Quick Study (2 page)

The kettle whistled and she pulled away. “Just a sec.”

He frowned after her, confused by the mixed messages he was getting. Hot, shy, fast, slow. He still didn’t know her full name and was struggling to think clearly without any blood in his brain. For the first time since he’d been struck by the sight of her at the preschool, he wondered if he should get his head out of his pants and fix the code the guys in Sunnyvale were after him to finish. He had a mortgage now. Couldn’t just slack off because he worked from home. And the toys around the apartment reminded him what kind of fire he was messing with.

But before he could follow that thought to a respectable conclusion, she was back with two mismatched coffee mugs and heading for a sagging futon under the window. She sat down and smiled at him, balancing one mug on each knee until he joined her, no coffee table in sight, which made him wonder if they were actually going to have to drink the damn coffee before getting back to business.

“Thanks.” He brought the mug to his lips, prepared to scald his throat rather than risk too many minutes to get sensible.

She stared at him, then leaned down to set her untouched mug right on the carpet, never looking away. He raised his eyebrows, lowered the mug away from his mouth and handed it to her. She set it next to hers.

He was finding it difficult to breathe, gazing at all the naked woman flesh pinched by a black bra that was blissfully inadequate for such great breasts. They were heaving up and down under her own fast breathing, and any other thoughts about code, sisters, rugrats, or fathers disappeared when he dipped his head to lick the shadow of her nipple right through the fabric. The lace was scratchy under his tongue. He nibbled and sucked until she was sinking softly onto her back beneath him.

“Oh,” she gasped. “That’s nice.”

“I like being nice.” He dipped his head and took the next nipple in his mouth. It got hard under the lace, and he savored it, his heart pounding in his ears through the sound of wet sucking and the little groaning sounds in her throat.

Her fingers tunneled through his hair and gripped his skull, pulling him closer. He couldn’t remember ever being so turned on, so fast. Soon, he’d be inside her, so soon—

The phone rang. Just a brief distraction they both ignored. A distant chirp. He ran his hand over her belly and squeezed, kneaded the swell of her hip, dipped his fingertips under the waistband of her jeans and shoved his hand between her legs until his finger dipped into wet, hot girl. 

Then the machine picked up, a child’s voice on the recording, young and serious and unintelligible. Paul froze, his index finger sliding deeper, his teeth around the tip of her left nipple.

“Hey sweetheart,” a man’s voice crackled over the line. “You there? Jakey, little buddy? Dang it, I wanted to tell you in person. I’m coming home! Daddy’s coming home! They’re talking about adjusting to post-deployment, for real this time, can you believe. . .”

Paul had begun to pull away as soon as he realized who was talking, and by the time the man was crowing into the phone with obvious love and joy, Paul was on his feet and buttoning his jeans with shaking hands.

“Are you there?” the man went on. “Babe, I miss you so much—”

She was married. With a kid. And the dad was coming home, from war or whatever, he was a hero, a decent guy who didn’t deserve this. 

What kind of woman was she, to keep looking at him like she didn’t want to stop?

Through an ashamed, resentful, angry panic he remembered his jacket and stumbled over to it, forcing himself to look at Bonnie again. 

She didn’t look ashamed so much as embarrassed. “It’s not what you think,” she said, but didn’t get up to stop him. She crossed her arms over her chest.

By then he was already backing up into the hall. “Sorry. I can’t do this,” he said. “Thanks—” But that was lame, so he shut up, gave her a pathetic wave, and shut the door between them. His chest was heaving. His stomach wanted to.

Holy fuck. That was horrible. What had he almost done? Some poor guy was out serving their country and Paul the overcompensated computer geek had almost slept with his wife, whose full name he didn’t even know, with their little boy’s toy cars all over the carpet and—

His sister had just called him an aging adolescent that morning, and she was right. He hadn’t even considered who he might have been hurting, following his dick around like a GPS. Turn left. Turn right. Take this one all the way to the end.

Out on the crappy suburban street, the early morning haze was burning off, and he scowled at the January sky and strode up the street to his car, his body awash with adrenaline, lust, and self-loathing. 

