Sex (3 page)

He grasped the top of her thigh as they rolled over together and forgot about anything beyond that bed.

And with each more passionate kiss, Gaia began to understand why those love scenes in romantic movies always faded to black—why the chapter almost always ended just before the act itself. It wasn't because the reality of sex was too scary or too “dirty.” At least, not when it was right. It was simply that being with Ed like that… was too intimate to describe. Too close for any words or images to do it justice. It was something for only Gaia and Ed to know.

Ed froze like he'd just been zapped by an alien space ray in a C-grade Japanese sci-fi movie.

deranged wish fulfillment

ONE CRISP, SUN-DRENCHED MORNING, two grande lattes, and Josh Brown. There could be no finer combination. At least, not as far as Heather was concerned.

Murderously Gorgeous

It was what Heather liked to refer to as a “Mary Poppins” morning. One of those mornings where the spirit of Walt Disney had not just taken over Times Square, but all of New York City, even below Fourteenth Street and down to the Astor Place Starbucks. The trees seemed to be politely stepping out of their way for her. All the rumpled, unshaven bohemians seemed to lock arms and dance a two-step down lower Broadway, while cartoon birds seemed to flitter down from the bright blue sky and perch on Heather's fingers, winking at her and exchanging whistled melodies as she floated into Starbucks.

Of course none of the above had taken place, but something far more dreamy and miraculous had: Josh's unheard of and all too daring Morning Follow-up.

Heather still couldn't believe it. She and Josh hadn't finished their previous coffee rendezvous until midnight last night. But at the end of that unbelievable evening, Josh had actually suggested that they meet again
the very next morning.
Nine hours. Nine hours between coffee dates. That kind of dating proximity
was generally reserved for either deep, insatiable love affairs or desperately lonely people. And considering Josh's inhumanly beautiful appearance, she knew loneliness was simply not a possibility.
Not
that Heather thought he'd developed a deep insatiable love for her after one spilled coffee encounter and one semi-impromptu Starbucks chat. But nine hours? Even Romeo could wait more than nine hours to see Juliet. Things were looking awfully good.

And Josh was looking awfully good. His black T-shirt offered no distraction from his perfectly sculpted, angular face and arms and his slightly spiky, still wet from the shower jet black hair.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, ducking his head in disbelief after Heather sat down at their sun-warmed window table.

“What?” she asked, widening her eyes with concern. Had she done something wrong before she'd even sat down?

Josh brought his head back up and stared at Heather, his eyes reflecting in the sun like blinding blue neon. “You can't look this good at nine in the morning,” he said. “No one looks this good at nine in the morning.”

“Oh.” Heather smiled, feeling her feet melting into her Steve Madden shoes. “Well, I…” She could do nothing other than smile and look like an idiot. Was
there any possible response to that? Probably there was, but not when Josh said it, there wasn't.

“You're one of
those,
aren't you?” he said.

“One of what?” she replied shyly.

Josh leaned forward on the table. “You're one of those girls who looks equally as beautiful when she gets out of bed in the morning as she does on a Friday night at seven-thirty.”

“Okay,
stop,”
she giggled, averting her eyes from his murderously gorgeous grin. Silently, she prayed that he wouldn't stop.

“No, really,” he went on. Her prayers had been yielding unprecedented success these last twelve hours. First he'd shown up at Starbucks last night after her wishful semi-stalker-like stakeout. Then came his suggestion of Morning Follow-up coffee. And now this. “Really. I bet you look like this the second you climb out of bed.”

Now her legs had pretty much melted as well. When Josh said the word
bed,
Heather found it somewhat difficult to breathe, let alone put together a verbal response.

“I'm sorry,” Josh said with an embarrassed chuckle as he leaned back in his chair. “Did that just come out as being ludicrously inappropriate? I didn't mean—”

“No, it's fine,” she assured him with a nervous laugh. “It's just not true, believe me. I'm sure you look a hell of a lot better than I do in the morning.”

