to Grace, whom I called repeatedly to report to on how my every effort at flirtation fell completely flat. Still, I couldn’t stop conjuring up reasons to lure Kirk to my work-station—a lazy mouse, a jammed keyboard (sesame seeds from lunch, but at least I got a smile out of him) and a surprising lack of understanding of the new software updates he’d just installed. And as he patiently wiggled my mouse, dusted my keyboard and explained the new procedures yet again, I made goofy-but-good-natured jokes, standing close enough to “accidentally” brush his arm (delightfully solid) or smile winningly up at his smooth and seemingly unruffled features.
“I’m obsessed with him,” I told Grace during the second week of failed innuendos.
“It’s the challenge,” she replied. “You can’t resist it.”
She was right, I realized later, when I finally gave in to her advice to “just ask him out, for chrissakes,” and he, to my surprise, said yes. But I was hooked good from date one. Kirk was so different from all the men who had come before. For one thing, he made enough money to actually pay for dinner. And I couldn’t help but admire his ambition when he told me his dreams of running his own software company…or his well-toned physique, when things got to that level between us, honed from four times a week at the gym.
Now, as the warmth of that lean, muscled body seeped into my consciousness, I snuggled closer, eyes intent on my book, until I felt his weight shift as he closed the computer shut and reached over to rest it on the night table.
Closing the book with a joyful snap, I thrilled to the feeling of triumph that winged through me, as it never failed to do, even almost two years into the relationship. Call me competitive, call me a nymphomaniac, I don’t give a damn—there was nothing, to me, like the sight of Kirk smiling down at me, a predatory gleam in his eye.
“Come here, you,” he said in a husky voice, as if I were the one who’d been resisting all this time.
Without hesitation, I straddled him, reveling in the discovery that he had gone from software to hardware in seconds flat, even though you could barely tell I was female beneath the roomy T-shirt I was wearing. Still, his big hands unerringly worked their way under my tee, found the somewhat meager mounds there and stroked.
I sighed, knowing what was coming. Because if there was one thing Kirk and I had down pat by now, it was sex. Like the scientist that he was, he had experimented endlessly on me to discover just what buttons to push to get me where I wanted to go. And it was never boring, despite this precision on his part, I thought, as he rolled me beneath him, did away with both of our boxers, then rested back on his heels momentarily to cover himself in latex procured from its ever-ready place in the nightstand.
I would have hated myself for being such putty in his hands, if it weren’t for the heat that inevitably overcame me as he slid inside me. My only complaint might have been that Kirk wasn’t much of a kisser during sex. In fact, he rarely brought his mouth to mine once we were joined. But that was okay, I thought, gazing up at his flushed features, his dark lashes against his cheeks, his full mouth. The view was pretty damn good from here.
Rather than revel in the view as I usually did, I closed my eyes. And just as I was settling into the rhythm, a sudden—and unexpected—image filled my mind of Kirk peeling away my clothes, lifting me into his arms and depositing me on a canopied bed I had never seen before in my life. And when, in my mind’s eye, I turned to look at the heap of cloth that had pooled at my feet as Kirk freed the last button on my— T-shirt?—I saw, to my horrified surprise, swaths and swaths of white silk. What looked to be, in my heated imagination a wedding gown?
Oh, God, I thought, as my body contracted—almost unwillingly, for it seemed way too soon—and I felt the biggest climax of my life shudder through me. My eyes flew open as the foreign sound of an earth-shattering moan left my mouth. I might even have thought it was Kirk who had cried out so freely because, unlike me, he made no bones about noisily expressing his pleasure, if I hadn’t found myself looking straight into his surprised gaze. Moments later, I felt and heard his own satisfied shudder as his body went lax on mine.
“Wow,” he said, when he lifted his head and met my gaze once more. “That was something,” he continued, a smile lighting his features as he bent to graze my surprised mouth with a kiss.
“Yeah,” I said breathlessly, studying his expression. It was something, I thought, hope beating in my breast. But did it mean something? I wondered, remembering the image of that dress in all its surprising detail. Well, clearly it did mean something, as sex between Kirk and me had always been a revelation. But this felt like a revelation of a very different kind. For me, at least, I thought, gazing into his eyes and seeking out the foreign emotions that I felt racking my own heart and mind.
I did see something shining in Kirk’s eyes, but what it was had yet to be determined. Until I heard his next words.
“I never felt you so…strongly. That must have been a big O, huh?” he said with a laugh, then leaned back with a look that told me exactly what he was feeling. Pride. The garden-variety male smugness over a sexual performance well done.
As if to punctuate my realization, he went into scientist mode once more. “What do you think it was? I mean, it was the fucking missionary position, for chrissakes. Nothing special there.” He pulled his hand away from my waist, where it had been gently massaging me, and thumped the bed. “Maybe it was this new mattress? God, had I known, I would have tipped that salesman at Sleepy’s.”
Oh brother.
I might have been thoroughly disgusted at this point, if Kirk hadn’t rolled onto his back, bringing me with him, and pulled me into that solid body of his. Maybe it was the feel of his muscled chest beneath me. Or the tenderness in his hands as they slid over my back. Maybe I just wanted to believe that, though Kirk was a guy and thus given to fits of euphoria over the technicalities of sex, he did feel something more—something he couldn’t possibly express—that made me relent, pressing my body into his in an attempt to hold on to whatever that feeling was. At least until reality set in. And it soon did.
Glancing at the clock, Kirk sat up, suddenly disentangling himself from my limbs. “Is it ten already? I gotta pack.”
“Pack?” I asked, cool air crawling over me as he leaped from the bed, pulled on a pair of boxers and headed for the closet.
“Damn, did I forget to tell you?” He turned to look at me, his expression baffled, as if he were mentally going over one of his meticulous to-do lists and realizing he’d forgotten one of the most important items on it: me.
Assuming he was going away to meet a client, I prepared to launch into a speech about how nice it would be to know these things in advance. Then I heard his next words.
“I’m going home this weekend.”
That stopped me short. Kirk was going home to Newton, Massachusetts. To visit his parents. Parents, I might add, I had yet to lay eyes on myself.
“When did you decide this?” I asked, a vague panic beginning to invade my rattled senses.
“Mmm…last week? Anyway, I just booked the ticket this morning. I was going to tell you….”
His voice faded away as my mind skittered over the facts: Kirk was going home for one of his semiannual trips, and he hadn’t invited me. Again. The memory of Josh’s taunting voice on my answering machine ran through my frazzled brain. While I was orgasming over wedding dresses, Kirk was planning a pilgrimage to the parental abode without me. Clearly I was not the woman who was about to pull the lid off this thing with Kirk. In fact,