At least it would be spring soon. The woman and her child wouldn’t be freezing to death in their own home—even California got cold at night, especially to a little kid. Hopefully by the time fall came around again the dad would be back home, helping out. If he could find work, if he hadn’t gotten PTSD from serving his country.

Shaking his head with disgust, he tossed his jacket onto the passenger seat next to him before zooming as fast as his Prius would take him out towards 680, away from her suburban gulag apartment building, past the mall and south out of Pleasant Hill to his cozy five-bedroom custom-built house in the hills of Lafayette. Spent a fortune on a castle, he should enjoy it. Alone. No more impoverished, vulnerable, lonely, married women with small children for him—let alone one belonging with a man risking his life overseas.

He knew a warning bell when he heard one. From now on he’d be a goddamn monk, even if it meant never leaving the house, and the only woman he’d touch would be carefully screened for husbands and children and poverty before he so much as shook her hand.

Just as he merged on the freeway, he smelled Bonnie's pussy on his fingers and nearly swerved into a hedge of oleander along the on-ramp.

Bonnie
pulled her t-shirt back on and sighed. Guess he wasn’t as shallow as he’d seemed. Her lips were swollen and her hair was falling in her face and she her teeth were chattering—from the sexual arousal, the come-down, and her neighbor’s unheated apartment. And she still wanted him.

Compiling her research was going to be harder than she expected.

She sighed and combed her wild hair with her fingers. That was nice for little Jake, having his dad come home. Hopefully for Shannon, too. Bonnie cleaned up the untouched coffee, barely able to focus on the cups she washed, then locked up and walked next door to her place. 

Her roommates wouldn’t have appreciated her having company over so early in the morning.

She should have told him, of course. But now she was too embarrassed, and maybe it would teach him a lesson. Until he’d been confronted with a very possible reality, he’d been willing, even eager, to tune out the implications of what he was doing. They were at a preschool, for God’s sake. He must have assumed she was the mother of one of those children—yet nothing was more important than the promise of quick sex.

At least when he did learn more, or thought he had, he’d made a run for it.

She half-smiled, half-groaned into her hands, imagining what he must have thought of her. Not that Shannon wouldn’t have deserved some action, working two jobs and supporting little Jake all by herself, her husband a serial philanderer, national hero or no. But Bonnie was supposed to be taking care of Jake for two days, not taking over his mother’s identity. She’d have to find that guy and explain or she’d never forgive herself.

She went over to her laptop, hands not quite steady, and tried to write down the events of the morning. Her roommates were still in bed, and she wanted to get it all down before she had to pretend nothing had happened.

“Day One,” she wrote. “Man One. Tall. Broad-shoulders, muscles, shaggy brown hair, probably used to women throwing themselves at him. Wealthy-looking hipster, black leather, silver stud in one ear, dark jeans. Probably over thirty. Didn’t know own nephew’s name. Good, really good, with tongue—”

Here she had to stop. Her nipples were hard again, remembering. She pressed her palms against her breasts and closed her eyes, forcing herself to notice with a clinical detachment the way her heart was pounding. 

She took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. She had to finish her degree. Even if a Master’s in Post-Modern Gender Dynamics would be useless in the job market, even detrimental, she was going to finish the damn degree and prove she wasn’t the self-indulgent, sentimental slacker her mother always said she was.

Back to her laptop. “Really good with tongue. Breast man. Nice ass, and didn’t recoil when partner (i.e., myself) expressed moment of sexual dominance by grabbing—”

She exhaled loudly and quickly hit save. Maybe she’d start tomorrow with another guy, one from a bar, where no confusion or deceit could conceivably cloud the results of her experiment. Yes, that would be much better. This morning was a blip, an unexpected rough draft she’d delete from her brain. A trial run. Off the record.

Setting the laptop aside, the damp cups of her bra rubbed against her tender nipples and her body flooded with heat. Her body knew she was a liar. Bodies never forget a skilled touch.

“Damn,” Bonnie said, and went to the bathroom to strip off the bra and wash away as much of Uncle Paul as soap and scalding water could manage. 

