“Bat signal,” I squeaked.
The guy running the Batmobile attraction undid the velvet rope. “You two next?”
“Yes,” Michelle said, slipping between Jim and me.
He looked at me, silently asking if it was all right, but I was still speechless that a man I hadn’t seen anywhere but on a TV screen was five feet from me for the third time in a week.
“Mr. Wallace,” I said.
He smirked. “Almost didn’t recognize you without the glasses, Apples.”
“Did you forget my name?”
“No, but I think he did.” Dash pointed toward Jim and Michelle having it out in the front seat of the Batmobile, so deep in discussion that they weren’t paying attention to the attraction.
I turned to face Dash. He’d shaved for the event, and though I liked the scruff he’d had before, the angles of his jaw looked extra sharp without hair to soften them. His tux brought out the width of his shoulders, and the open jacket let me see the flat perfection of his waist. I didn’t want to think about the rest. Not while I had to form words.
“I hope they stay together this time,” I said.
“You look…” His eyes scanned my body, and I felt prickly heat all over. “What are the words?”
“Nice? I look nice?”
“You could conduct electricity in that dress.”
I laughed. Part nerves. Part space filler. Part delight over an obscure fifth-grade science reference.
I flattened the gold fabric against me. “I was going for more insoluble.”
“You’ve just out-scienced me.”
“I help the kids with their homework after school.”
He pointed his chin at the Batmobile. Jim and Michelle were talking quietly among the blasts and screeches of the screen. “I think you lost your date.”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t want to keep you from yours.”
She was a five-foot-eleven triathlete with a PhD, no doubt.
“I came with my sackmate.”
My brain skipped as if tripping on a crack in the pavement.
Sackmate.
A friend with benefits. That was my first thought. Up on deck, the consideration that a casual fuck buddy made him kind of available. In the hole, the actual definition of the word sackmate.
A shortstop’s second baseman. Double-play partner. Jack Youder.
Not a fuck buddy unless you’d just hit a grounder to short with a man on first. Then you were fucked.
It had taken me forever to unravel that, and he watched the process, probably wondering if I knew what he meant. I couldn’t stand in public with a baseball god and look like a deer in headlights.
“What are you going to do when he goes free agent?” I asked.
He stiffened, unamused and seemingly unimpressed. Fuck. Foul ball.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Dash said.
“You’d have a hard time finding a mate as good to sack.”
I was trying to lighten him up, and it worked. He smirked and looked at me the way he had when we’d met at the park. He looked at me as though he was trying not to. As if I was a magnet’s north and his gaze was stuck on me like magnetic south.
“You have a way with double entendre, don’t you?”
“Don’t let it fool you. I’m a librarian. You don’t get more boring than that.”
Jim and Michelle got out of the Batmobile. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. They wanted to touch Dash Wallace, but my brain wouldn’t let them, and the energy it took for mind to command matter drained me of any conversational material. I’d never felt so stupid in my life.
“Is there someone in your life, Apples? A guy type?”
I shook my head.
“Is that a ‘no’?”
I nodded. God almighty, what was wrong with me?
He bent toward me, and I could smell his cologne. Pure heat and crackling ozone. Spice and musk and something that could only be described as lust in a bottle.
“Was that a forward question?” he whispered in my ear. His breath was warm, and with every syllable, I knew how his tongue and lips moved to make the sound.
“No. I don’t think so. I mean, I guess that depends on what your intentions are. If you’re just curious, then it’s forward and inappropriate.” You’re babbling. “But if you’re trying to come on to me, it’s probably one of the first questions you should ask because a gentleman would establish consent.”
You implied he wanted to come on to you.
I wasn’t the feisty heroine I imagined I was. The whole conversation had no place in a romance novel, or even life. I was supposed to feel his heat and still parry/thrust with clever comebacks. I was supposed to push him away while I beckoned him closer, all leading him to chase me until I could no longer run. For every hundred times I had been told by my father and my friends that romance novels were fake, life proved it true two hundred times.
“I found the word for that dress,” he said.
God, I hoped it wasn’t vintage or something. “Tell me.”
“Molten.”
My insides went as molten as my dress, and I saw him and what he was saying in a narrow tunnel. He liked the dress—and my body in it.
This was the best night of my life. Ever.