Night Moves

I had drawn her near to me, was feeling all round her bum with one hand and wetting the finger of the other in her—

Wow.

How could anyone approach this from a purely academic angle? She certainly couldn’t, at least not today. A particularly frustrating fact considering she was camped out in NYU library for the specific purpose of working on her term paper, or rather for the purpose of deciding the topic of her paper. She knew she wanted to do something that juxtaposed historical erotica against modern works, but that was too broad a topic. And as for brilliant plans to narrow her theme, so far she was drawing a blank. Not good, since she was due to meet with Ronnie on Monday to go over the paper’s thesis and outline.

Usually she was much better at focusing, but today her mind had been all over the place. Maybe because it was a stifling summer Saturday. Or maybe because she’d already finished papers in the two other classes she was taking this summer. She’d piled on a killer course load, as usual, and the demanding schedule was probably getting to her.

Not hardly.

The familiar voice in her head was her own, and she knew exactly what it would say: she wasn’t cowed by a heavy workload. Deadlines and pressure were what got her going. She was an adrenaline jockey all the way, and had been all her life.

No, as much as she hated to admit it, her distraction wasn’t caused by anything relating to her degree program. The explanation was both simple and complicated: Shane.

He’d been her best friend for years, but now he was abandoning her to move from Manhattan back home to Texas, and she still hadn’t quite gotten her head around the fact that he was actually leaving. He’d been in her life for as long as she could remember. They’d done elementary school together, and they’d split the cost of a U-Haul when they’d both come to New York as freshmen, thrilled to be escaping their equally nightmarish families and vowing to help each other through every ordeal the city might throw their way.

Seven years later, Shane had blown through college and law school and was now working as an assistant U.S. Attorney. Though just as ambitious, Ella was moving more slowly, with a degree in history completed and several credits under her belt that went toward her master’s. She was determined to rack up the best academic qualifications. The kind that would get her a job at the Met—or, if her fantasies prevailed, the Louvre. She and Shane might have taken different paths, but they’d gone the distance together.

That he was now leaving wasn’t something she liked to think about. A whole jumble of emotions kept washing over her. Hurt, anger, betrayal. They’d promised each other, but still he was going back. What made it worse was her certainty that Tony was going to propose. How was she supposed to plan a wedding without her best friend there for moral support? Although she had to admit that Shane might balk at that particular duty. She could occasionally talk him into crossing the threshold of Sephora with her, but Shane was a guy’s guy. Wedding planning was probably a little too froufrou for his blood.

Still, she wanted him nearby. And she couldn’t quite get her head around the fact that in two days he’d be outta here. That went against everything she believed in, most particularly her firm belief in happily ever after. Shane was part of hers, his friendship essential. And she hated the idea that they’d be nurturing that friendship across fifteen hundred miles.

She hated it, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Lord knows she’d tried.

Part of her wished Monday would never come, so that he’d never leave. And part of her wished it were already next week, so he’d be long gone and her head could get back to focusing on her work.

Right. Her work.

As if beckoning, the pages fluttered in the breeze, stirred up by the makeshift fan she still held in her hand. Her gaze drifted back down, and the evocative language caught her attention once again.

Ella closed her eyes, her own imagination supplanting the words on the page. She wanted to pretend she was a total academic, interested in the language for its higher literary or scholarly significance.

A nice fantasy but not true.

Instead the language intrigued her, heated her blood just as she’d known it would. And made her wish she’d stayed in the privacy of her own apartment to study rather than coming to the library, where anyone who wandered into her dreary little corner might see her face and figure out exactly what was on her mind.

In the story, the man wasn’t described at all. In her mind, though, he had dark hair, almost black. Tony’s hair, of course, because who else would her imagination conjure? And although that hair could be smooth and debonair, at the moment it was tousled by her fingers, which ran through the coarse strands. A wilder Tony who existed only in her imagination.

His hands were rough, as if he occasionally worked with them, but not gnarled or calloused. They were strong and confident, and as she leaned her head back, his hands kneaded her breasts, his thumb and forefinger finding her nipple and rolling the soft nub between the pads of his fingers.

In her mind’s eye, she arched back, hot wires of pleasure shooting from her breasts all the way down to her clit. He was there, between her thighs, the rough stubble on his cheeks scratching her sensitive skin as his tongue stroked her, a delicious counterpoint to the thrill of his hands on her flesh.

She couldn’t see her lover’s face. Just the dark hair on his head so intimately nestled between her legs, and the broad shoulders, muscles straining under his thin T-shirt as he stroked his hands down her belly, closer and closer to where his mouth was providing such wonderful attention.

She might not be able to see Tony, but she knew his touch. Strong. Confident. Just like the man himself.

Soon the pad of one thumb joined his tongue, and the added sensation sent her almost over the top. His other hand pressed on her lower belly, though, calming her and silently promising even more thrills if she was patient.

Oh, yeah. She could be patient….

She shifted just slightly in her chair, still half aware, thank goodness, that she was in a library and, though her mind might be going crazy, she had to keep her body under control. The devil between her legs shifted, as well, the brush of his cheek against her thigh sending a fresh wave of sparks swarming through her body. She almost moaned aloud, but her breath caught in her throat because right then his head lifted enough so that she could see his eyes—and they were not the deep brown of Tony’s chocolate eyes.

