Afternoon Delight (14 page)

Tim gave one of the big wooden chaises a shove with his booted foot. It rolled a foot to the left.

“That's just neat,” Sarah said.

Disregarding the damp, he sprawled out on one of the chaises. “I've been coming here a lot lately,” he said. The words had the tone of a confession, although Sarah didn't see why that was necessary.

She lay down beside him and propped her head on the bulge of his biceps. From this angle, Manhattan's horizon of skyscrapers parted to expose a thin ribbon of industrial New Jersey sandwiched between a swath of spectacular sky and the Hudson. “It's easy to see why,” she said. “If I lived here, I'll come here as often as I could. What do you like about it?”

He shrugged, a movement she felt in the shift of muscles and joints. “I don't know. It's . . .”

His voice trailed off. She resisted the urge to fill in his silence with her own words.
It's a park, and yet unlike any other park in the world, because it's filled with native plants, steeped in New York's history. Someone did this right, and slowly. They stopped ignoring something ugly and resisted the urge to tear down, pave over, or turn it into high-rises for billionaires. They put careful attention into every single detail, the tracks and the planks and the plants and the trees. They immersed in life, dragged function out of form, saw beauty and possibility where everyone else saw blight.

“There's something similar in Paris, called the Promenade Plantée,” she said.

Air huffed from his lungs, disappearing into the steady rain. “I figured as much. There's nothing new under the sun.”

“That's true,” she said. “We make it new.”

He didn't respond for a long moment, just watched the rain patter against the Hudson. “Did you know this is one of the city's best hot spots for public sex?”

“Says who?” she asked as she curled around to look up at him. Raindrops clung to the bristle of his beard, dotted his eyelashes. “Says you?”

He grinned. “Actually, no. Want to be my first, darlin'?”

She all but rolled her eyes. “I doubt very much I could be your first at anything,” she said, but she placed her hand on his abdomen, right above his belt buckle, as she spoke.

They were alone on the promenade, but apartment buildings towered to their right and left. Not even the steadily increasing rain would hide the most discreet sex act, and six feet, five inches of man having sex was anything but discreet.

“What do you suggest?”

His gaze flicked over her, then he sat up, jackknifed upright, rock-hard abdominals flexing enviably under her hand. He shrugged out of his blue jacket, then lifted it. She ducked under to allow him to spread it over their upper bodies. She snuggled into the juncture of his shoulder and chest and smiled.

“Sneaky,” she said. Like this, his jacket covered him to the tops of his thighs. To an outside observer he'd look like a real gentleman, making sure his girlfriend was better protected from the rain.

“You know it,” he said.

She squeezed his cock through his jeans, and he jumped. “Be nice,” she said sweetly.

“Magnanimous,” he said. “I am the picture of magnanimity.”

“Is that a word?”

“Unzip me and I'll show you.”

He had both hands under the jacket, one wrapped around her waist, the other covering her hand as she unfastened his belt and zipper. “This is going to be less noticeable if you've got one hand outside your jacket.”

“Now who's sneaky?”

“Not my first time at this rodeo,” she said.

He huffed out a laugh, but withdrew his hand from under the lightweight jacket and rested it alongside his thigh.

“Now,” she said, “if you're really going for an Oscar, keep that hand relaxed. Lift a little.”

He lifted his buttocks, she tugged his jeans just low enough to release his cock, and then he eased back onto the chaise. She curled around his body and let her gaze go distant, staring into the rain. Close up she could see individual drops, then streaks, then over the Hudson the drops coalesced into flat sheets that speckled and lashed the Hudson.

“We're going to be soaked,” she said, and started to stroke him. She kept her touch gentle until she felt slick drops of precome ease her way.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Faster.”

She shook her head. “My hands are pretty rough. I don't want you to get raw.”

At that he lifted his head and looked at her. “Are you kidding me?”

She laughed. Soaked to her skin, curled up in the driving rain, jerking off a man in New York's newest park, she laughed out loud from sheer delight. “A little, but not really. But it's a shame to rush this.”

“Most people, when having sex in public, want to get it over with as quickly as possible to avoid getting caught.”

