Adrian Lessons (9 page)

Nope. No luck. “I still can’t believe you sprung that on me,” I say, to disguise the fact that I’m currently mired in primordial lust.

“It was an emergency. Adrian’s an expert. It worked, right? Besides, you loved it.”

“Pfffftggggh. No, like. Nah,” I splutter convincingly.

Marie giggles. Must change subject quickly. “Mostly I can’t believe it was
you
who came up with it. You, who normally makes apples jealous of your color when anyone mentions sex.”

Her jaw juts out determinedly, sort of like He-Man’s. “If I’m going to make this my career, I have to overcome my…religious upbringing. I’ve accepted that. You can’t write my sex scenes forever.”

I pat her shoulder. “As long as you promise to never compare vaginas to flowers.”

“I never got why people do that,” she shrugs. “It looks more like a cuttlefish than a flower.”

I reach for the keyboard and type
He reaches out and strokes my slimy cuttlefish,
and both of us dissolve into laughter.

“Anyway, I’m heading out to meet with my study group and I wanted to say goodbye.” She rests her elbows on my shoulders and kisses the top of my head. “I’m glad you’ve got your writing mojo back, Cleo.” She winks. “We’ll have another session with Adrian soon.”

I try to make an unenthusiastic noise, but all that comes out is a gurgle. Marie waves, grabs her bag, and leaves the apartment.

And I rip off my pants.

No, literally. I yank off my pants so fast that I trip over them and end up on a heap on the floor.

I touch myself, imagining the heat of Adrian’s breath, picturing his sizzling eyes, his chest, his stomach…I rub myself and imagine it’s his hand down there. It doesn’t take long for the orgasm to come, racing up and down my body, but when it leaves me, I just feel empty. Like I was craving a cheeseburger and all I got was two buns with a slice of cardboard in the middle.

“I hope that cop’s car breaks down in front of a baked beans factory today,” I mutter to the poster of
The Notebook
.

Three more minutes and I would have been fine. I wouldn’t have been left with this crazy energy trapped inside me, turning me into Horny Cleo Extraordinaire—

The door opens.

I scream and roll under my desk, my traitor pants across the room where I stupidly threw them.

“Cleo?” Marie calls out. “Where’d you go?”

“Canada,” I squeak.

“Why are your pants on the kitchen table?”

“God works in mysterious ways.”

“… Anyway, I just wanted to wish you luck on your date with Adrian tonight. Seeya!”

The door closes again, and I crawl out, pantsless, from under my desk. I’d totally forgotten about my date with Adrian.

That’s a lie. All I’ve been thinking about is my date with Adrian. And every time I do, my stomach twists with a weird Betty Crocker mixture of anxiety, desire, and embarrassment. Mix it with milk, ten minutes in the oven and you’ll have…

What will I have after this date with this green-eyed boy who blew into my life out of nowhere, pissed me off, turned me on, and left me totally confused?

To distract myself, I collect all of Marie’s romance paperbacks and organize them alphabetically. I clean the fridge. I sweep the floor. I do ten jumping jacks. I reread the sex scene I wrote this afternoon and then Lower Cleo demands another rendezvous with Mr. and Mrs. Fingers.

Eventually, I stand in front of my closet, trying to remember if there’s a Harry Potter spell that summons a perfect outfit. “I don’t know how to speak Latin,” I say.

The closet ignores me.

“Give me an outfit that says ‘Last night I had three different sex dreams about you and my clitoris is writing you love letters, but I don’t want to date you because you’re obviously a playboy and you intimidate the heck out of me and I don’t want things to turn out like how they did with Eric.”

If closets could roll their eyes, this one would.

I take a deep breath, slick my hair back into a ponytail, and dive in. The end result is an outfit that, even if it does not say everything on my list, at least does not say ‘I am a nun.’

I probably don’t want my outfit to be talking that much anyway.

There’s a knock on the door.

“Goddammit, Marie,” I yell, slamming my bedroom door and stalking across the kitchen. “What, are you gonna pretend like you lost your key just so you can catch me masturbating again—”

The door opens, and the Sex King is framed in my doorway.

He raises one eyebrow. “Again?”

I panic. “Masturbating is actually Venezuelan for ‘doing homework on the couch in a totally nonsexual way.’ We only speak Venezuelan in this apartment. Mangez-moi?”

