Brick by Brick (32 page)

When he handed over the small blue foil box with the Ford key, I wasn’t the only one who cried, just the first.

Chapter Forty-Two

“You don’t have to keep asking if I remembered stuff.” Gage didn’t quite hide his irritation with me. “I’ve been living out of suitcases off and on my whole adult life.”

“Sorry,” I said, not.

Gage packed light. Two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, one suit, one pair of trousers, two shirts, two ties, shoes, socks, underwear, Dopp kit, Kindle. One suitcase.

He turned a slow circle in the studio apartment behind Rowan’s house, where every drawer, closet, and cabinet stood open. “See anything I forgot?”

I accepted the olive branch. “I don’t think so. Although if you’ll strip the bed, I’ll wash the sheets for when you come back.”

“I hope,” he said with a cocked eyebrow, “that I won’t be sleeping in this bed when I come back.” He threw the comforter over the unmade bed. It landed crooked, but he didn’t care. “All set, then. Let’s go.”

Gage drove the Porsche a little too fast on corners, but I didn’t complain. Let him have his fun; he wouldn’t drive again for a month.

He’d been so excited that James and I never once talked about missing him.

“That was Steve. My agent?” he said, hanging up Thanksgiving night. “Werner Grohl shut down production in Boston. ‘Creative differences’ with the star, which can mean almost anything. They’re only a week and a half into the shoot, and he wants to start over, with somebody else.” His smile was huge, creasing his eyes in rays like our nieces’ pictures of the Star of Bethlehem. “Me.”

“Hey, that’s great!” James said.

“Wow, fantastic!” I added.

“I fly up tomorrow at one. Okay. Okay. What do I need to do?”

* * * *

We’d agreed we would not go into the airport terminal with him. “Less chance of a scene,” James said.

“Yeah, I might throw myself on the ground,” I said, “so I can grab your legs and scream, ‘Please don’t leave me!’ Better to do that at the curb.”

Gage grinned. “Just remember every jackass with a cell phone has a camera now. If you want us to keep our privacy, don’t be anything but my friends James and Natalie dropping me at the airport.”

Gage put on his Suns hat before getting out of my car, chosen over James’s truck for being more unremarkable. James opened the trunk and lifted Gage’s suitcase. His shoulder no longer bothered him; whatever he’d strained in the accident was healed.

We stood awkwardly on the wide sidewalk in front of the terminal building. “I’ll be back for a couple days at Christmas. Less than a month. So why is leaving so damned hard?”

Several car lengths away, two girls with UA stickers on their suitcases stopped loading their luggage into an idling minivan and stared.

“Because playtime is over and you’re going to work?” James offered.

I loved him for keeping it light.

Gage shook James’s hand firmly, looking him in the eye. “I love you, Jamie,” he said quietly. “I’d way rather be on my knees showing you that than shaking hands.”

“I hope so. When you get back?”

“Count on it.”

“Excuse me,” a plump woman around our age said. “Aren’t you Gage Strickland?”

“Sometimes,” he said glibly. “As soon as I’m done with good-byes, okay?”

She stepped back, watching from ten respectful feet away.

Gage turned to me, his hand sticking out awkwardly for a long moment before I took it, pressing a slip of paper between our clasped hands. “What’s this?” He opened it and read the same
Call me!
message he already kept in his wallet, the one he interpreted as me loving him long before I knew I did.

He blinked rapidly and hugged me tightly, despite our agreement that there wouldn’t be any hugs. “God, Natalie,” he whispered into my hair, “way to bring a man to his knees! I love you.”

An older woman, equally plump and bearing a strong resemblance to the first, joined the one already watching us.

He released me. “Thanks for the ride,” he said to us both, “and everything else.”

“Gage!” A Hispanic teenager speed-walked toward him. The UA girls were coming this way too, pushing their rolling luggage ahead of them like baby strollers.

“Our pleasure,” I said. I was getting the hang of this. Act like any hostess seeing her houseguest off. “We enjoyed having you.”

“Thanks again. I better go check in. Good-bye!”

“Can I get a picture with you?” a blonde asked.

“Me too?”

The group ringing Gage and his suitcase moved with him inside the terminal. We stood alone at the curb, watching through the glass doors until they moved out of sight.

James slammed the trunk closed harder than he needed to. “Well, that’s that. He’s gone. He’s going to be gone a lot.”

I hugged him. “I’m still here.”

He squeezed my bottom twice, extra love. “And he’ll be back.”

“I know.” I squeezed his bottom twice. “But in the meantime…”

He smiled the whole trip back to the house.

The phone was ringing when we arrived. James picked it up. “Hello?”

“Hi. My plane’s not even here yet. At least security took pity on me. I’m in the VIP lounge.” His chuckle was throaty. “Alone.”

“Poor thing.” My tone mocked, but kindly.

He ignored me. “Both of you get undressed,” he said. “Those are my hands. I’ll tell you exactly what they’re doing.”

Loose Id Titles by Maryn Blackburn

Brick by Brick

Maryn Blackburn

Maryn Blackburn is a reformed suspense writer whose “try something different” attempt at erotica threw open the floodgates. Her first efforts were fan fiction—read her long enough and you can guess who—but she soon preferred original characters. Her erotica short stories, published under various pseudonyms, have appeared in several anthologies and magazines.
Brick by Brick
is her first published novel.

She lives in the Great Lakes region with her husband, adores their two kids, and drives the requisite minivan yet refuses to consider the Golden Retriever that goes with it. To her relief and pleasure, her life is ordinary, including such traditional pursuits as sewing kick-ass Halloween costumes, amassing an impressive clutter collection, baking bread, and making home-cooked meals, wondering how her ass got so big, and writing explicit fiction.

Her stories most often feature realistic portrayals of characters exploring their sexual interests and their own limits—often with a celebrity thrown in to screw things up. Once a fangirl…