These eyes were emerald green and all too familiar.

No. It couldn’t be. There’s no way he would be in her fantasies.

But then she could see his entire face, and there was no mistaking that fabulous jawline or that devil-may-care grin. She knew this man, all right. This man, with his tongue on her clit and his hands on her body. Oh, yes, she knew him well.

Shane! Her best friend. And a man who didn’t belong within a hundred miles of her fantasies.

So what, she thought, was he doing there now?

THE APARTMENT WAS ONLY three hundred and fifty square feet, and in a space that small the fumes were making him giddy. At least, that’s what Shane Walker told himself as he unscrewed the last of the kitchen cabinets so that he could take the doors out to the fire escape to sand and stain.

The chemicals in the stain had to be getting to him. There was no other explanation. Never mind that he had all eight of the windows open and the fan in the window unit going, and the vent over the stove going and the ceiling fan chugging away at high speed.

Never mind that there was barely a hint of chemical smell in the tiny apartment.

No, he had to be light-headed or giddy or something. Because if he wasn’t, then what excuse did he have for taking a break, settling himself in the middle of Ella’s floor and pawing through the box of old photographs and letters he’d found on the top shelf in the kitchen, just behind the bottle of tequila with the actual worm inside? The bottle she kept but refused to drink from, citing the ick factor of dead invertebrates.

But that’s what he’d done not ten minutes ago, and he felt like a total bastard for doing it. The pictures in the box were tame enough. Pictures of him, of Ella, of the two of them together. Boating, biking, hitchhiking from Houston to Mexico, hanging out on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Souvenirs of the fun they used to have. None of their families, of course. No surprise there. But lots of pictures of their mutual friends. All no big deal.

And all of it none of his business.

He consoled himself with the knowledge that Ella would have happily let him look through the box if he’d asked. He knew she would. They’d been best friends since second grade, and there wasn’t a request he could make that she would deny. For that matter, as far as he knew, there wasn’t a single secret that Ella kept from him. He knew that her tortured relationship with her mom still gave her nightmares, waking her up in a cold sweat all too often. He knew she’d decided, so many years ago, to get a motorcycle license because she’d been surprised and aroused by the vibration between her legs when an old boyfriend had given her a lift home on his Ducati. And he knew that she’d enrolled in Ronnie’s class on erotic fiction as much from prurient interest as from academic fascination.

They’d never actually voiced any plan to be so open; it had just happened as a natural growth of their friendship. By the time they’d reached college, they’d known pretty much everything about each other, from what type of birth control she used to which paralegal he’d fooled around with in the supply room at his first office Christmas party.

They knew everything, he thought, except the one secret that he kept from her. A big one. The biggest of the big. More to the point, the kind of secret that just might make her say no if he asked to look through the box behind the tequila.

But she didn’t know his secret. He hadn’t told her because he’d been too afraid the secret would screw up their friendship, and Shane hadn’t been willing to run that risk. The truth was dangerous. The truth was hard and painful and wonderful all at the same time.

The truth was he loved Ella Davenport.

Looking back, he supposed he’d loved her from the first moment he’d seen her. Right there next to the slide in the playground at Sam Houston Elementary School. They’d both been seven, and he’d tripped and fallen, his very drippy Fudgsicle flying out of his hand. It had landed smack on her pretty pink dress and, unlike a lot of girls who would have yelled and cried, Ella had just laughed, brushed off the dress—making an even bigger smear—and offered to share her Eskimo Pie bar with him.

From that day Ella had become his best friend, his closest confidante. Never once had he thought of her as more than a friend, though. Not once in all those years in Texas.

Not once until about six months ago, when he’d come home from a particularly bad date, called Ella on the phone to bitch about the so-when-will-you-join-a-big-law-firm-and-be-a-partner? bimbo he’d escorted to dinner and suddenly realized.

Ella.

The woman who’d been there in front of him all along. She was the woman for him. Absolutely and one hundred percent.

Not that he’d been able to tell her. Not then. The downside of knowing a woman as well as he knew Ella was that he was all too familiar with her quirks relating to relationships. If an ex-boyfriend said he really just wanted to be friends, no problem. But if the poor guy still had a boner for her—or, even worse, flat out said he was still in love with her—then once broken up, they were really broken up. She even went so far as to delete his entry from her Palm Pilot.

“Too awkward,” she’d told him once. “Billy Crystal was only half right,” she’d explained, referring to When Harry Met Sally, one of her favorite movies. “Guys and girls can be friends. Look at us. But only if sex and romantic love never enter the equation. If they do, every chance for happily ever after is shot to hell…” She’d trailed off, shaking her head, but he’d known what she’d meant. Ella’s life hadn’t been easy, and she’d survived the rough places by acting tough. Underneath it all, though, she was a cockeyed optimist, absolutely certain that everything would be rainbows and sunshine in the end. Hell, maybe that’s why she clung so fiercely to adventures like skydiving and rappelling—she innately believed that nothing could possibly go wrong, that the only possible outcome was a good one.

“God, can you imagine if we’d ever slept together?” she’d asked him during that same conversation. “How would I have lived without you in my life all these years?”