Perfectly Unmatched (14 page)

Instead, I pull my hand away and thread it with hers. Her eyes lash at me, bright with shame, but I hold.

“We can talk about this later. Okay? Right now, you need to eat.” I fumble through the bag with my free hand and pull out a roll, perfect for alcohol absorption.

She snatches it out of my hand and shakes her fingers free of mine. She
eats, the process awkward because I do nothing but watch.

“We should go,” she says when the roll is gone and she’s wiping bread crumbs off her lap.

I lie back on the rock and reach a hand to take hers. “Come here to me first.”  

She stands over me, sun at her back, hair falling in front of her face, and turns around like she’s about to jump off the rock and wade back to shore without me.

“I’m not too proud to beg you to come here to me,” I call. She stands, ice-statue still. “You are gorgeous. You’ve turned me on completely and made me laugh and made me think about things that I haven’t wanted to think about. And I want you. I want you stripped naked right now. Any man with two eyes in his skull would want you. But you’re drunk and even sober you weren’t sure you what you wanted with me, so please don’t ask me to do what you might regret. Please, just come here to me.”

She hugs her arms to her waist. “Why? What do you want?”

“To hold you. To smell your hair and hope you don’t notice and think I’m some sort of psychotic. To watch the way the light moves over your skin. I want you to get chilly and sleepy and need to press your body tight to mine, and I want to wrap my arms around you. I want whatever you write in that secret book of yours about me to be worth all the other rotten shit you’re going to wind up accepting down the line.”

She sways on her feet, and I jump up to steady her.

“That’s, um, that’s incredibly romantic.” She bites her lip and holds tight to the sides of my shirt as she careens back and forth on unsteady legs.

“Romantic words are part of the deal, love. I’m a classics professor. You have no idea how many lines of Sappho I’ve memorized.” Her smile is a bloom, and I babble as it dazzles me stupid. “I had
a very romantic Women in Ancient Greece professor as an undergrad.”

She sits down in a tangle of long, smooth legs, and I fall by her side when she pats the stone next to her. She presses both hands to my chest and I lie back. She lays her head gingerly in the crook of my shoulder, and my dramatic monologue is realized. And better than I
rhapsodized it to be.

“Do you remember any of it?” Her voice drifts up to my ears as she snuggles tighter.

“Remember?” Remember what? There’s little brain space for all my haggard past memories when this perfect present needs to be immortalized.

“The poems?
The ones your teacher made you read?” Her fingertips skim along my shirt, bumping over the folds in the fabric.

“Some. Let me see... ‘
Again love, the limb-loosener, rattles me/ bittersweet,/ irresistible,/ a crawling beast.’ Sappho was a bit of a sparse romantic. And wildly pragmatic, as it were.”

“Do you agree?
With Sappho?” Her voice is syrupy with the sweet rush of sleep coming fast.

“Yes.” I kiss her hair, softly, realizing she won’t feel the press of my lips. “But any love worth writing like that about isn’t going to be easy.”

“Mmm.”

I don’t know if it’s a sound of agreement or contentment or just a sleep reaction, but there are no words from
Benelli for a long time. Just the soft rush of her breath and the curl of her limbs closer to my body as dusk begins to darken the sky. I hold her and clear my mind of everything but this moment.

The past is too knotted and the future too uncertain for my liking.

The pounding in my head is jackhammer hard, and it feels like my brain is attempting to pop my eyeballs out of their sockets to relieve some of the pressure. The moon is a sliver away from full and shining with a muted yellow light.

I sit up on one elbow and study Cormac, head bent back, snoring loudly. His dark lashes curl in the dull gold light, and his mouth, finally relaxed and silent, is kissably perfect.

So perfect I lean down and brush my lips lightly over it. His hand flops up to swipe at his nose, and I realize that my hair must have tickled him. I try to ease back into his arms, but now that I woke up, I can’t get comfortable enough to fall back to sleep.

I think back about what happened before he and I ended up marooned on a rock in the middle of a stream, drunk and lying in each other’s arms. There was the fight last night. When I take hold of his thumb and drag his hand to his chest, I can see it’s still puffy and red, the knuckles bluish with bruising. I trace my fingers over those knuckles, the ones he bashed against Akos’s face in my defense. One eye is still shadowed with bruising from the last punch Akos managed before the fight ended. After the fight was our run, and after our run, there was the endless few minutes I spent wrapped around him, kissing him like he was the cliff ledge and letting go would mean an infinite freefall into nothing.

Then there was the talk with
Abony.

Remembering that makes the incessant pounding in my head drum faster and harder, so I skip past it and recall the little apartment, the surprising details of
Cormac’s quiet, beautiful life, up in his neat, clean room with all his pens and books.

It was beautiful. Calm and gorgeous and grounded, just like him. Just like the way he makes
me feel.

I cringe at the memory of my ruthless jokes, the ones I made because I felt like I didn’t belong. I mocked him because seeing his place, seeing him centered and sure of who he is and what he wants made me crazily jealous and stupidly sad.

I tuck my hands away from his body, because I’m way too messed up for him.

He deserves someone as smart as he is.
Someone as confident. Someone who doesn’t give a single solitary damn what anyone else thinks or says about them.

He deserves my complete polar opposite.

I say a quick prayer, thankful that he was too much of a gentleman to take advantage of me when I dangled my desire to lose my virginity in his face. I’m thankful that I only shared a few partial secrets about my family with him and that most of the most revealing confessions were made when I was drunk.

