Page 69 of Handful

“Yeah.”

I got my bag. At the door I looked back, because I am apparently a person who does that now, and he was already back at Fewin’s numbers, not watching me go, just letting me leave.

I drove to my real job and made drinks until last call. I didn’t think about him once. Didn’t think about the weight of him pinning me down. Didn’t think about the feel of his fingers inside me. Didn’t think about the look of satisfaction on his face when I lay in bed after with his come dripping out of me.

Not once.

Chapter 21

❧

— Handful —

I’d made up my mind on the ride over. Today was the day.

Fewin took the wine delivery out back at two thirty, which left the two of us alone — her behind the bar polishing glasses she’d already polished, me on a stool with my so-called emotional support clipboard, which I hadn’t looked at in ten minutes. Fewin wasn’t wrong about it, either. The clipboard was mostly something to keep my hands busy when Austen was in the room.

I’d given her space. A wide berth, clean handoffs, never a word out of line. I’d told her on her sidewalk I’d back off, and I’d done it. But watching her all these weeks — watching her laugh at Fewin, watching her hand move toward me last week before she caught it — I’d figured out the thing nobody tells you about giving a woman space.

It works right up until it doesn’t. After that it’s just hell with good manners — same room, same wanting, and you’re still playing the patient man.

I was done.

“You’re staring,” she said, not looking up from the glass.

“Yeah.”

That got her to look up. Something in the way I said it, I guess.

“Handful—”

“I kept my word.” I set the clipboard down on the bar. “I said I’d give you space and I gave you space. You can’t tell me I didn’t.”

She went still, a glass in one hand and a cloth in the other. “No. You have.”

“Good. Because I’m about to stop.” I stood up off the stool. Didn’t come around the bar — left the wood between us on purpose. “Fewin’s got a theory, by the way. His professional advice, brother to brother, is that I should throw you over my shoulder, drive you back to the clubhouse, and not let you out of my room till you’d forgiven every sin I ever committed. Says it worked on his old lady. Took a weekend.”

The corner of her mouth moved. “And you said?”

“I said you’d have my balls in a jar before we cleared the parking lot.” I let that sit. “So I’m not doing that. I’m doing this instead, which is harder, because it means standing here and telling you the truth with my hands where you can see them.”

“Handful, we’re at work—”

“I told you on that sidewalk you weren’t my first. But I also told you that you were my last, and I want to be real clear about something, Austen, because I don’t think you believed me.” I put both hands flat on the bar and leaned in. “I didn’t mean it the way a man means a nice thing to get a woman back in his bed. It’s a fact. You are the last woman I am ever going to want. That’s already true. It’s been true since the first Old Fashioned, and every day since you walked back into my building it’s gotten harder to pretend otherwise.”

She set the glass down.

“You want to know how much harder?” It wasn’t really a question and I didn’t wait for an answer. “I jerk off in the shower thinking about you. Every morning. Sometimes again at night if it’s been a long one. Six weeks of it. I stand there and I think about your mouth and the sounds you make. I take care of myself like a teenager, because you’re right here every day and I can’t touch you.”

The flush had started up her throat but she didn’t tell me to stop.

“I think about going down on you more than I think about anything else in my life, and that includes the club, which should tell you something.” My voice had dropped and I let it. “I miss the taste of you so bad. I want my tongue back inside you. I want to spend an entire night down there doing nothing else, no clock, no reason to be anywhere, just you coming on my tongue as many times as I can make you. I think about it when I should be doing the books. I thought about it four times during church on Sunday, which Dutch would kill me for.”

Her thighs pressed together behind the bar. I saw it.

“There it is,” I said, quiet. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’m the one standing here with a hard-on in a strip club in the middle of the afternoon talking to a woman who won’t have me.” I stepped back from the bar. Her eyes dropped to my jeans. “Yeah. You see that. That’s all you. Every bit of it. It’s yours. I’m not being cute — it belongs to you, Austen, the same way the rest of me does. You can do whatever you want with it, whenever you want, as long as it’s your hands or your mouth or you around it. The day that happens I will die a happy man and thank God on the way out.”

Her tongue touched her lower lip. Just barely. She didn’t seem to know she’d done it.