Was that the right response?
Stay cool Heather, you're losing your touch here.
Heather considered herself to have something of a Ph.D. in flirtation, but Josh was making it next to impossible for her to keep her feet planted on the ground. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that he'd already melted her feet. And her legs, for that matter.

“Look, I'm sorry.” He shook his head. Heather had no idea what he was sorry about, but she immediately felt her heart drop down into her stomach. Good Lord, this was bad.

“What?” she said, trying to mask her concern.

“I'm sorry, I just have to ask…”

“Ask
what?”
she whined inadvertently.

“Okay,” he said, planting his elbows on the table with a confrontational glance. “When I found you here last night…”

Oh God. Busted. Totally busted. Heather grabbed her lukewarm latte and guzzled half of it down, looking for a calming jolt of caffeine. He knew she'd been waiting for him. He must have known that she'd been on a five-hour stakeout for him. She might as well have had a huge pair of binoculars hanging around her neck, a pith helmet, and a group of resentful natives carrying her supplies. She'd fallen down into the ranks of the hunter-explorer girls. The millions of non-self-respecting Stalker skanks across the nation who lived for no other purpose than to entrap
some unsuspecting
dude
and seduce their way into last-resort-late-night-hookup status with him.

“I just don't understand,” Josh went on as Heather cringed internally.
Go on. Say it. Just say it.
“I don't understand what a beautiful girl like you could have possibly been doing alone at Starbucks last night.”

Heather's head suddenly felt much lighter. Another compliment. Not the end of the line. Could she be any more sensitive? Any more of a full-blown loser?
Relax, girl. You're Heather Gannis, for God's sake. Never to be confused with the pathetic hunter skanks of the world.
She tried to shake off her panic as quickly as possible, hoping it hadn't shown through her long-rehearsed emergency smile.

“Come on, tell me the truth,” he said with a sly grin. “Did you
just
break up with your boyfriend or something?”

She was so relieved to be undiscovered that she didn't even bother holding back with her answer. “Well, not exactly
just,”
she said, without even thinking. She guzzled some more latte to ease her sudden dry mouth. “It was a little while ago, but
after
we broke up… he kind of moved on to this other girl I know.”

Ugh. That had been unpleasant to say out loud. Did Josh really need to know this?

“Ooh,” Josh groaned with a comic wince. “Were you, like, good friends with this other girl?”

“No.”
Heather laughed, looking more and more at her coffee. “Far from it.”

She found herself wondering what Ed and Gaia were doing at this very moment. The last time she'd seen them, Gaia had actually gone pretty much berserk in the cafeteria, spewing out a totally uncharacteristic jealous tirade at Ed and her new Russian roommate (or something), Tatiana.

Watching them fight could have provided some kind of weird relief for Heather, as if maybe things weren't so damn heavenly in the world of Ed and Gaia. But the fact was, watching Gaia go nuts on Ed and Tatiana had only made Heather feel worse. Jealousy. It was the ultimate proof Heather had needed. If she'd had any doubts, now she knew for sure that Gaia was in love with Ed. Only love could make a girl go off on someone like that.

So what were they doing at this moment? They'd probably made up already. And two people are never more in love than when they make up after a fight. They make up. And then they have the makeup hug. And then the makeup kissing.

And then the makeup sex.

That's probably what they were doing at this moment. Having wild, passionate makeup sex.
Whatever. She doesn't deserve him. She doesn't deserve to know what it feels like to be with him. I was his
first.
There's nothing anyone can do to change—

Whoa, Heather. New leaf! Where the hell is your new leaf?

Right. The new leaf that Heather had worked so
hard to turn over. She was through with resentment, and selfish thinking, and petty jealousy. New Heather didn't have those feelings. New Heather was Gaia's friend. New Heather tried to help Gaia out of a jam when she needed it. New Heather just wanted to see Ed happy—whoever he was with. Right?
Yes… yes, that's right.

“Heather?”

