Collide Into You: A Romantic Gender Swap Love Story (10 page)

You’re attracted to him
, Keira.
 

No, I’m not.

It’s not lost on me that I’m talking to myself
and
that I just won a bowling game in a refurbished juvenile mental ward. I don’t see how it could get worse.

“Thanks for joining us tonight,” Julia says. She sounds genuine. It takes me a second to realize we’re just outside Dillan’s apartment building. It is almost eleven. Time to go. “Before you go, I need you to look directly into this pen-like object so we can wipe your memories.” She holds up a regular pen and laughs.
 

It actually wouldn’t surprise me if she had something like that. I don’t work much with the FBI since their focus is mostly centered on domestic issues while my specialty is in security intelligence. But the government has cool toys.

“I had a great time,” I tell her, yawning. She hands me a business card. Julia Fenske, Field Agent.

“Me, too,” Dillan says, leaning forward.

We say our good-nights, leave the minivan while no one really listens as Nebraska talks about ideas for
next time
, and enter the apartment building.

“I have a feeling that whatever the
next time
event is, it might be highly illegal,” Dillan jokes. We’re the only ones in the elevator going up. I look straight ahead, but I smile at his statement. “You’re quiet,” he says. “What, no gloating over your win?”

“For the record, I never gloat. Plus, there really wasn’t much at stake, was there? I don’t see the need to gloat over winning a trivial bet.”

He turns his entire body to face me.
 

I automatically look at him. One eyebrow is raised in a questioning
I totally don’t believe you
manner. His jaw is dark with stubble. His light green eyes search mine for a quick moment.
 

“Okay, then. If it was so trivial, I suppose you don’t want to know what Stacey meant.” The elevator dings and we get out.

“I already know what it means,” I say.
 

The lipstick message said:
I loved it when you put it there.
I mean, there’s only so many places a man can put
it
. And putting it
there
is never going to happen with me. Dillan unlocks the door and secures it after we enter the apartment.

His keys jingle as he places them in the ceramic bowl on top of the narrow half-moon table near the door.
 

Standing there and staring at him will never do, so I move to the fridge to take out a bottle of water. I do a double take after looking again at the fridge’s contents. It’s full of food. And not just bachelor condiments and the obligatory lonely onion.
 

“So tell me what her message means,” he says as I inspect the fridge.

Chicken thaws in a bottom shelf, three types of peppers decorate an internal drawer, and some sort of marinara with chunky herbs and spices sits on a higher self, next to eggs, yogurt, cubed cheese, and a pale yellow ball of dough. Granted, one of the shelves is full of uniquely labeled beer. Even I appreciate a good beer.

For an intelligence analyst, I am a bit slow on figuring out Dillan enjoys cooking. I suppose I didn’t put two and two together until now.

Dillan — I can’t wait to taste you again. I loved it when you put it there. xoxo Stacey

She wasn’t referring to sex at all. Stacey was talking about his cooking. His food.

“The bet was that you had to tell me, not that I would tell you what I think it means,” I clarify, closing the fridge.
 

I finish the bottle of water and place it in the small recycling bin under the sink.

I lean against the island that separates the kitchen from the living and dining areas. He leans opposite me. Dillan’s eyes are a bit bloodshot. He drank at least twice as much beer as I did.

“A bet is a bet.” His voice is husky and I imagine that this is how he sounds when he wakes up in the morning. His bedroom voice. I clear my throat to dislodge the stupid, betraying thought. It was doing things to me, like allowing me to imagine myself lying next to him, hearing him talk like that to me.

It felt too…intimate.

Remember, Keira, you really, really,
really
don’t like this guy. Beer and victory made a silly goose out of me.

A couple of minutes go by.
 

“I don’t have all day.” My words are laced with impatience. Good, let him see that I find him irritating. But my impatience doesn’t appear to have an effect on him.

“Before you moved in Saturday night, I spent a good portion of the day making tiramisu. Stacey enjoyed it Saturday night.”