“News flash,” she said. “Cops don't get out of their cars in the rain unless they have to. So unless you start to flail around in ecstasy and make a huge production out of this, and someone sees and calls 911, we're pretty safe.” She looked from left to right. The promenade was totally empty. “And I'm not most people.”

“I know,” he said. “Trust me, I know that.”

He was holding his head up off the back of the chaise as he spoke. The hand on her waist flexed, and his blue eyes were surprisingly serious for Tim the jovial jokester. Keeping her gaze locked with his, she bent her head and kissed his pectoral through his T-shirt. “Lie back and think of the city,” she said.

He did, stretching up until he was comfortable. The view was spectacular, his throat exposed to her, his lips and cheeks flushed despite the cooling temperature. Rain collected in his eyelashes and beard, trickled over his Adam's apple to pool in the hollow of his throat. She stroked slowly up from the root, swirled her palm over the tip to spread the slick, then back down again. A muscle in his jaw jumped.

She took her time, kept her grip loose, her stroke steady and slow, until his major muscle groups tensed and released. His hand tightened on her waist, that grabby impulse that changed the game in their first challenge allowed free rein. Her nipples peaked in sympathetic response to the flush moving down his throat, and the damp lace scraped over them.

“Want you to ride me,” he growled.

His shaft was iron in her palm. She tightened her grip and swirled her thumb over the head. “I want that, too,” she said.

“Would you do it?”

She risked a quick glance at the buildings to either side of them. No one in the windows, but there was a limit to the risks she'd take in pursuit of pleasure. “Not here,” she said. “Someone could be watching.”

The thought didn't seem to frighten him, but then again, not much did. It did, however, seem to turn him on. His cock pulsed in her hand. “I could be sleeping.”

She looked at him again. Sex rose from his skin like steam, the tight jaw under flushed skin, the way his legs sprawled, his fingers fisted in his jacket, slowly pulling it from her shoulders. She wanted to straddle him, bite his lips, lick her way down his throat. Her nipples throbbed, and fresh heat spread between her legs. “There is no way someone watching us thinks you're sleeping,” she said, and stroked him again, root to tip.

Would he finish this here? If he were going for speed, for the flash in the pan of immediate gratification, he would. Or would the promise of them together, skin to skin, in the privacy of his apartment, sharing a rainy afternoon delight, tempt him to wait?

He was close. His shaft swelled and throbbed in her encircling grip as he tipped his chin back. Aching and slick, she nipped at the transition from beard to vulnerable skin made visible by his exposed throat.

“Fuck. Stop. Stop now.”

He trembled in frustration as she stopped. A flush spread up his throat. The wind was picking up, sending the rain gusting and billowing over them. “We finish this at my place. Now.”

She held the jacket away from his skin so he could button up. He tugged his shirt down to meet his belt buckle, then stood up and stretched both arms to the sky. His spine slotted back into alignment with a series of rapid pops. She counted
one one thousand, two one thousand
in her head. By the time she got to five, his T-shirt was as saturated with rainwater as if he'd dived into the Hudson. He turned to look at her. “I dragged you out in the rain for nothing. I did some research before I met you here. I knew about the place in Paris. I was out of ideas.”

“So you knew I'd probably seen something similar in Paris before we even climbed the stairs.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do it?”

“Because I knew you'd like it anyway. And I like watching you see new things,” he said. “When you see something new, you're . . . delighted. Hell, when you see something old and loved, you're delighted. I like watching you be delighted. Even though you'd seen it before, I wanted . . . I wanted to delight you.”

The rain pattered over his words, washing them into the slits between the planking along the deck. Sarah's T-shirt and skirt clung to her hips and shoulders. She slicked rain back from her face, twisted her hair to wring it out. Heat thumped low in her abdomen. Cotton sagged when it got wet, but satin and lace clung, hitched into the crease of her thigh, into her sex, damp from more than the rain.

“Do you need a challenge to do that?”

The rain drowned out her words. They walked east for ten minutes before they found a cab depositing a woman in front of her gym. Tim held the door for her, then gave the driver his cross streets as he folded his long body into the back of the car and closed the door.

“He'll take you back to Brooklyn. If you want.”