“That’s French.” He leans against the door frame, hands tucked into his pockets, his bicep bulging slightly as he presses against the wood. My uterus starts ringing the alarm bells, assuming he’s here to finish what was so rudely interrupted on Thursday, and warmth floods my abdomen.

“That’s some white imperialist nonsense right there,” I rasp.

He smiles gently. “My car’s downstairs.”

And just like that, ten minutes later, I’m sitting in the front passenger seat of the Sex King’s BMW. The sight of such an expensive car momentarily calms Lower Cleo, who has been crossing her arms and tapping her foot, glaring with an expression that says,
There is absolutely no reason in the world why your skirt should still be on.

“This is an awesome car,” I marvel, running my fingers over the leather.

He winks as he pulls away from our apartment building. “The seats recline really far back.”

I clear my throat, drowning out the part of my body demanding I fling my skirt out the window and acquaint Adrian’s face with my crotch. “Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.” His strong, tanned hand rests on the wheel. “Although I promise there’s no fountains involved.”

“What about wetness?” The words jump out of my mouth before I can stop them. “Sorry. I think my uterus just hijacked my mouth.”

Brilliant, Cleo.

He reaches over, running one finger underneath my bottom lip, looking away from the road briefly. “When is it my turn to hijack your mouth?”

There is no way I’m going to make it through this night without my clothes violently flying off my body of their own volition.

He drives in the same direction as last night, away from Boston, and for a second I wonder if he actually is taking me back to that fountain—I would be willing to engage in a
Kill Bill
-style revenge plot against that cop—but he takes a different exit. We drive through a small town and park in a big lot next to a sign that says
Festival Parking
.

“Festival?” I ask as we get out of the car. I note his large backpack.

“It’s full of sex toys and lube,” my uterus advises me, and I go weak at the knees.

“Yeah, the Harvest Festival.” He turns to smile at me. “They do it every September in this town. Found it online. It seemed like more fun than a boring restaurant.”

“You were so adamant about dinner, though,” I say. He takes my elbow and helps me over a pothole. It’s such a tender gesture that it surprises me.

“Dinner’s coming, don’t worry.”

I shrug—nothing wrong with festival food, hot dogs and fried dough—but all thoughts of food are driven out of my head as we round the corner of a copse of trees standing behind the lot, and that’s saying something, considering that half of my brainpower is generally devoted to thinking about food.

It’s a full-out festival, with huge rides spinning screaming teenagers against the matte backdrop of the sky, carnies waving pink stuffed bears at passersby from behind makeshift countertops, and the scent of French fries and vinegar thick in the air. (Okay, I guess not all thoughts of food were driven from my head.) Colorful lights line every tent flap and roller-coaster. At the back of the fair, an enormous Ferris wheel stretches over the fairgrounds, rotating slowly and spilling light over the ground.

He offers his hand. “Come on.”

I look at it. Holding hands is a totally different ballgame from being felt up. Holding hands implies an emotional connection.

It’s stupid, but I take it.

He leads me across the fairgrounds, past some torture device called the Zipper and past the stalls selling food and cheap plastic sunglasses. He seems to have a very particular destination in mind. We stop only to buy ride tickets from an oversized lady in a tiny booth.

Then he brings me to the Ferris wheel.

“We’re gonna ride that?” I say slowly, pointing up at the mammoth thing. “I’ve always thought Ferris wheels looked better from far away. Like celebrities.”

“I have a surprise for you at the top.”

His eyes are glinting.
A surprise.
A surprise that, statistically, probably involves his hand up my skirt.

“Okay,” my mouth says.

We step up to the boarding line together. Adrian hands over our tickets, and I swear I see him exchange a wink with the ride operator. But I don’t have much time to think about, because then we’re in a rickety little cart attached to a giant metal wheel that will probably detach from its base and fall over sideways, crushing us—

“You okay?” Adrian asks me, drawing a little closer, and his presence drives away the fear like a bright light splinters the dark.

“I’m fine.” I’ll let him put his hand up my skirt, get my orgasm so I can stop tearing my pants off like an insane person whenever Marie leaves the apartment, and ignore the fact that we are lifting higher and higher off the ground.

