My Only Vice

He continued to watch Rosie as he enjoyed a few more sips, and couldn’t help thinking she looked more and more panicked with every passing second. Something wasn’t right with her. She just had some kind of vibe coming off her at the moment that wasn’t in keeping with her usual easygoing self. And he couldn’t help thinking it was his presence in her shop that was causing it.

Maybe Ed Dinwiddie was on to something, he thought before he could stop himself. Maybe everything about Rosie wasn’t on the up-and-up, after all. Because somehow Sam was starting to get the impression that she’d been doing something just now, before he came into the shop, that she shouldn’t have been doing. He honestly couldn’t say what, but right now she seemed edgy and anxious, as if she feared she was about to be caught.

Unable to help himself—hey, you could take the cop out of vice, but you couldn’t take the suspicion out of the vice cop—he drove his gaze around the shop as surreptitiously as he could, trying to discern if anything was amiss or out of place. But the place was tidy to a fault, and even more quaint than the police station. The dark hardwood floor was buffed to a rich sheen, the walls were painted forest green, striped with wooden shelves that were overflowing with plants and flowers and pots. An antique cash register sat on the countertop to his left, behind which were more shelves, more plants, more flowers, more pots. There was a door leading to a back room that was open, and Sam could see more of the same beyond, along with tables and stools and flower arrangements in varying stages of completion.

For the first time, he noticed the smell of the place, a mixture of sweet blossoms, cinnamon tea and loamy earth. The only window was the one to the right of where they stood, the faint golden sunlight filtering through it the only light present at the moment. From Malcolm’s Music Mart next door, he could hear the faint strains of something classical and heavy on the horns, music from another time tumbling into a room that might as well have sprung from the same century. All combined, the impressions gave the shop an otherworldly ambiance, where Sam could almost believe time had stopped and he and Rosie were the only people left on the planet.

It was such a whimsical thought for such a practical man. What the hell had come over him to make him think like that? Shaking the odd sensations out of his head almost literally, he downed what was left of his tea and set the mug on a different shelf from the clean ones. Then he looked at Rosie again.

Big mistake, he immediately realized. Because where before she had looked incredibly, well…turned-on, now, suddenly, she looked thoroughly and profoundly aroused. Not only that, but she hadn’t dropped the hand with which she’d been reaching for his mug, and it still hovered near Sam’s shoulder, as if she were having trouble deciding what she wanted to do with it.

And suddenly, completely unbidden, Sam had a very good idea of what she should do with it. Not only that, but he had a good idea for his own hand, too. In fact, the idea was so strong, and so demanding, he couldn’t push it out of his brain. Because there, in his mind’s eye, he saw himself and Rosie, standing right where they were in the middle of the flower shop, her fingers wrapped possessively around his cock as she jerked him to completion, him with his long middle finger buried in her damp slit as he drilled her for all he was worth.

And good God, where had that thought come from? he wondered as he did his best to squash it. More to the point, why wasn’t it going anywhere, no matter how hard he tried to push it away?