That is way too easy of an answer. I know there is more.

“But she wrote
tasted you
and
when you put it there
. I don’t see the connection.” My cheeks flushed after repeating her red-hued words. I’m not a prude, but I suppose I wasn’t above asking embarrassing questions to get the answer.

Dillan grins. “I had hopes that you might say those exact parts.”

“Don’t be a dick. Just answer the question so I can go to bed.”

“Retract the fangs, Sergeant,” he says with a highly false chuckle. He didn’t like being called a dick. “Stacey enjoyed it because we ate the tiramisu off of each other.” He leans in closer. The grin is gone. It’s replaced with something else. Hunger. Just because another woman found him sexy enough to eat food off him didn’t mean I would, too. “It got pretty messy and…sticky. I spent at least an hour licking sweetness off of her.” He pauses. “Including
there
. Especially
there
.”

There is nothing logical to say to that.
 

It’s…crazy.
 

It’s…doing funny things to my stomach.
Lustful
things to my brain.
 

Snap out of it
,
Keira.
He’s talking about things he’s done with another woman. There is no earthly reason why you should want him to do the same thing to you.
 

“Look at the time,” I blurt out. “I don’t want to make you late for your STD appointment in the morning.” I stop at my bedroom doorway.

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?” I turn around fast.

“Judgmental,” he says with a sigh. “I would never judge you, Keira. I happen to like sex with women who also like to have sex. It’s not a big deal. I don’t cheat. I’m safe. And I worship the ground they walk on when I’m with them. No one gets hurt. None of the women I date are interested in long-term relationships. I’m not out there breaking hearts. But here’s a question.” He pauses again. “Why does any of this matter to you?”

His face changes expression. From defiance to concern. He thinks someone like him broke my heart.
 

But he’s dead wrong.
 

I never let them get close enough to break my heart. I’ve never been in love and I certainly don’t plan on falling head over heels for him or anyone else.

Before he can question me about broken hearts and past boyfriends, I say, “You’re right. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just tired.” He looks at me like he doesn’t believe me. I nearly close the bedroom door, ready for the conversation to be over, when I add, “I didn’t mean to seem judgmental, but…”

But you challenge what I know and make me want to come out of my own skin. Like maybe there’s a part of you that only needs to bring it out in me.
 

“But what?” he asks when I don’t say more.

“Use a tarp next time. The cleanup will be easier.”

He continues to laugh long after I close the bedroom door.

Dillan

F
OR
THE
AMOUNT
OF
TIME
Keira inspected the inside of my fridge—grabbing a bottle of water takes, what, five milliseconds?—I knew she figured out what Stacey meant. Well, she figured out that the gist of it involved food.

Keira’s face whet from pale to pink to blushing red. But not the type of blushing I would have liked, which is the
you turn me on, please rip my clothes off
, blushing red. Nope. Hers was the
I can’t believe I just repeated those words
and, as orderly as Keira was, the tarp suggestion was funny. And valid.

All that licking made my taste buds numb for two days straight. I’ll never look at, or eat, tiramisu in the same away again.

Originally, I wanted to leave the answer vague, plain, and utterly boring. I made food. We ate it. There. End of story. But, no. She had to have an exact answer to Stacey’s lipstick statement. It’s her own fault for getting angry.

There’s a bit of rustling inside Keira’s bedroom and I wonder if she’s throwing her stuff back inside that hideous duffle bag, ready to leave. Doubtful. Keira isn’t the spiteful type. She is stuffy, professional, and very proper. Besides, it was nearly midnight and she has nowhere to go. In the morning, she’ll go back to ignoring me. I should do the same. I should stop egging her on.

I tidy the kitchen and go into my room. As I strip down to my boxers, I forget that my bedroom door is open—I’m not fully used to the idea of having a female roommate—and spot Keira standing in the dark living room, staring at me. Her hair is pulled up in a high ponytail and her caramel-colored skin practically glows against a white tank top and billowy white shorts that may or may not be underwear. I’m hoping for underwear, but Keira would never leave her bedroom unless fully attired.

