Release (5 page)

“So you don’t eat this
early?” he asks.

“I tend to drag myself out
of bed as late as I possibly can, as close to the start of class as possible,
and power up on something light. Then I eat again immediately after. I’m not
really an early bird. If you don’t eat this early, either, why did you suggest
breakfast?”

The right side of his
tempting mouth tilts up. “Would you have said yes to anything else?”

I’m startled by his
response. “Clever you,” I say, unafraid to show suspicion in my tone. There’s
even a little unintended narrowing of my eyes to go with it.

He had no shame in admitting
that. Though, he’s right, I wouldn’t have met him for some night time thing
involving alcohol and a dimly lit, intimate booth where there’d be the
temptation of passionate kissing between his gorgeous lips and mine along with
fondling hands and an overpowering desire for more.

I feel annoyed that his
tactic worked. I feel like an idiot for being here.

Dane puts the menus back in
the plastic holder. “Does that add to the opinion you’re forming of me,” he
asks, both his tone and his expression serious. For whatever reason, he means
business.

I have no idea what this man
is up to.

“Because I’m here it doesn’t
mean I think I should be. Actually, I don’t think I should be. What does it
even matter what I think of you? We both know you don’t have to work very hard
for female submission, so why are you bothering with me? I don’t just fuck.” A
harsh word over breakfast – or early morning coffee – but my voice was firm and
I wanted words with impact.

As I lean back, I notice
Lexi serving at the table behind Dane. With a smile, she winks at me. I smile
back and resist the urge to punch the air and shout, “Girl Power!” That would
be over the top and it’s really not my style. I just want Dane to realize where
I’m coming from, because I’d rather have my extra sleep than waste time on a
man whose sole focus is on boosting his ego. I should probably watch the level
of my voice.

“Female submission,” he
says, delaying the words, like he’s tasting them. Slowly licking them. I try to
ignore how sexy it sounded. His gaze pierces mine. “Nice choice of words.”

Now he’s grinning. The
bastard.

Impact of the wrong flipping
kind.

Brooklyn looks pissed and it makes me want to laugh. I
like her. I could say something to smooth things over, or I can leave it and
keep her pissed at me. It’s entertaining and it’s hot.

No need to contemplate. I’m
going for what I want to know the most right now. “So how does a guy get you to
submit?” I mean what I’m asking. The look on Brooklyn’s face says she knows it.
Her cheeks are even painted a light shade of pink.

“That you’ll have to figure
out for yourself,” she says with a whole lot of determination. “One thing I
will say is if all you want from me is sex then you’re wasting your time. You
may as well give up now.”

I love the edge in her pretty
moss green eyes, she means every word. She doesn’t realize that not only do I
already know that, but it only makes me want her more.

The hesitance I pick up in
her gaze and the fact that I don’t think these loose-fitting clothes are
without purpose are just as effective as if she were sitting here with ‘Do Not
Touch’ signs plastered all over her. If she was the type of woman who
just
fucks
, we wouldn’t be sitting in a cafe at seven-twenty in the morning.
She’d be in my damn bed.

“I could ask what you do,”
she says, “and act like I don’t know, but I do. Is that your shop over there?”
She looks across the street at my workplace.

“It is. What else has Kayla
told you about me?” I probably already know the answer.

“I don’t want you to be
angry with her. She’s a good friend and just looking out for me, it’s nothing
personal.”  

 “Angry? I rarely get
angry and never over something like this. I don’t have a problem with Kayla.
You’re her girl, I get that, but I think it’s only fair that I know what
opinion you have of me, an opinion based
only
on what you’ve been told.”

“I suppose. Basically, what
I’ve been told makes you the kind of man I avoid. In a nutshell, you get
around.”

“So why are you here then?”
I asked that sounding mildly interested, but I am genuinely intrigued. I could
see she meant it when she said she’d usually avoid a
man like me
.

“I’m curious and being here
is the only way for me to cure that. You were right in thinking I wouldn’t have
said yes to anything else, though.” Her brows pull tight, as if in
concentration. “I probably should’ve said no to this as well, and saved us both
wasting our time.”

“You know,” I lean in closer
from my side of the table, “I probably would’ve pursued the shit out of you, if
you had. You being curious means you’d have said yes at some point. We’re just
doing this sooner rather than later.”

Silently, she stares at me.
“Maybe. So what opinion would you like me to have of you, Dane?”