“Is that what you want?”

He stared out the window. His clothes clung to him, outlining his knees, his ridged abdomen, and water droplets beaded in the fine hairs on the backs of his hands. Finally, he turned to look at her. “No.”

They passed the rest of the ride to his apartment in a silence broken only by the splash of tires through puddles and the slap-slap of the cab's windshield wipers. Tim paid the driver, then followed Sarah into the pouring rain. Her hair, normally so wild, lay flat against her head and face. Without the distracting flyaway curls, her eyes were huge in her pale face. It was a vulnerability he'd never seen in her before, hidden as it was behind her zest for life, her delight in simply being alive.

“The city sucks in the rain.”

“It's not so bad,” she said.

“Can you find the silver lining in any cloud?”

There was a long pause. “I guess I can. Ovarian cancer is one of the hardest cancers to diagnose. Aunt Joan was sick off and on for a couple of years before they caught it, but by then, it was really too late. We move so fast through our lives that it's easy to think we're in control, but it's really an illusion. I try not to forget that now.”

Something snicked into place in his head as he unlocked the building door. They left trails of droplets as they climbed the stairs. Tim shucked his jacket on his way up. Sarah followed suit and left her denim jacket on the hallway floor outside his door, then stepped out of her clogs.

He paused and listened. No sound from upstairs or across the hall, so he unlocked the apartment door, then stripped his wet T-shirt over his head right in the hall. Sarah didn't bat an eyelash, just pulled off her own T-shirt.

Tim froze. Her breasts, her lush, gorgeous, heavy breasts, spilled over the top of black lace cups as she twisted to find the button on the side of her skirt.

“What?” she asked as she unfastened the button.

“Uh,” he said stupidly, and nodded at her breasts.

“Oh, these?” She unzipped her skirt and let it fall. “I bought these for you.”

Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints in heaven. She was standing in his building's hallway, dripping rainwater, skin glowing, wearing underwear straight out of his lingerie model dreams. Her adorable little belly pooched over the top of the panties just a little, and it was so Sarah, so perfectly, rightly Sarah, life just spilling out every goddamn direction, that he nearly went to his knees to worship her. In that moment he understood the male instinct to worship the rounded, ripe female body. It was life, alive, so fucking alive.

He went from half-hard to fully erect in a couple of racing heartbeats, like he was sixteen years old and invincible, not thirty-two, not tired and old and worn out from carrying a superhero's armor.

“When?” he managed.

“Earlier today.” She gathered her hair and twisted it into a rope. Water coursed down her arms to stream from her elbows onto the floor.

“You had . . . You wore that . . .” He reached out and trailed his finger from the hollow in her throat to her navel. “While we were on the High Line?”

Goose bumps rippled up her arms, and she shivered as she nodded.

He'd almost missed it. He'd almost sent her home and missed the way her pale skin glowed against the black lace and nude fabric. He gathered up her clothes and his, shoved open the door, and tossed the whole soaked mass into the kitchen sink. “Inside.”

They left puddles on the way to the bathroom, where he turned on the shower. “Leave that on,” he said when she reached behind her to unfasten the bra.

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

“You can't get any wetter,” he pointed out, testing the water temperature.

He shucked his own soaked boxers and kicked them into the corner, then pulled back the shower curtain. She stepped past him into the narrow, tiled rectangle.

“Oh,” she sighed. “That's good. I didn't realize how cold I was. That's very, very good.”

He crowded into her, backing her under the spray, using the water and his own body heat to warm her. Quickly her skin went from pale to pink, probably from the warm water beating on it, but possibly from the pressure of his thumb against her nipple. The lace provided an interesting, irresistible contrast in texture.

Prior experience taught him the stall was too small to accommodate the length of his shins, so, turning his back to the wall, he went to his heels and widened his knees. “Come here,” he said.

She did. Head bent, she stood under the pounding water and let him worship her. He kissed her cheeks, her lips, her throat, then the soft skin lifted and offered by the bra. With his teeth he nipped at her nipples, then licked them, then scraped and soothed the firm, confined flesh of her breast. She was whimpering and writhing in his hold when he'd finished, one hand braced on the wall, the other wrapped around his neck.

