solicit me to fuck you in the ass or spank you or tie you up. Don’t send me pictures of your naked cock until and unless I’ve asked you for them. Most of all, do not assume you know me.” I replaced my former profile, which had been much blander, with that new one, and laughed. It wouldn’t do any good, and was probably going to solicit even more unwanted attention from the sorts of men who would then want me to punish them for disobeying.

  Randi was right; it was insanely hard to find someone you clicked with. I’d met Esteban here, and I’d thought we had made a connection, imperfect as it might’ve been. Then again, what was ever perfect anyway?

  I let my cursor hover over the delete my account button, considering it. I scrolled again through the messages and solicitations and deleted all of them, even the ones that had made the effort to be reasonably polite or clever. I deleted all the dick pictures. And finally, I went into my saved messages and deleted all of my original correspondence with Esteban.

  If he wanted to be gone, I would make sure he was.

  25

  William was amazing. I hadn’t done too bad a job with my reading, either. There’d been no fisticuffs on the bimah, nobody had lost their shit, nobody had even flubbed anything too badly. William had flown through the entire service like a champ, stumbling even less than the rabbi. He’d given his speech without faltering and good-naturedly ducked from the flying candy the congregation had showered on him when he finished.

  Now he was suffering the reception line of hand shaking and mazel tovs from everyone who’d come to the party at the hotel, which, despite my mother’s worries about her friends who wouldn’t drive on the Sabbath, turned out to be almost everyone except my father, as predicted.

  All that worry for nothing, but wasn’t that how it went? You worried and fretted and then it all turned out all right. If only all of life could go as well, I thought, but then pushed that from my mind.

  Now it was party time.

  I made it through the hora and one line dance and then a bunch of speeches, and a truly awful candle-lighting ceremony before I managed to escape to the bar just outside the ballroom. There wasn’t any booze being served at the party, but the bar was close enough to make it feel like I wasn’t bagging out of the party to get lit. Not that I was the only one—the entire area, open to the lobby, was filled with Bar Mitzvah guests grabbing a drink.

  And oh, there was Niall Black.

  “Ms. Klein,” he said from behind me, and I turned. He’d taken off his tie and had his jacket in one hand. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  I gave him just a touch of side-eye, thinking I’d have to holler at my brother later for not giving me a heads-up. “Hey.”

  Niall gestured toward the bar. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “When a free glass of wine slaps you in the face,” I began.

  “You don’t say no,” Niall finished.

  I gave him an assessing look and took a seat at one of the chairs at the bar. ?
??White, please.”

  He ordered a bottle of beer and settled next to me. “So...”

  “So,” I repeated.

  “So, it’s good to see you.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “You are...really...”

  “Intriguing? Talented? Clever? Handsome?”

  “Confusing, is what I was going to say.” I took the glass of wine from the bartender and sipped with an appreciative murmur. I could drink as much as I wanted; we’d all rented rooms here to visit with out-of-town guests and attend the brunch tomorrow morning.

  “Confusing. Huh.” He grinned, and damn it, he had a smile I found really hard to resist. “Do I want to ask you why you think I’m confusing?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You’re really not going to tell me?”

  I looked him over. “If I say no, I don’t want to, will you keep asking?”

  “Yeah, probably.” He grinned.

  I frowned. “Figures.”

  Niall’s grin faded a bit. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” I said, “that like most men, you want what you want.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  I thought about that for a second. “Yes. I guess we all do.”

  “And you probably always get what you want,” Niall said.

  “When I can. Sure.” I lifted my wine toward him. “Cheers.”

  “So, tell me how it all works,” Niall said after we’d sat in slightly awkward silence for a few minutes. He took a long pull from his bottle of beer.

  I’d been waiting for the question. Under other circumstances, I’d have given him a cool smile and answered with a roll of my eyes, but what can I say? The wine was going to my head. Bar Mitzvahs made me emotional. And he was very, very cute.

  But he had blown me off, and that wasn’t something I could just ignore. I sipped from my glass and eyed him. “How what all works, exactly?”

  “The her on top stuff.”

  If I’d had any sense that he was asking for some sense of skeevy voyeurism I’d have shut him down immediately. Not that I had an issue with voyeurism—after all, far be it from me to judge anyone’s kinks. But I’d had my share of gross “wink wink nudge nudge” conversations with men who were secretly getting off on what I was telling them, and that was never okay with me, being the subject of some sort of underhanded beat-off material. I liked to be more in control than that.