“Oh God,” she choked out before he kissed her again, felt her lips swell under his. Then her hands were at his shoulders, pushing, her torso straining away from his. “I can’t. Your stubble … I can’t … I can’t go back upstairs looking like I’ve been macking in the stacks!”
“Shhh. Okay, okay,” he said, and loosened his grip.
She didn’t step away, though. He expected a ruffled hen and got instead a purring cat. She stroked his throat, his nape, the sheepskin collar of his coat, then slid her hands along his shoulders and brought her face to his.
“You said we couldn’t kiss.”
“We’re not going to kiss,” she whispered. “Be quiet. Sound carries down here.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her what they were going to do, with her legs woven with his, her breasts brushing his chest with each inhale, when she touched the tip of her nose to his, then slid it along one side, then the other. Her cheekbone sought, and found, the soft skin of his, above the stubble he stupidly hadn’t thought to shave.
Yielding to the gentle pressure of her hand on his nape, he bent his head. She went on tiptoe and brushed her lips over each eyebrow, then his forehead. With his face tipped forward, the faint scent of her perfume drifted to his nostrils.
Her hand skated from neck to throat, then up to the damned scruff where her thumb brushed his mouth, then continued up to the scar in his right eyebrow.
“What’s this from?”
“Ask me later,” he said, fighting every instinct that was telling him to hoist her against the stacks. Barring that wildly inappropriate action, he wanted to be sure she wasn’t ticking items off her list with anyone else. Motorcycle. Skydiving. Dating. Especially the dating. No Tinder for sexy sweet Erin Kent. Not on his watch.
“I’m off at ten. Come over for a drink?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“See you later, Jack Powell,” she said.
He stood there, hands on his hips, cock throbbing in his jeans, listening as her heels clicked against the linoleum, sharp, precise, listening to the elevator button ding. He read the titles of the books on the shelf until his hard-on subsided, then made the circuit of the stacks to reach the elevator. When the doors opened, another student stood inside. He gave Jack a cursory glance, then went back to his book.
When he reached the main library floor, he saw Erin sitting in the shared office, lip between her teeth as she typed away. He sat back down and forced himself to bang out an outline for the paper, resolutely not thinking about anything at all. He left thirty minutes before her shift ended and got to her house the long way around, on a long night ride, picking up the interstate, swinging through downtown. And with each red light or stop sign, he lifted his right hand, his fighting hand, from the handlebars and watched his fingers quiver, the entire hand twitch.
*
The light was on in the front window by the time he rode up Erin’s sloped driveway and parked his bike in the shadows between the garage and the trash cans, out of sight from the road. He took the steps to the back door and peered through the curtains that didn’t quite close. She was sitting on her sofa, her head tipped back, a glass in her hand; he could hear a throaty, raw female voice and the twang of a banjo coming faintly through the door. The rhythm was low, dark, pierced by the woman’s voice. He knocked quietly and watched her tip her head to look at the door, then uncurl and cross the floor.
A deadbolt clicked open. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said.
She stepped aside to let him in, then closed the door against the chilly night air. “Nice night for a ride,” she said.
“We’ve got a good stretch of weather coming, sunny but not too hot,” he said. “Perfect weather to learn to ride your new bike.”
She smiled at him, the corner of her mouth curling up, teasing, knowing, then lifted the tumbler to her lips and sipped. Is it a mystery to live, or is a mystery to die, the singer wondered, the drums taut and rolling, riding a fine line between foreboding and compelling. “Want that drink now?”
“Sure,” he said, and followed her into the living room. He looked around while she poured him a glass of whiskey from a bottle on top of a polished sideboard. The lines were clean, dark floors, white walls, mismatched furniture pulled together by an Oriental rug in brilliant reds and golds. Art and mementos hung in the spaces between windows. Airy bookshelves spanned the wall across from the sofa and a piano sat at an angle in the corner, sheet music and books of English contradance tunes shuffled haphazardly on the lid.
“This is Australian?” he asked.
“Probably. I think so,” she said as she capped the bottle and held out the glass.
“You’re not sure?” he asked as he took the glass.
“It’s not my house, remember?”
He’d forgotten. “You’re house-sitting,” he said, and mentally shook his head. He was getting slow, soft, forgetful, which seemed like a really good reason to swallow half of the two fingers she’d poured for him. “Is any of this stuff yours?”
“None of it,” she said. “My clothes are in her closet, my toiletries in her bathroom. That’s it.”