He unhooked the bra and let it drop to the floor, then kissed his way down to the sexy panties. A millimeter at a time he tugged them off her hips, teasing her as thoroughly as she teased him, sliding his tongue between stretched elastic and her skin, then the soft swell of her mound. Even with the water pounding all around them he could taste the salt of her arousal. When he slipped the panties low enough to work his tongue between her outer folds and touch her clit, she shuddered and cried out. The sensitive flesh was swollen and hot, and she trembled with each pass of his tongue.

He cupped her bottom with both hands, let his head drop back against the wall, and pulled her forward. His erection jutted into the air, tortured by the absence of touch other than water coursing down it, but he shoved that aside and focused on her. Her hand fisted in his hair, holding him even when he had no intention of going anywhere at all, not until she was spent and shuddering in his arms. He slid his hands up over her hips to cup her breasts, pinching her nipples in time to her rhythmic hip movements.

Her knees buckled when she came, so he tightened his grip at her ribs and held her up. Fighting back the urge to back her into the opposite wall and fuck her until he came, he turned off the water and snagged a towel from the shelf over the toilet, then dried her face. She squeezed most of the water out of her hair, then began to quickly dry off.

“I'm as wrinkled as a prune,” she commented.

The bathroom barely held him, let alone two people's elbows and knees as they dried off, so he stepped past her and dried off in the living room. He released the Murphy bed, then pulled her into a deep kiss. “Want you,” he growled.

“Yes,” she whispered.

The light had an odd, flat quality to it, dampened by the rain and dulled to gray. It washed Sarah's skin to pale cream, softened by prolonged exposure to water, heated from within by several hours of foreplay. She sprawled on the bed and spread her legs, her fingers trailing over her belly and thigh as she watched him put on a condom. Something in her gaze niggled at the back of his brain, but he pushed it aside to settle between her legs and push inside her.

She was slick and hot and tight, coiling around him with the first stroke, breath hitching to a higher register. He gripped the back of her thigh while she braced her arm on the wall behind her head, as if she wanted more, deeper, more. As if she wanted a connection, to make this a shared experience, not a challenge.

“Tim.”

He kissed her, partly to stop her from saying whatever she was going to say, partly because the flush on her cheeks and collarbone matched the hue of her lips and he wanted to feel that heat against his own mouth. Maybe she had breath in her she would share with him. That tight feeling in his chest was back, constricting everything, making his heart race. He'd almost missed this, getting a hand job on the High Line, trying to move at the speed of light so nothing could touch him. Speed thrilled, and speed killed.

He couldn't breathe. She was wound tight under him, heels digging into his ass, thighs trembling, one hand gripping his nape while the other flattened at the base of his spine. With a low cry she threw back her head and came apart under him. He tumbled over the edge after her. All he could think was while he'd won the occasional battle in their running challenge, the war had been hers to lose from the moment he saw her. She'd won. Skirmish, challenge, battle, war—it was all hers.
He
was hers, except the thought terrified him because that kind of victory meant a future together, and he had no idea what he was going to do about it.

He shifted off her and dealt with the condom, then found dry clothes on the shelves in the Murphy bed's frame and pulled on a pair of basketball shorts. Sarah lay sprawled on her stomach, watching him with sleepy, satisfied eyes that sharpened when her phone buzzed. “I can't reach that,” she said, lazily amused, extending her arm in the direction of the kitchen.

Tim found her phone in the pocket of her denim jacket, lying in the pile in the sink, and brought it over. She pushed her hair out of her face, dried the screen on the sheet, and pushed the home button. He watched her tap and scroll, then her face went blank.

“What's up?”

“Captain Jones asked me out for dinner next Saturday night. A little café on the Upper West Side a friend of his opened a few weeks ago. He thinks I might like meeting his friend, and says the chef is really interesting, too. Studied in Spain.”

His brain kept right on cruising along at a hundred miles an hour even as his gut dropped six inches. Very classy: a dinner date plus an introduction to like-minded people, a connection that might be helpful to her business. Thoughtful. Jonesy didn't waste time on stupid shit like challenges. No, he saved fooling around for AnonEMT and went for the kill when the stakes were high. Sarah Naylor was high stakes indeed.