And resist the urge to release the pressure with her Water Pik. She needed as much carnal tension as possible to brave a shot at Man Two. Whoever he might be.

Chapter 3

P
aul lasted two days
before he had to ask his sister about her.

“But Jakey’s mom had to go out of town for her job,” Mary said over the phone one afternoon, distracted as usual by children screaming and laughing in the background. “She was begging with the teacher to take him every day for the rest of the week and her neighbor would watch him at night. From her building. A graduate student or something. But they needed somebody on Wednesdays to drop out so he could drop in, because they have licensing laws about class ratios—”

Paul was too busy feeling a rush of optimistic lust flooding his body to listen to the rest of it.

A neighbor.

Before his smart sister could figure out—or have time to grill him—why he’d asked about a woman at her son’s preschool, he abruptly ended the call and ran across his ornately tiled bathroom to shower a second time. And shave. With the good-smelling stuff. Ten minutes later, in a fresh shirt and jeans fresh from the dryer, Paul sent an email off to his team excusing himself for the rest of the day, then ran out the mud room door to his car parked under the porte cochere thing his real estate agent had creamed over.

Fingers on the wheel, he realized he couldn’t just rush over and start up where they’d left off. As much as he really, really wanted to. He’d thought of nothing else for two days, from the lurid daydreams reliving the slick heat of her body, then descending into obscene nightmares at night where she strapped him to a bed with bungee cords and tormented him until his balls were so blue he turned into a Smurf.

A neighbor. No wonder she hadn’t been ashamed. She had no reason to be.

He hadn’t given her a chance to explain.

She’d tried come off as fearless, but he remembered the flashes of shyness, which only made him want her more, now that he suspected she was just a helpful neighbor with nothing but her own, reasonable needs. And no husband or little kid to worry about.

Breaking several traffic laws, Paul drove down the secluded hills out of his neighborhood to the flat, concrete ugliness of hers. He parked outside the squat apartment building but didn’t get out of his car. What was he going to say? How would he get in to talk to her?

Checking his teeth in the mirror, his breath on his hand, then pressing his palm against the fly of his jeans, Paul reminded himself to find more about her this time before they took it too far.

He had to ring seven of the buttons at the front gate before he found hers.

“Hello?” she asked through the speaker—
her
voice, finally, distorted but recognizable.

His heart leaped. “Bonnie? It’s me. Paul. Can we talk?”

Silence. Then, “Who?”

He didn’t believe her. “We can go out for coffee. For real this time.”

The speaker crackled, then was quiet. Paul stood there, gazing at his own reflection in the glass of the entry door past the battered security gate, wondering if he was a handsome guy. 

He thought he might be, but after spending the first thirty years of his life staring at a computer monitor snorting Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, peanut M ‘n’ M’s, and Gatorade, his self-image was that of a larger, paler, geekier version of himself. Paul 2.0 might look like hot shit, and his sister and surprised coworkers said he did, but he wasn’t always convinced. Past the piercings and Haight Street haircut, he glimpsed the guy he used to be.

His confused reflection swung away to reveal Bonnie standing in the doorway in a tight white t-shirt and low-slung jeans, her wavy hair down about her shoulders in a dark, messy cloud that made his breath catch.

“Thanks for coming out,” he said.

She nodded but didn’t open the security gate. “Listen, I needed to explain—”

“You don’t have to. My sister told me. You’re the boy’s neighbor.”

She paused, mouth slightly open, and then nodded again. “I tried to tell you—” She glanced down. “Well. OK, then. Bye.” She started to turn.

“Wait!” Paul pressed his palms against the grate. “Hold on.”

She shook her head, took a step back.

He sensed her nerves, but she was lingering, waiting for him to reassure her. “Just coffee. Please.”

She bit her lip. “I don’t think so.”

“But why?” He let his forehead bump against the gate and gave her the most charming lopsided grin he had. “Look, I’m really sorry I ran out like that. I should have given you a chance to explain.” He hoped he didn’t sound desperate, but he really liked her. He stepped away from the gate and struck an unaggressive pose, fingers stuck into the tight front pockets of his jeans. “Please let me buy you that coffee. One cup. Just to clear the air.”