“I hope that thingamabob of yours has a bottle opener on it,” I noted, finding that the beer bottles didn’t have twist-off tops.
“What kind of boy scout would I be if it didn’t?” he asked, flipping the Swiss army knife around to reveal a bottle opener.
“I guess not the kind that won’t admit he was a boy scout,” I teased.
“This is your game,” he reminded me. “I’m just a mere player.”
“I’m not surprised,” I murmured. Guys who looked like that always were.
Emerson gave me a look, but didn’t respond to my comment. Instead he gave me another once-over, but this time, I could sense that he was looking for answers to questions he hadn’t even asked yet.
“Let me guess,” he said, cocking his head. “You do something important. High-powered.”
“I thought we weren’t sharing personal details,” I said, uncapping a bottle of beer.
I peered at the label—I didn’t recognize it, but it looked like some fancy small-batch brewery. Something a beer snob might drink. That surprised me. From the look of Emerson, I would have taken him for a Budweiser kind of guy. Simple and easy.
“I think we should play another game,” Emerson suggested.
“But truth or dare was your idea,” I reminded him.
“This game will be more fun,” he told me. “Trust me.”
I had no reason to trust him. None at all. He was a complete stranger. Yet, when he smiled at me like that, I couldn’t help it.
“OK,” I said. “What’s this alternative game?”
“I tell you what kind of person you are.” He opened his own bottle of beer. “Just by looking at you. And you tell me if I’m right or if I’m wrong.”
“Hmm.” I took a drink of beer. “And what do I get if you’re wrong?”
His gaze went hot. “What do you want?”
Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?
“I’ll take your beef jerky,” I said, chickening out of anything more suggestive.
“Deal,” Emerson said, and we shook on it.
He gave me a gleeful look as he rubbed his hands together. “OK,” he said. “So you work in a high-powered position.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s a very vague statement,” I told him. “Don’t expect to get any hints that way.”
He grinned. “Fair enough,” he said, crossing his arms. “Well, from the way you’re dressed, I can tell that you don’t work from home.”
“True.” I scooped out a spoonful of ice cream and licked at it.
“I’m guessing you work in an office with a strict dress code,” he observed.
“Also true,” I responded.
“You’re not an assistant,” he told me.
“No?”
“No.” He shook his head. “You’re dressed like someone in charge.” He paused. “Or someone who wants to be.
I’m right, aren’t I?” he asked, looking pleased with himself.
“Maybe,” I admitted.
“So you want to be in charge, then?”
I shrugged, feeling self-conscious.
“I bet you’re great at what you do,” he said.
I let out a laugh, and it was a little harsher than I intended.
“I feel like I’m in over my head ninety percent of the time,” I confessed.
I wasn’t sure why I did. I hadn’t told anyone that I felt that way—not even Kelsey. It had always been important for me to project complete confidence, even when I didn’t feel it, so why was I telling a complete stranger that I wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing?
“I feel that way all the time,” Emerson admitted.
I looked at him, surprised. Everything about him screamed confidence. How could he feel the way that I did? How could he doubt himself?
“It’s not easy being in charge,” he told me. “There’s a reason people say fake it until you make it.”
“I guess so,” I said. “I guess I’m just waiting to make it.”
“I have no doubt that you will,” he offered.
I laughed, not as harshly this time. “You barely know me,” I reminded him. “I could suck at my job.”
“I know enough,” he said. “I know you’ve got excellent taste in snacks—especially in ice cream. I know you don’t panic in unexpected situations. I know you take pride in your appearance and yourself. I know you’re creative and clever.”
With every word, I felt my blush grow stronger and stronger. It didn’t help that Emerson was watching me the whole time, his eyes focused and intense.
“And I also know that you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been trapped in an ATM with,” he finished.
My breath left me for a moment. We were sitting close together. I hadn’t even noticed us getting close, hadn’t even noticed how his thigh was now pressed up against mine, his arm against mine.
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” I somehow managed.
He shook his head, his eyes dark in the shadows. “Just you.”
I knew right then that he was going to kiss me.
And I wanted it bad.
