“Well, it’s not easy!” she snapped, fumbling to open the car door, which she could not, for the life of her, figure out.
“Not easy? I’d say it was goddamn near impossible,” he said, shaking his head, and got out of the car. He ducked his head back inside. “You really are an alien, aren’t you?” he asked, and then disappeared. But before Rebecca had a chance to collect her many wild and loose thoughts, Matt was at the passenger door, relieving her of the Styrofoam containers as he simultaneously grabbed her elbow to pull her out.
She stumbled out of the car, but as everything was sort of swimming around her, she caught the door to steady herself and very cautiously dipped down to retrieve her bag.
“Are you all right? I mean, besides . . . you know . . . that?” he asked, gesturing vaguely at her. His question didn’t really sink in, however, because Rebecca had noticed his face was looming large in front of her, still smiling, and he seemed a little softer now, not all hard edges, and she was a little taken aback by how handsome he was. So handsome that she unthinkingly reached up and touched his cheek to feel his five o’clock shadow. “You know, you really are cute.”
With a roll of his eyes, he shut the door behind her. “So you said.” He put an arm around her waist, and pulled her into his side as he balanced the steak containers. “Okay, one foot in front of the next.”
“I know,” she said, even though she was stumbling along beside him. And she was concentrating so hard on walking straight that she didn’t even notice where they were until they were in an elevator and he punched the P. She hiccupped. Tried to think of what Peeeeeee stood for. “Where are we again?” she asked.
Matt sighed loud and long.
When the elevator door opened onto a carpeted corridor, Matt grabbed her hand and stepped out, pulling her along with him, and causing her very large bag to bang against him and almost topple the containers. There were no doors in the hallway, just one on either end of the long, long corridor. Matt pulled her along to one at the far end, stuck a key into it, and pushed the door open. Then he pushed Rebecca through it.
She stumbled into a large room painted white, with gray tile floors covered with Pottery Barn rugs (she had studied the catalogs at length during periods of raging insomnia). The furniture was black and chrome; the light fixtures were chrome, too. It was like walking into a page from Architectural Digest. Clean. Stark. Uninhabitable. “Wait a minute . . . what is this place?” she asked, turning around slowly so as not to make her head swim any more than it already was.
“My place,” Matt said, depositing the Styrofoam containers on a granite bar. “Welcome to Chez Parrish,” he said, shrugging out of his coat.
Chez Parrish. Whoa. How had they ended up here? “Wait a minute, bucko—”
“Ach!” Matt said, throwing up a hand and stopping her before she could begin. “Not getting in your pants, remember? But you’re too intoxicated to drive, and I am sure as hell not driving you all the way out to Ruby Falls. Why the hell are you living in a retirement community anyway?”
“Why are you living in a . . . a sanitary penthouse?” she shot back.
Matt put his hands on his waist and frowned at her. “Okay, Mork, time to put some steak in there and soak up that barrel of Chablis.”
“I’m not hungry!” she stubbornly protested, and lurched toward the full plate glass windows that formed one wall of his apartment.
“At least now I understand what it is with you,” he said, loosening his tie as he followed her to the windows. “I’d be a little uptight, too, if I’d been in the desert for four years. Judas Priest,” he said, shaking his head again with that bewildered look as they stood, side by side, looking out over the lights of the city. Or the huge blurry blob of light as it were. “Why haven’t you?” he asked after a long moment.
“Huh?”
With a chuckle, Matt looked at her. “You know what, Rebecca Lear? You’re a mess.” He smiled and tucked her hair behind her hear. “I’m asking why someone as beautiful as you hasn’t had sex in four years.”
Dear God, was that her heart thumping in her ears? “Because,” she said, folding her arms across her middle to steady herself, “I was married to a jerk, and then I wasn’t. You can’t just order sex up from the yellow pages, you know.”