Wilder shuffled across the room naked as the day he was born, like it was his preferred state, and stood before me.
“I promise you, I’m incapable of falling in love with anyone,” he said, a hint of sadness flickering in his eyes. “You have nothing to worry about.”
“What a relief,” I said, forcing a smile and hating the fact that I wanted to know more. I wanted to know who had hurt him as bad as Kyle had hurt me.
“Let’s just be who we are,” he said. “You don’t have to be so guarded. We’re on the same page, you and me. Cut from the same cloth.”
He reached for the curled ends of my silken hair, twisting a strand around his fingers before letting it fall.
“Just don’t feel like you need to rush out every time I fuck you,” he said. “You can stay for a minute. Take your time getting dressed. Tell me how shitty your day was until you came to see me.”
I hung my head. He had a point.
“You kind of make me feel cheap,” he teased. “I’m insulted.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never been in my shoes before,” I said.
He ran his fingers across his lips as if to zip them and twisted them at the corner, locking the secret away.
“I’ll never tell,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not as big of a man whore as you think I am.”
I fished around in my purse and pulled out my phone. “I better call for a cab now. I really need to get going.”
“See you next Friday, lovely.”
She was perfect. Abso-fucking-lutely perfect. Her ripe ass. Her perky breasts. The way she didn’t expect me to send her flowers after an amazing night of sex. The way she didn’t turn into an emotional ball of mush after I fucked her. She didn’t need to cuddle or be reassured that everything was cool with us. She didn’t cry or get weird or all sentimental.
She let me dominate her naked, beautiful body, giving herself to me as we both enjoyed the hell out of ourselves.
I’d been looking for someone like her for years. No muss, no fuss. No commitment. No expectations. No reverse psychology mindfuck bullshit.
I was supposed to be able to fuck her sideways and not think about her again until the next week. I was supposed to go about my days like a man who got laid on a regular basis and didn’t give a fuck about where his next lay was going to come from because he already knew.
But it didn’t happen like that. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The taste of her cherry lips. The scent of her rose perfume. The way her alabaster skin felt under my palms.
I sat in my office chair Monday morning, my body aching with a restlessness that stemmed from the fact that my thoughts didn’t make sense. I picked up my phone and called her.
“You’re not supposed to call me when I’m working,” she answered. “Did I leave something at the hotel?”
“Meet me again,” I said. “Lunch. I can get another hotel room.”
“Can’t. I’m meeting my sister for lunch.”
“Cancel.”
“She’d kill me. I never cancel on her.”
“Tonight,” I said. “After work.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked with a hint of amusement in her tone. “You’re not supposed to do this. We talked about this, remember? Once a week. One hour.”
“I may have agreed to those terms and conditions, but my cock didn’t sign off on it,” I argued. “And I don’t know if that exquisite pussy of yours did, either.”
“Wilder,” she shushed me. “I’m. At. Work.”
“So tonight, then?”
“I have a to-do list a mile long,” she countered. “I don’t have time to run up to Midtown and—”
“Then I’ll come to you.”
“Maybe I don’t want you knowing where I live.”
“Then you come to me.”
“You’re not giving up, are you?”
“Never.”
“I really do have things to do tonight.” Her voice trailed as her defense faded. I could only hope she was thinking about my cock and the things it could do. “You can come over. One hour. Eight o’clock. You have to be gone by nine.”
She rattled off her address and hung up.
Funny. We both lived in SoHo all this time.
* * *
That night, I knocked on a pristine, white door with APT 3B in gold lettering above the peephole.
“You’re early,” she said as soon as she answered.
I glanced at my watch. “Maybe ten minutes.”
She stood between the door and the frame, looking me up and down. I got the feeling she didn’t have a lot of people over. Shit. She probably didn’t let a lot of people into her world.
“If I let you in,” she said, her blue eyes softening with a thin veil of vulnerability, “just please don’t break anything, okay?”
I got the feeling she wasn’t talking about things. Not entirely, anyway. I stepped past her.
“Is this Heaven?” Everything was white or cream or some variation thereof. I was quite certain I was standing in the middle of the most immaculately unspoiled apartment in all of lower Manhattan.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Does anyone even live here?” There wasn’t a speck of dust to be found. I slipped my shoes off. “This looks like a model unit. You can’t possibly live here.”