“Huh?” Heather looked back up at Josh. His expression seemed to suggest that he was waiting on an answer to a question. Though Heather hadn't heard a thing.

“I said, are you jealous? You know, of this girl who stole your
man,”
he joked.

Heather tried to answer before allowing herself to think further. “No,” she blurted. “I'm not…. I mean… I'm really trying to stay away from that kind of thinking, you know… petty jealousies and stuff like that.”

Josh's grin grew wider as he bored his stunning eyes deeper into Heather's. “Come
on,”
he crooned, searching intently with an extremely cute little taunting glint in his eye. “It's not petty, Heather, it's
human.
You don't have to pretend with me, you know. You hardly know me. And I don't know them. It's the perfect situation to confess.
Confess,
Heather,” he joked, pointing his finger directly in her face with the archetypal glare of the Grand Inquisitor. “Thou wilt confess thy jealousy.”

Heather couldn't help but laugh. Gorgeous, smart,
and funny. She would have thought he was just a dream if his long, thick finger hadn't been pointing directly between her eyes.

“Well…,” she began with a half smile. “I did kind of used to…
despise
the girl.”

“Ahhh,” Josh exclaimed with a satisfied grin. He ran his finger down the center of Heather's nose, inducing a full -body tingle the size of Canada. “A little honesty. That's more like it.” He leaned toward her. “Okay, Heather,” he said with the mock seriousness of a Freudian psychotherapist. “This mystery girl. Let's discuss your hatred of this mystery girl. I think it would be very good for you.”

WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THIS MORNING… How to do it justice…

Body Tingle

Back in Ed's skating days, whenever he would take a massive fall, he used to leap right back up to his feet, grin from ear to ear, and scream out a hearty howl to the skies. As he would often explain it, he was announcing his total invincibility to the cruel and powerful gods of extreme sports. He didn't just want the gods to hear him, he wanted anyone in his general vicinity to
listen. He wanted the world to be clear on his personal philosophy. Shred's Golden Rule: No setback was ever a setback. Life was something to be enjoyed and devoured at all times.

Particularly after his accident, people had always seemed awed by his ability to find joy in life no matter what the circumstances. They envied his ballsy nonchalance—his laughter in the face of near death, his humor in the face of self-pity and depression. He was a regular rolling bundle of joy. A French girl named Josephine had once told him he had
joie de vivre,
whatever the hell that meant. He was Shred—the eternal optimist.

But this morning, with his arm wrapped around the bare waist of a sleeping Gaia Moore, her tangled hair pressed against his cheek, her smooth shoulder peeking out from the rumpled purple sheets of his bed, Ed had begun to come to terms with something. Something he hadn't even quite known or recognized until now. Something he probably would have denied for years, if not for the rest of his life, had this morning never existed. And that something was this: His eternal optimism…

It had always sort of been work.

In fact, sometimes it had almost felt like his job. Maintaining that smile, lusting for life, howling joyously at the gods of misfortune. Staying happy. At times it had been exhausting. Because it really wasn't altogether true. That's not to say there wasn't a great
deal of truth to it. Ed
did
have a kind of lust for life. He
did
find the joy and the humor in his existence at all times. But more of the time than he would have cared to admit, he was also kind of adding a little. Throwing in a joke when in truth he was in a crappy mood. Howling when he might have felt more like being silent or nursing his wounds.

In reality, he probably wasn't all that different from the people who supposedly envied him so much. He, just like them, had always experienced the slightest, almost imperceptible sensation of something missing in his life. There was always some kind of void he was trying to fill, something good old Shred might have been trying to cover over.

Until this morning.

The combination of the last perfect night and this glorious morning had clued Ed in to the fact that there was an entirely other kind of happiness. The kind he was experiencing at this moment. A happiness that did not require any kind of work whatsoever. One that did not require that he hide behind a joke or a daredevil stunt or a philosophy. There had simply been no way of understanding the void in his life until he knew the feeling of having that void completely filled. This morning marked the first time Ed had understood what it felt like to truly want nothing more.