“I’d really like you to come
up with that yourself.”

“Fair enough. At least tell
me why you approached me.”

“Because I want you.”

“What do you want from me?”
Her expression is like an unspoken challenge, which I’ll gladly take. I was
trying to keep this respectable, given the time and place.

“I wanna fuck you, Brooklyn.
I’d take you home with me right now if you’d let me, but I know that’s not
happening. Get to know me. Form your opinion of me. See where things go from
there. You may be surprised to hear this, but I do actually want to get to know
you. If I didn’t, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

She sits back. “Okaaay,” she
says, at a whisper to herself. “Can’t hold your honesty against you.”

“I’m not gonna bullshit you,
Brooklyn.”

“Good, I’d rather you didn’t
bullshit me, Dane.” Her smile is hesitant at first, but broadens.

I lean back in my seat.
“Tell me about your dance career. I didn’t watch the TV show you were on, so I
know little more than your name.”

Her right brow arches. “Not
your idea of fun?”

I chuckle at her. “No, but
don’t be offended. I don’t even watch American Idol.”

Smiling, she sips her
coffee. “Each to their own. My mum took me to a Jazz class when I was six. I
loved it and wanted more. I met my best friend, Leona, there as well. She’s the
girl who was with Kayla and me yesterday, and Saturday in the bar. After a
couple of years I started entering competitions and some of them led to offers
for small theater productions. After finishing my BA in contemporary dance I
got a few parts in West End plays, as a backup dancer, and I did a UK tour with
a Motown musical for six months. Then, in 2008, I got a place on
All about
the Dance
.”

“You got injured during the
show, right?”

“Yeah, I tore my Achilles in
my right ankle.”

“I had the onset of Achilles
tendonitis once, and that was bad. Yours tore? Shit.”

“It was brutal. Had to have
surgery and was out of action for six months. I’m still glad I did the show; it
was stressful and hard work, but it was an amazing experience. No regrets
there.”

“Your ankle’s okay now.
Watching you perform, I wouldn’t even know you got injured without being told.”
She’s fucking sensational on stage.

“My tendons can get stiff
from time-to-time, but stiffness and aches are the norm for dancers, so there’s
no getting away from some form of discomfort. One thing a dancer doesn’t
require is the weather report – if it’s cold, our joints will tell us.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that. How
did you meet Kayla? She wasn’t on the show, was she?”

“No. Around that time,
before the auditions started, I came here for a weekend with Leona. We met
Kayla in a nightclub, of all places. We stayed in contact and late last year
she offered us the opportunity to be in
Release
. I didn’t even have to
think about it.”

“This isn’t your first time
in San Francisco?”

“No.”

“You like it here?”

“Yeah, I do. The weather’s
mostly shit, but it is in the UK as well, so I’m fine with that, though it’s
more unpredictable here. I’m also used to city life, so in some ways it doesn’t
feel completely different. I love the hills and the character of the houses and
things like that. The street art is wicked – a good wicked, by the way. The
language barrier is the biggest thing. Sometimes when I’m having conversations
with Kayla or Ella, or the other dancers, they don’t get me. Vocab-wise it
seems for everything that’s the same, there’s something that’s different.
There’s more to it than cell phones versus mobile phones and trash cans versus
bins, and that’s without the differences in spelling and pronunciation.”

“I like your accent,” I say.

It’s the way her soft tone
works with her words, the clarity and refined articulation. I don’t personally
know anyone from the UK, but I’ve heard tourists from there speak and I’ve even
spent time with British chicks over the years. Though I meant it when I dropped
the “I like your accent” line, it was more about it being the perfect
icebreaker. I didn’t feel this type of appreciation for it.

Maybe it’s more about
Brooklyn than her nationality. I guess that means I like
her
voice.

“I get told that a lot
here.”

My lips curve with humor.
“So I’m no different to all those other annoying Americans you’ve encountered?”

“No, not really,” she says,
scrunching her nose in a way that appears playful.

“How long does the show run
for?”

“Four weeks.”

“Every night?”

“Thursday through Saturday.”

“Then what after that?”

“We’ll be touring with
Release
,
but I’ll be based mainly here. I teach Pilates as well, and Kayla and Ella want
me to do some classes at their studio. There’s quite a bit of demand for
one-to-one sessions as well. I’m not sure how long Leona and I will stay for.
Our visas last three years – it’s likely we’ll do the whole time, but we
haven’t decided for definite.”