“I was heading to the bathroom,” she mutters. I can totally hear the horror in her voice. She wants to make sure I know that she didn’t come out here to watch a peep show.

I let out a short laugh. “You saw worse when you moved in.” I was fully naked when she moved in. “Well,” I clarify. “I wouldn’t call it
worse
.”

“No, you were right the first time,” she says. Ouch. Miss Bee has a stinger. Her mouth is grim. “While I’m out here,” she continues, “I might as well tell you that our living arrangement isn’t going to work out. Give me a week or two to figure something out. Thanks for allowing me to stay here. I know you did it because Jon asked for a favor. But our personalities don’t mix and I don’t need the added stress of wondering if I’m going to find my roommate in various stages of nudity or tangled up with another woman. Bedrooms have doors for a reason.”

I go from being amused and high on life to feeling about two feet tall.

She doesn’t let me respond. Immediately, she goes into the bathroom, does her thing, and quickly retreats back into her bedroom. I hear the soft click of the latch, and when I hear her push in the lock on the doorknob, I fume a bit. Does she honestly think that I’m going to barge into her room without her permission?

Okay, this morning when I looked at her uniforms didn’t count. She wasn’t in there and my first motive was to make sure she was okay if she was. Curiosity, naturally, was my second motive.

Reaching out, I close my bedroom door—I lock it to spite her—and flick on the television. I barely register what’s on the channel. But it’s noise. I kick the boxers into my dirty clothes pile, turn off the light, and get into bed.
 

I lay there for a while, trying to figure out exactly where I went wrong in my approach with Keira. Truth is, it started out wrong. From the exact moment she entered the door Saturday night, to tonight, when, as I was trying to be truthful with her, it all backfired in my face.
 

Face it
,
Dillan,
Keira isn’t your type, and you two are not compatible
.
 

She’s in a completely different world than me. Other than an Air Force captain I dated a couple of years ago, I know next to nothing about women in the military. There’s no reason to start now. Obviously, Keira built up her own set of roadblocks and there is nothing I can do about it.
 

It still stung that she’d rather move out than deal with me. I’m not exactly a monster. I’ve never heard of a case where someone flirted with someone to death. But what a way to go.
Cause of death, doctor? A sudden case of Overflirtacitius, nurse.

It takes me a while before I fall asleep because, deep in my gut, I have a feeling things with Keira are going to go from bad to worse.

Keira

T
HE
NEXT
TIME
I
SEE
Dillan for more than ten seconds is at Tanner’s baseball game on Friday night. For the last three days, he has avoided me like the plague. And I don’t blame him. I told him to back off, and he backed off.

There is zero reason for my disappointment. He did exactly as I asked him to. He even went as far as leaving
The Washington Post’s
Apartments for Rent section out for me yesterday.

Part of me wanted a fight. No, that’s not right. I want someone to fight
for
me. It sounds lame even to my own ears. Wanting Dillan to fight for me is like asking the ocean to completely evaporate. Impossible. Dillan won’t change his stripes for anyone.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I immerse myself in General MacWilliams’ office. I read the letters and take notes. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The first hundred letters or so—the original letter and its subsequent response—from 1955 and 1956 are nothing special. They read perfunctory.
 

Topics included the weather, current events, and books. At first, I wondered if the letters were really about something else. Weather meant war. Current events of the day described classified information. Books might have been something about politics. But I could never find a pattern. They weren’t like lyrics, where the words by themselves could be interpreted innocently or, as intended by the singer, not so innocently.

For the most part, these two individuals seemed to truly only want to discuss surface topics—polite pen pal letters that no one would think twice about.

And, as 1956’s letters came to a close, I felt that the woman, Greta Weber, was warming up toward the Army Officer, Major William Hall. She had begun signing her letters,
Warmly Yours, Greta
.