I’m embarrassed about trying to convince him to be my secret side romance. If a man had made the same offer to me, I would have stormed out on him.
Cormac would have offered to fight for my honor. Just because I’m a woman and he’s a man, there’s no reason I should have sunk to new lows and offered my body in exchange for his no-strings-attached involvement.

“You look so serious.” His voice is groggy, and the just-woken-up sound of it tugs at a need that’s low in my gut.

I want to wake up with him.

I have to strike that thought from my mind immediately.

I tighten my fingers into a fist, even though I want to loosen them and run them through his hair.

“I’m really sorry.” I keep busy organizing and reorganizing the bag we packed for this picnic, this picnic that turned into an emotional, embarrassing, drunk proposition.
“About before. About everything. I had a great time, but I really don’t think we should see each other again.”

“You’re too tense to be tipsy.” His voice is like fine-grit sandpaper on my nerves.

“I’m incredibly sober. And, I guess, hung over.” My temples are swollen and tender feeling.

Cormac
sits up, disheveled and gorgeous in the intimate way a guy is gorgeous when you’re seeing him just awake and alone, like you own rights to his secret, pre-dressed, pre-world self. It’s an intimacy I don’t deserve, but it doesn’t stop me from appreciating the moment.

“Come here.” He crooks his finger, and I should hop down to the stream and wade far away from him before I
cause more problems than we can weather.

But I go to him instead.

He pats his thigh. “Lie down here.”

“On your lap?”
It’s so far from a sexual invitation, my horny thoughts make my heart jump.

“I can see how badly your head hurts from the look on your face. I had a very foxy professor, a cougar I guess, who taught me some pressure points.”

There is no reason for me to scowl, but it’s like my lips aren’t mine to control anymore.

“Do you hate pressure points?”
Cormac jokes, smoothing his hands over my forehead and rubbing my temples with sure, steady pressure.

“
Mmmm.” I don’t mean to moan, but it’s like his hands are unhinging me, and the pain that filled my cranium seconds before is melting away and leaving me fuzzy. “I don’t hate pressure points. I hate
her
.”

“
Her
?” His fingers creep to the center of my forehead, and I could break down and sob over the relief. “Who is
she
again?”

“The cougar,” I mumble, not caring what I say or how stupid I sound. All I can focus on is the feel of his hands on my head and my one repeated wish: that
Cormac never stop touching me.

“Well, it was over a year ago. And it never amounted to more than a few massages and some very raunchy innuendos on her part.” He chuckles and moves back to my temples.

“You don’t like...mmm...older women?” I arch my back, though it’s completely vulgar and strange, because my body was wire-tight, but it’s like Cormac’s magic has relaxed it into  coil of soft rope.

Rope he could tie me up with anytime he likes.

Ugh! No! I need to keep focused on--

“I don’t know. I didn’t take her up on her invitation because I had a fi
ancée
at the time.”

My bleary thoughts dart and swim like a confused school of fish. “What?” I ask, grasping through the murkiness, through those fingers rubbing my head until I have to bite my bottom lip to hold back another moan. “You were engaged?”

“Yes.” The answer is short, and his hands seem to speed up their tempo and break the spell a little more.

“Engaged to be married?” I ask, netting all the facts so slowly it’s painful.

“Yes.” It’s not like Cormac to be so short and direct. Usually when he talks to me, it’s some kind of long-winded story or factual explanation dump.

What reason would he have for being so cautious and secretive?

Unless, of course, he still harbored feelings for her.

I sit up in an abrupt rush, giving my brain a stern scolding for missing the feel of
Cormac’s hands when they fall away.

“I’m sorry.” How many times will I say this today? I need to follow my mother’s good advice and stop doing the things I have to apologize for instead of throwing around empty ‘
sorrys.’

“What for?”
Cormac’s voice has lost the lilt that makes it so easy to drown in. I shiver as the knife’s edge of it slides up and down my spine.

“Just...what I wanted...before. It was so, so stupid.
Even then. And now that I know--”

“Know what?”

And there’s the professor again, the calculating teacher who has me pinned and knows I don’t have the right answer but is going to make an example out of me for the class.

It’s infuriating and tongue-tying...which is even more infuriating, and I scramble for the words to untie this and make it...less infuriatingly embarrassing!

“I didn’t know you had been with someone and that it was so serious. I never would have asked for what I did if I’d known. And I understand why you were...why you didn’t want it...me. Now I feel stupid.”

The night around us is loud as I wait for his response. I focus on the sounds of the wind rustling the leaves, the crickets screeching as they jump out of the way of the hungry, croaking frogs. I’ve wandered these forests all night for nights on end nearly every summer of my life, so the noise is a comfort, but also a distraction from what I really want to hear.
Which is Cormac’s reaction to my confession.

He takes my hand with a
blasé attitude, like it belongs to him. I fight back the part of me that wars with my general good sense and argues that,
you do belong to him
. Before I can wrap my mouth around the words to tell him to back off, he does something to the skin between my thumb and index finger that makes it feel like my legs are rushing, puddling water.

And all the time he unravels my handle on sanity, he’s talking, his voice keeping this crisp, efficient running dialogue like he’s going over safety procedures before a skydive.

“I want you.” The words and his hands and the look in his clear, green eyes strips me. “I want you, but I said no because you were drunk, and I would never take advantage of you like that. Also, you want a fuckbuddy, and I don’t particularly enjoy heartbreak, so I’m trying to convince myself to sidestep your very appealing offer. And, trust me, it’s very appealing. As for my engagement, it was a crash course in the many detriments of getting married too young. I dodged a hollow point bullet on that one, and I don’t regret the way it ended. Or that it ended at all.”