“Come here.” We head down a hall past many doors, and then walk into a huge modern bedroom done mostly in dark woods and light fabrics. “Get comfortable.”
He hands me a men’s shirt from his closet and disappears into a spa-size bathroom, rolling an oversize mahogany pocket door closed behind him. My heart aches as I grip the shirt and impulsively smell it. I hear the shower water, and I wish I had the balls to just strip naked, walk in there, and join him.
Instead, after smelling his shirt to my heart’s content, I remove my dress and briefly wonder if I should remove my underwear. I keep it on, which I’m glad of seconds later, because nothing prepares me for the intimacy and panty-wetting sensation of slipping on his shirt.
I feel a strange tingling awareness when it envelops me. I hadn’t realized how much I missed his damn shirt. A part of me still hoping I can change his mind, I try to run my hands down my hair, wipe my tears, and slide prettily into his bed. His mattress is huge, the kind that feels like heaven beneath you.
When Malcolm steps out of the shower, my stomach’s gnarling with all kinds of warmth and need. He’s in slacks and bare-chested. His hair is wet, and he’s barefoot as he lowers himself and stretches out on the bed beside me. I press up to him, closer. The scent of his soap reaches me as he gathers me even more tightly to him. His skin has a scent and I’m addicted, pressing my nose to it. Suddenly I want to make him breathless and groan, feel his big body against me, feel him quiver for me.
He’s in bed with me.
God, it’s like a dream come true. All these nights dreaming.
I tip my head back.
He regards me quietly, his lips quirked. “Livingston, if you could read my mind, you would start feeling really shy around me.”
No. He can’t possibly know what I want. How crazy I feel. How much I want him. How I can’t stop thinking about him. But the intensity in his eyes mystifies me, and the air crackles with so much desire, it’s hard to lie here and do nothing but look at him and want him and feel crazed with desire for him. He doesn’t move closer, but he doesn’t move away, he keeps me in the bestest embrace that’s ever been around me. His lips are here, so very near, two inches from my mouth, as he studies me with an expression of utter determination.
“So tell me about these plans of yours,” he says, and though his voice is low with desire, I can hear the sincerity in his tone as well.
“We don’t have to talk, we can go for the other option,” I whisper. But when he only smiles ruefully down at me, I sigh and snuggle back against his chest. “I’ve never in my life managed to feel safe somehow. But you’re not afraid of movement, you always keep moving. . . .”
Silence.
“Why?” I ask pensively. “Why are you always after something?”
He chuckles. “I don’t know. Because I want to. I want everything.”
“Even women?”
He doesn’t flinch, answers with a soft press of his lips against my temple that makes me melt. “Sometimes women.”
Jealousy sneaks into my guts, but I try not to let it stay there. “You’re always surrounded, Malcolm, by so many people. I’m surprised I found you alone tonight.”
He hesitates. Again, his lips graze my temple. He shifts his body so that I’m almost spread out on top of him, my bare leg folded over one of his black-clad thighs, his hand splaying over my back—over his shirt I’m wearing. “The company I’ve been keeping doesn’t seem to satisfy me anymore,” he whispers in my ear.
If I keep turning into the consistency of honey like this, I don’t even know if there’ll be anything left by morning. Brushing my lips over his tiny brown nipple, I murmur, “Why do you surround yourself with so many people?”
“Because of the meningitis. Remember my father couldn’t stand that I got sick? At five, I was a kid in the hospital with meningitis. My mother stopped by for an hour every day before her tennis classes. The days went by so damn slow. So damn slow that I would look at the clock and one minute would trickle by. Then another. I waited for the last of my IV to drain so someone would come in and change it.”
He felt lonely. In a private room. Alone. Isolated.
I look at him, and he’s big and powerful. But still, there is always the sense of him being surrounded but alone.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I lick his nipple, suck it, kiss it, and when I feel him tense and lift his hand to my hair—ready to pull me back to stop me—I ease back, then gaze up at him with a fierce ache in my gut.
“With Stop the Violence, I sometimes visit family members of the victims, and some of them are so alone. People don’t realize that even if they don’t have money to donate, so many of us just want company.”