“Was yesterday okay for you?” The light from the golden bulbs on the side of the Ferris wheel illuminates the mild concern in his face. “It probably wasn’t how you were expecting to spend your evening.”

Is he kidding? Did he miss the part where I was announcing how wet I was, that I wanted to taste him? I was so turned on, it was like being drunk. And I’ve been hungover all day.

“It was okay,” I sniff, totally cool. Then the Ferris wheel creaks and I fly into his lap like a cat with a rocket sticking out of its butt.

I expect him to feed me a line, but instead he moves his hand in slow, comforting circles on my back. “You don’t need to be afraid,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

I straighten, though I’m tempted to lie there for the rest of my life. Our cart is almost to the top of the Ferris wheel. I’m sweating like a cold glass of water left out in the sun, but soon we’ll be on our way down.

Except, at the moment when we’re at the very top, the wheel grinds to a halt.

I swing to look at Adrian, expecting my panic to be reflected in his face, but instead he’s calmly opening his backpack, setting out a tiny folding table with Tupperwares of food—salmon sandwiches, rice pilaf, sautéed green beans, and a bottle of champagne. “Here’s your surprise.”

I try to thank him, but all that escapes my lips is a little bit of hyperventilation.

“Shit.” He puts down his backpack as he realizes. “You’re afraid of heights.”

“Who’s afraid of heights? Not me. Sheryl Crow is afraid heights, though. I definitely don’t know this because I googled ‘phobia of heights.’ I wouldn’t google that because it’s not something I have,” I babble calmly.

His eyes widen. “Oh, fuck.”

“It’s okay! It’s probably only a little broken and they’ll fix it quick and we won’t even die at all, most likely.”

“Ahhhh,” he groans like he’s in pain, massaging his forehead. “I screwed up, Cleo. I bribed the ride operator to freeze this thing when our cart was at the top. We’ll be up here for fifteen minutes. I thought it’d be romantic.”

“Oh,” I say in a small voice. He planned this out, and I’m ruining it.

“I should have got his number.” His words are tortured. “Then I could have called him and told him to start it back up. I could try yelling down…”

“No! He’d be in huge trouble if his boss found out, I bet. It’s fine—I’ll be fine. It’s not so bad now that the wind isn’t blowing, And this food looks really good. I wanna try it.”

“Wow,” he says softly.

“What?”

“Most people wouldn’t put the career of a carnie over being stuck in a terrifying situation, that’s all.”

“I wouldn’t call it terrifying. More like mildly alarming.” His hand is resting on my knee, and somehow his touch calms me. I pull the top off a Tupperware, forcing the fear deep down into my stomach, where hopefully I can bury it with food and booze. “Did you make all this?”

He waves a hand. “It’s just simple stuff.”

I take a bite of the sandwich. The baguettes are crispy and fresh, the fish flaky and moist. “This is better than tacos. Which is the highest compliment I’m capable of paying.”

“Then I’ll accept it gladly,” he says, handing me a glass of champagne.

“I had a dream we had a picnic last night,” I say between bites, driving away my fear with words.

“Oh? What happened after?”

It’s like he knows that I fucked Dream Adrian on the picnic blanket until the sun set.

We eat together, sipping champagne at the top of the Ferris wheel. Eventually, my nerves settle enough for me to appreciate the view. The lights of the fairground stretch below us, people illuminated like toys.

“I’m really sorry,” he says. I glance up and his eyes are shadowed with genuine regret. “I got one shot with you and I blew it. I should have checked to make sure you were okay with heights.”

Something deep in my heart wrenches. “No! This is still amazing. The food is delicious. And honestly, for a date idea, this is actually pretty brilliant. You should try it out on the next girl.”

“What if I don’t want there to be a next girl?”

He has to be joking, but there’s a subtle emotion behind his words that tells me he’s not. I finish off my champagne and lean forward, the light breeze filtering through the wire cage we’re in and playing with my hair, and ask the question that’s been bothering me all week.

“Why did you want to go out with me so bad, Adrian?” I don’t take my eyes off him. “I know who you are and I know your reputation. This isn’t something you do. You could go out with any girl at Statham—”

Just then, a gust of wind hits the side of our cart, pushing it from side to side. My whole body freezes. Just as I’m about to cry out, though, Adrian knocks over the tiny table, reaches out, and pulls me onto his lap, wrapping me in his arms.