The Lie

I immediately get out of my seat and kiss her.

She gasps lightly in shock then giggles as I pull away, my hands in her golden hair and skirting down her soft cheeks, marveling at her.

“How are you real? How are you here?” I ask her softly.

She takes the seat beside me and briefly eyes Max, perhaps shy at the sudden and public display of affection. “Well, I just shared the train with a bunch of stinky people, so I definitely know this is all real. I couldn’t pinch my way out of that one.”

She quickly reaches over and pinches my forearm, hard enough to make me yelp.

“Hey,” I scold her, rubbing at my skin.

“Wuss,” she says, grinning happily. “But it’s not a dream, is it?”

“If it were, the beers would be on the house,” Max says, piping up. “Alas, they aren’t.”

I eye him dryly, knowing that the longer we stay here, the less privacy we’ll have.

“Dream crusher,” I tell him. “Give the lady a snakebite and I’ll have another. And then I’ll settle up the almighty tab.”

Max can scarcely believe what he’s hearing. It’s a long-running joke that I’m slow to pay my tab. But now that Natasha is this close to me, I’m having a hard time keeping my hands to myself, let alone finishing my beer.

Max gives us our drinks and then shoots me a not-so-sly wink before heading down the bar to help someone else.

“He seems nice,” she says. “You know, for someone that looks like he was the tour manager for Pink Floyd.”

I laugh. “You’ve been reading my mind today, haven’t you?”

She raises her head, appraising me. “Have I? What else have you been thinking about other than the bartender?”

I grin at her, wiggling my jaw back and forth. “Do you want the truth?”

She adjusts herself on the stool to face me more squarely and puts her hand on my knee. “Always,” she says with smiling eyes.

I lean in closer, staring at her collarbones. I lower my voice. “I’ve been thinking about what it was like to fuck you. I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do to you tonight.”

I wait a moment and then look up. She’s staring at me with a hyper-sexual mix of lust and innocence. Her lips part.

“Just that,” I whisper to her. “Just your fucking lips dropping open, and I think about all the places you could put them.”

Her cheeks are flushed now, eyes glistening. She blinks at me and then takes a long gulp of her drink. I know I’m being too forward, but I can only be honest with her, even if it shocks her. The fact is, I want to shock her. I want to see this side of her with the shy eyes and the pink cheeks. I want to expose her to a part of me she might not recognize.

“Well then,” she says when she recovers, quickly brushing her hair behind her ears. She smiles and looks around the bar. “That was unexpected.”

“Even after this afternoon?” I ask, reaching out and feeling her silky hair between my fingers, tugging on it gently. I wonder if she’d like to have it pulled later.

“I guess not,” she says, her voice becoming huskier. She meets my eyes and chews on her lip. “So, is the bar just a place to have foreplay?”

I smile. “It can be. I wasn’t sure how you felt after today, so I wanted to make it neutral. You know, in case you wanted to run for the hills.”

She gives her head a small shake. “I’m not running anymore.” She picks up her drink and slams the rest of it while darting her eyes to my beer. “Drink up,” she says when she’s finished.

“Trying to get me drunk?” I joke, but I drink the rest of it down easily.

“Trying to get us out of here,” she says, hopping off the stool.

I raise my brows. I wasn’t expecting her to be this eager, and I can’t pretend it’s not the biggest fucking turn-on.

I quickly put a few notes on the bar—plus some extra for Max’s sage advice—and we go. I’ve never been so thankful to have my place just across the street. We’re barely on the other side of the road before I’m attacking her, pressing her up against the bricks while my hands fumble for the keys in my jacket pocket.

Her neck tastes like cream, her smell sweet and heady, and even when I do find the key fob, it takes everything I have to pull my lips away from her, to do something else but revel in her taste.

Eventually we do get upstairs and into the flat. Winter is bounding toward us but neither Natasha nor I can even greet him hello. I kick the door shut with my foot, my lips unable to pull away from hers as we move backward into the room. Our clothes are quickly discarded. My jacket thrown across the room, landing on Winter, her shirt pulled over her head. My hands slip down the front of her jeans, desperate for her cunt as her hands try and undo my zipper.