Emerson put a hand on my face, his thumb stroking the underside of my jaw. The sensation made me shiver. He tilted my face up towards his, and then lowered his head. His lips touched mine softly at first, but we were perfectly aligned. He moved slowly, languidly, his touch light enough that I could move away at any moment, but his kiss confident enough that I couldn’t have moved even if wild zombies were dragging me away.
He kissed me, his tongue dragging across my bottom lip, making me gasp, giving him access. Immediately, the kiss changed. It went from soft and slow to hot and hard. His hand slid from my jaw to the back of my head, making a mess of the tight bun I always wore at the base of my neck. Somehow he managed to unpin it without pulling away from me and I felt my hair come undone and tumble down my back. He let out an approving groan and thrust his fingers into my hair, angling my mouth so he could deepen the kiss more.
I gripped his shirt, not wanting to let go. Our tongues tangled and he tasted like chocolate and beer. I couldn’t get enough. My entire body tingled from just one kiss, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to have more.
Suddenly, I heard a humming noise and a bright light exploded from behind my closed eyelids. Confused, I pulled back, blinking against the unexpected glow. It took a few moments, but I realized that the power had come back on. And with the power came light, and with the light came the realization that I was kissing a stranger.
An extremely handsome stranger, but a stranger nonetheless.
Emerson looked about as dazed as I felt, so I took that opportunity to scramble to my feet, gathering my things as I did.
“I should go,” I managed, my lips still swollen from his amazing kiss.
“Wait.” He stood, putting a hand on my arm. “We should at least exchange numbers. Last names?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told him.
He looked surprised, but
I didn’t wait for him to respond. I grabbed my bag and pushed past him, leaving him alone in an ATM with two fewer beers.
3
Alex
I tried not to think about Emerson. It wasn’t easy since I had fallen asleep thinking about him—the way his mouth had felt on mine, the way his hand had tightened in my hair as he kissed me, the way he tasted like fancy beer and something else wonderful and all him . . .
I might have considered the entire thing a fever dream brought on by my period and the bottle of wine I downed when I got back home—except I discovered that at some point, Emerson had slipped his packet of beef jerky into my shopping bag. It was the only proof I had that anything had happened.
And I needed proof. Because it was completely unlike me. I didn’t kiss strange men. Lately, I didn’t kiss anyone—whether they were men and/or strange didn’t really matter. I was working myself ragged at the office and way too busy for this kind of distraction, and the fact that I spent the entire evening in my bathtub with a glass of wine that I kept refilling as I replayed the hottest kiss I’d ever had in my life instead of doing the pile of paperwork I had intended to do was further proof that this was the kind of distraction I really, really didn’t need.
I went to bed, my alarm set for an ungodly hour for a Saturday morning, allowing myself one final replay of the kiss. Of course, that just led to me having incredibly intense, very sexy dreams about him in which the power hadn’t come back on when it did and we finished out our evening having sex against the wall of the ATM.
Really, really great sex.
Great sex that was ruined by the sound of hammering. At first I thought it was just in my head, that I was being punished by a splitting headache for eating nothing but Chunky Monkey and a bottle of wine for dinner, but as I woke fully, I realized that the sound was coming from downstairs.
It was also two hours before I had set my alarm. Which meant some asshole was downstairs hammering something at six a.m. on a Saturday while I was dealing with a hangover and cramps. I had officially entered hell.
At first, I tried to go back to sleep, burrowing my head underneath my pillows, but that barely did anything to dull the noise. After twenty minutes of not sleeping and nearly suffocating myself under my pillows, I gave up and got up.
Five minutes later, I had a cup of super-strong coffee at my side and earbuds blasting white noise in my ears. I had grown up in crappy motels and even crappier apartments, so I had experience dealing with noisy environments. I had learned how to cope when I was a kid, managing to get straight A’s despite shitty circumstances outside of my control—I could cope with some hammering now.
When my dad left, he left us with nothing. My mom went back to school while balancing a full-time job. Eventually she got her nursing degree and moved us out of the worst neighborhoods, but we always struggled to make ends meet. She gave up a lot for me, and all I wanted was to make enough money that she could retire early. So she could actually enjoy life for once.