Sarah looked up at him. “Did you know he was going to ask me out?”

Tim's heart started to do things that, professionally, he found frightening. A weird stutter-step punctuated by a hard thunk against his breastbone. He ignored his body, because it was telling him a truth he didn't want to know. Her question was an awkward one even if he hadn't been inside her five minutes earlier. The text, and Sarah's question, made the future that much more immediate, more real. “Yes.”

“You knew,” she repeated, but it wasn't a question this time. It was disbelief.

“I knew.”

“You knew that another man was going to ask me out. You probably told him that was okay,” she said, connecting the dots, “and had sex with me anyway.”

It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact, and her matter-of-fact tone and phrasing hurt worse than anger or indignation.

She pushed back onto her heels and looked at him. “All right, then.” She got off the bed and stepped into her underwear, discarded on the floor.

“Your clothes are soaking wet,” he pointed out. He should have thought about that before keeping her outside in a pounding rainstorm, but even the length of time it took to dry clothes was too much of a commitment to the future.

That's what he'd become?

“It's fine,” she said, and wriggled damp satin and lace up her hips. “I'll take the train home.”

He watched in silence as she finished dressing. Finally, she lifted the strap of her messenger bag over her head and looked at him.
Say something. Start with I'm sorry.

The thing is . . . futures can be exciting, or terrifying.

Tim looked down at his hands. “Are you going to go out with him?”

“Do you have an opinion about that?”

He could stop this with a single word.
Yes. Yes, I have a problem with that.

No. No futures. Just the here and now. No fear, no anticipation, no regrets.

“Before Aunt Joan got sick, I would have dated both of you at once,” she said into the heavy silence. “That's who I was then. Aunt Joan wanted me to go back to being the woman I was before she got sick. But I'm different now. The thing is . . .”

His head jerked up when he heard the litany of the last few weeks come out of her mouth.

“The thing is . . . I'm not that woman anymore. I can't pretend that what happened to me, what is happening to me, doesn't affect or change me. I can't keep doing this, Tim. I'm sorry. I know I'm changing the rules mid-game, but this is what's best for me.”

“Sure,” he said, far more casually than he felt. He didn't know what else to say. He felt like a cartoon character the second after impact with a brick wall, birds tweeting over his head, body numbed by contact with an immovable object. Except the immovable object was a foodie chef who liked life spicy and wasn't settling for anything less than . . . anything. She wasn't settling, period.

She rummaged through her messenger bag until she came up with her MetroCard. “Hey,” she said. “Still friends, right?”

“Right,” he said. “Still friends.”

“Then I'll see you around.” The door closed gently behind her. He heard her scuff into her clogs, clatter down the stairs, and out of his life.

***

Tim wiped sweat from his temple with his jersey as he dribbled the ball down the playground court. Kids from the neighborhood stood on the sidelines, waiting for the court, calling a mixture of good-natured encouragement and trash talk at the players. They were down four, with a couple of minutes left, based on the informal rules governing the playground. Normally he'd be focused on what his team needed to do to win, but right now his heart wasn't in the game.

He'd gotten exactly what he wanted. He got a spring fling with a sweet, sexy woman who was as inventive and in-your-face challenging as he was. He got the best sex of his life. He found a new place for lunch. Best of all, they'd made a clean, uncomplicated, no-harm-no-foul break a couple of weeks earlier.

He should feel great. Fantastic. On top of the world. Living life balls to the wall. Instead he felt like he was circling a race track at top speed, running hard and going nowhere.

He felt like shit. Because he'd had sex with a woman he really, really liked, who made his days brighter and a little easier, knowing he'd told another man it was okay to ask her out. When it wasn't. It wasn't okay. It wasn't even on the same continent as okay. And he was a grade A asshole. It ended like it always ended, very grown-up and mature, very cosmopolitan. Very New York. Sophisticated. Sarah wouldn't throw a fit, or one of her deadly clogs. Still friends. So the kiss on the cheek and a thanks-for-the-memories wasn't the problem.