I’m going to have to change.
No one should count on the authenticity of drunken emotion, yet there was something so deep about the tone of that word. Even if he didn’t remember how he uttered it the next morning, there was something inside him that knew he had to fix this.
“Lean on me,” I said.
We took one step forward, then two. I held his wrist with one hand and his waist with the other. The front of his tuxedo shirt was brown with mud. I got wet wherever his clothes touched me.
“Thank you,” he said when he stumbled.
“No problem. Step up here.”
He stepped up to the pool patio.
“You hurt my feelings,” he said without hurt in his voice. As if he was just stating a fact. “When you called me a dick.”
“I’m not sorry.”
“I don’t blame you. Do you have fantasies, ever?” He ran the question into the statement as if they made sense together.
“Like about what?” I asked. His arm around me, his breath soft in my ear. Even his dependence was kind of a fantasy.
“You know what bothers me about fantasies?”
“Watch this chair here. Whoa.” I pulled him left, narrowly missing tripping over a lounger.
“You never know if you’re getting it right,” he said.
I turned to him, and found his eyes taking up my entire field of vision and my nose two inches from his.
“What do you mean?” Up ahead, the screen door was wide open. He must have come out that way.
“Like when I fantasize about fucking you.”
We almost tripped on the entrance. I swallowed my lungs, stomach, and heart in one gulp. He was drunk. He didn’t mean it. He never thought about fucking me. Not Brad Sinclair.
And he was my boss.
“Step up,” I said, turning back. My face burned red hot.
He stepped up. We were in the back room. I was never going to get him up the stairs to his room, so I pivoted toward the guest room.
“Do you come with a dick?” He slurred, but I wasn’t mistaking the words or meaning. “Just a dick? Or do you need a little help?”
“Brad, really?”
“I have this one fantasy where you come without help and one where I touch you.”
“This is totally inappropriate.”
I kicked open the guest room door.
“I want to know which one’s right, then I won’t ask again. And what do you call your . . . you know . . . girl parts?”
I ducked and let his weight drop. He fell to a sitting position, soaked clothes sticking to his beautiful body. White shirt exposing his nipples and the hair on his chest, eyes a third lower, seriously asking me what term I used for my genitalia.
“I’m assuming you talk dirty,” he said. “I shouldn’t assume. But it’s my fantasy and I’m keeping it.”
A drop of water fell from his cuff onto the wool carpet.
“The jacket has to come off.”
He nodded and went for his lapel, but even that messed with his balance and he nearly tipped over. I grabbed him and pulled him up.
“You know the best part of them?” he said. I tugged his cuff so he could get his arm out. “The part when I spread your legs.”
I sucked in a breath. My nervous system fired, dropping all sensation and urgency to my core. I had to pause to breathe before I pulled the other cuff.
“I’m looking in your eyes and you say yes,” he continued. “You bend your knees.”
I tossed the jacket over a chair.
“And I . . .” He put the backs of his hands together and moved them apart. “God.”
I didn’t have to take his shirt off. Didn’t even have to stay in the room with him. I could have left. But maybe this was a little bit of my fantasy too. Maybe his attention was something I craved, even if he wasn’t supposed to be drunk or muddied.
He looked concerned for a second.
“Do you shave? Landing strip? I don’t care, but I want to get it right.”
I undid the top button and took the studs out of the front of his shirt. I had to kneel to get to the bottom buttons.
“Tell me,” he said.
I got to the last button. His head tilted down to me, and I looked up at him.
“Just tell me that.”
I reached for his cuff links, but he pulled his arm back and did it himself.
“My fantasy is about you.” He pointed to me. “If I don’t know this stuff, it’s about some random woman.”
He dropped the cuff links on the carpet.
“How I manage my hair depends on my mood,” I said, grabbing his cuffs. I pulled his wet shirt off and put it over the jacket. “I’m not attached to any one way of doing it. I really hope you forget this tomorrow.”
“I still have to memorize the third act,” he said. “I bet you taste like strawberries.”
I pushed him back, and he fell like a sack of potatoes, arms out, bare chest breathtaking in the moonlight. I wanted to put my hands on it. Claw at the skin. Feel the nipples get hard under my fingers. Talk filth until he got hard.
I got back on my knees and took his shoes off.
“Thank you for taking care of my daughter,” he said as I picked his legs up by the ankles and swung them around until he was straight on the bed.
Only a guy midblackout could go from subject to subject like that. It meant he was forgetting things as soon as they were happening.
“I talk during,” I said matter-of-factly as I put the blanket over him. “And dirty. And dick. And even though it’s inappropriate and against all the rules, I’d love for you to bury yours in me so hard it hurts. I dream about you fucking me like an animal three nights a week, and the other four you fuck me like you own me.” I patted the blanket.
“I’ll never work again,” he mumbled, half inside his drunken dream world. He couldn’t have been talking about burying his dick in me. “No one will want me if I don’t show up. Everything will be gone. All sad faces.”
“Good night.” He murmured a response. I kissed him on the forehead.
When I came back to put a glass of water and aspirin on the night table, he was passed out.
CHAPTER 20
CARA
I got up early and went to the gym. I ran, climbed, did sit-ups and a spin class, but nothing worked Brad’s words out of my mind.
He fantasized about me. That was the bottom line. I imagined his voice telling me what he wanted to do to me and replayed it over and over while I pedaled myself into a mass of sweat and burning muscles. On the screens above, DMZ flashed Brad on the red carpet with Nicole in his arms.