“That’s quite some time
you’ll be away from home and your family, do you miss them?”

“Like crazy. My mum, my
brother and his girlfriend are coming for the final show and staying for a
week, so I have that to look forward to. Are you close to your family?”

“You might’ve met my sister,
Saffron. She’s tight with Ella, so you probably will if you haven’t already.”

“Kayla introduced us on
Saturday. I can see the resemblance. Different eyes, though. Do either of your
parents have the same color eyes as you?”

“No. Some throwback gene
thing, I guess.”

“Not a terrible throwback
gene thing,” she says and quickly draws her attention away from me and down to
her mug, cupped in her hands.

She obviously doesn’t want
to show any interest in me. If she wasn’t even slightly interested she wouldn’t
be here, so I can live without anything blatant right now. I find it hard not
to complement her, every time I look at her I want to, but I know she needs to
trust me for those complements to carry any weight.

She meets my gaze. “So you
and saffron are close? I love her name, by the way.”

“Yeah, we are. We lost our parents
in a car accident when I was nine and Saff was eight. My sister and her two
year old son are my only blood, but we have others who are our family also.”

Her brow furrows. “I didn’t
realize,” she says, quietly.

I smile to ease her. “Why
would you know something like that? You’ve only been told the stuff that’s
common knowledge and relevant to you.”

“Where you’re from is
relevant ... to me it is, anyway.” The coffee receives all of her focus, for
the second time, so I wait until she looks at me before responding to that.

“Would knowing something
like that add substance to your opinion of me?”

Her stare hardens, showing
all that determination, and fucking hell it’s hot. “I don’t appreciate you
challenging me like that.”

I smile again, unable to
stop myself. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t look at me like that.”

She flops against the back
of her seat, kind of sloppy for someone who sits as upright as she was a second
ago. “You are proper confusing me right now.”

“Confusing you?”

“You said it yourself; I
only know what I’ve been told about you. The whole point of this is to get to
know you and form my own opinion. To do that I have to ask you things, and of
course those things should add substance. For me they need to. Regarding your
problem with the way I look at you, there isn’t much I can do about it since I
can’t see my own face.” She sighs, peering out the window. “This was such a bad
fucking idea.”

Now she seems angry with
herself, and I feel shitty for getting her all confused like that.

I lean forward, to get
closer. “When the topic of my family came up, you looked uncomfortable. I was
just trying to ease that, so yes I challenged you, just as you have been me,
but I’m not playing games here. I told you already, no bullshit. As for the way
you looked at me, you didn’t do anything wrong. If you wanted to make me hard
then you did everything right, but since you’re not the type of woman who
just fucks,
and I have to be at work soon it’s kind of a waste, don’t you
think?”

A moment of stunned laughter
sounds from her. “How the heck did we switch from the topic of family to
erections as quickly as that?”

It’s obviously a
hypothetical question, so I don’t respond to it.  

Sipping her coffee, Brooklyn
frowns and complains to herself that it’s not warm enough. Raising her hand, at
the same time straightening her spine, she waves to the waitress and, when
served, nicely asks if it’s possible to have the coffee put in the microwave
for twenty seconds.

“Well, at least I got to hear
you laugh, even if it was brief,” I say before taking a drink of my own now
cooler beverage.

“That could be taken to mean
you think I’m miserable. Either that or you really are happy to hear me
chuckle. You have nice teeth, by the way,” she says, her gaze trained on my
full grin. Her right brow arches, and we’re back to confident, playful
Brooklyn.

She really shouldn’t look at
me like that, either. It’s got me wanting to charge across this table and
pounce on her like some crazed predatory cat ready to fucking mate.

“You’re not miserable.
You’ve smiled a lot, even if those smiles at times have been hesitant, but you
haven’t laughed. I do like it.” We haven’t exactly discussed anything funny.

 “I laugh a lot,
usually. I’m sure after a while I’d get on your nerves with it. My friends
often tell me to shut up. I can be a bit loud sometimes.”

“Get on my nerves, huh? I
doubt it.” I’m damn serious about that.  

“We’ll see.” She’s hitting
me back with the same certain eye contact I’m giving.

“I hope we will.”

In silence, we stare at each
other. And there it is, the pale pink color infusing with the light olive tone
of her cheeks. Hell, I even find that hot, what is it with this woman? I’ve had
at least a semi hard-on for most of the time I’ve been sat here.