Page 130 of Nothing to You
“Doesn’t mean no strippers.My old lady’s laid-back.”
“Your old lady…” she said, leaning closer, “believes in equality.Have all the strippers you want, rubbing themselves all over you.Just know I’ll be oiling up my own naked guys the next night, paying for them with your dollars.”
“Every man’s got to earn a living.”
“Glad you think so, baby,” she said and patted his shoulder.He took a corner and her hand slid higher until her fingers met his hair.“You know what the hardest part of not being with you is?”His backward nod requested the answer without words.“It’s forgetting not everyone is like us.The girls, they think I’m being evasive, I think it winds them up, but… I love being with you.Just being around you.Just… you.”
Rather than tease, he reached over to squeeze her thigh.“Not everyone is like us, which is why we don’t take this for granted.We never make it more difficult than it has to be.Being with you is easy.Loving you is easy.It’s just reality.It’s not complicated and I love that.I love you.I say I love you and the next second we make the logical choice of marriage.I’d never be with anyone else.Never do that with anyone else.It’s the way it has to work.It has to be that clear cut for me.I didn’t think it ever would be and didn’t think I wanted it until…”
He glanced her way and their eyes met.On the road, in traffic, she couldn’t mount him right there, but it wasn’t just sex plaguing her.Hope, adoration, need, desire, he was her everything.
“Okay,” she said, closing her eyes and shaking off the moment.“Timeout over.Play on.”
“Next round’s going to be a doozy.Just you wait.”
TWO
SHE UNLOCKED HER apartment and opened the door.He scooped both arms around her shoulders from behind as they entered.
“The famous Radley den.Many a man has fallen here.Oh, no, shit,” he said, tightening his embrace.“Men don’t come back here, do they?”
“I think you’re a man,” she said, arching back.
His mouth came lower.“I’ll submit to inspection.”
She nudged him and eased out of his arms.“Marrying you is a kindness to every other woman out there if that’s your idea of a pickup line.”
“I just show them my bank balance, don’t have to say a word.”
“Your bank balance is my bank balance,” she said, going to check what alcohol she might have left in the cabinets.
“This place isn’t bad,” he said, strolling deeper into the apartment, checking the place out.
One long room separated by her bookshelves.Her desk on the wall by the bedroom door on the right, dining, living room on the left.
“What did you expect?”
“A hovel.Isn’t that what spinsters live in?Do you have cats and a caldron stashed somewhere around here?”
“Insulting the woman you intend to marry is one thing.Implying no one would have her insults you.Am I the best you could do, Boy Scout?”Pushing aside the empty cookie jar, she triumphed and grabbed the bottle behind.“Ah ha!”
“What’s that?”
“My emergency rum stash,” she said, taking off the cap to swig from it.
“Did you really finish these floors yourself?And plaster the walls?”
Something had gone in besides their irritation of each other.Why did he remember every little thing ever?Man, she loved and loathed that about him.
“I filled in little gaps, papered and painted the walls,” she said, slipping off her shoes and putting down the bottle to toss her jacket off too.“We poor people have to make our own way in the world, pampered prince.”
“Can’t mock me for that if you’re about to take half my net worth.”
“I’ll take gross, taxes and expenses come from your half.”
After another drink, she got out of her pants and shirt.
“We doing naked dinner tonight?What are we having?”
