Blue Notes (16 page)

“Don’t do that again or I
will
have to take you home.”

“Straight ahead to sex?” I ask, not knowing if that’s such a bad idea. I’m heady and drunk, just playing with this man, sparring with him, breathing him with every intake of breath. “You’ve got me in the mind for it, I gotta admit.”

“No,” he says, his drawl pinched tight. “I’d drop you off at the dorm, then head to my bed. Alone.”

“Then when?” I ask, genuinely curious. “What are we waiting for?”

“Not waiting, sugar.
Delaying
. Do you really want to think about what comes after, once we go all the way?”

He’s frowning, maybe contemplating what I am. Beyond our first time . . . I don’t want to think about it. Taking it slow, with these beautifully frustrating teases, rules, and laughing games, keeps it playful. That’s all I want. Being playful with a gorgeous guy who wants to be with me.

When said like that, letting this linger is a really great idea.

“Open your eyes, Keeley.” I do as I’m told, which is damn easy when it comes to Jude. It’s his power over me. I suspect he’s got a lot of power over a lot of people. “Tell me where you’re at.”

“Delay away.”

Just before delving deep for an intense kiss, I wind up sitting on his lap. I don’t know how. It just seems like the place to be when he kisses me. I like the tartness of the tonic and lime on his tongue, and the way his arms crisscross my back. He knows what he wants from me, how he wants me. That’s so damn hot. “So, for the foreseeable future, you’re mine.”

“Yours?”

“Mine to teach, flatter, surprise. Having power over you is keeping me up at night . . . as much as the idea of your first time.”

“Even if I’ve given you that power?”

“Especially that.” He pulls me close. “Hostile takeovers are for boardrooms, where I wear a suit and a scowl and nobody likes me very much.”

I go still at those words. I touch his cheeks with unsteady fingers. “I can’t imagine that.”

He grins, all showy arrogance. “You would’ve that first night at Yamatam’s.”

“We’re at a
way
different club, and you’re not wearing a suit.” I kiss his nose, then his mouth, then his chin. “And I like you very much.”

“This is give and take,” he says, bathing me in the hot molasses of his drawl. “This is what I’ve been missing. Believe what you will, Keeley, but you’re seducing me just as much in return.”

 Twenty-Two 

M
idnight arrives like Cinderella’s closing bell. Sure enough, people who are wearing next to nothing congregate around a distant door. I wonder what’s behind it, those mysteries, but no way am I ready. My head would probably pop off. I’ve been doing my best to keep up with Jude.

He has me so worked up. Private words. Kisses and touches—some as slight as a brush of fingers down my throat, some as suggestive as running his hands up the back of my dress, cupping and squeezing my ass. In full view.

“Tell me when I go too far,” he’d said.

“You assume you’ll go too far.”

With a chuckle, he smiled against my breastbone, where cleavage would’ve awaited him had he been with some other girl. “Okay, how about, tell me when I go too far too fast.”

“That sounds just about perfect.”

I can’t get enough of his skin. Even as we exit the club, with me casting one last glance toward the dungeon door, I’m clinging to his bare upper arm. He’s tied the flannel around his waist.

He follows my gaze, with a last look of his own. “You curious?” he asked, his eyebrows high.

I laugh and lean into him as we reach the top step and exit back onto the street. “Dungeons are for another lifetime.”

I shudder unexpectedly.

He pulls me closer, a questioning expression marring the sweeping wonder of his lower lip. “What was that for?”

“I . . .” I swallow my uncertainties and how the word “dungeon” doesn’t do a damn thing for me. “I think you’re intimidating enough.”

“Intimidating? I don’t know if I like that.”

“You are,” I say softly.

Something has happened tonight, between us, that has a lot to do with seduction and not so much to do with actual sex. We’ve wrapped each other in a spell. It’s so beautiful and hypnotic that I can put away my fatalism. I lean into him even more closely, letting myself pretend, if only for the length of our walk back to his car, that our future is a pretty one.

Our agreement that we’re not ready to take the next step tonight continues to be a relief. We’ll have more walks. I don’t have to pretend those.

We continue in silence. Part of me wishes I could just think what I want to confess and he’ll hear it. My past by osmosis. Just . . . get it out in the open. Most of me wants to close it all away so he’ll know me as Keeley, kiss me and hold me and care for me as Keeley. No one else, because that old life keeps tripping up the good things I have now.

“I’m sure the people in Slink are having a good time doing dungeon-y things, but they’re some jump in evolution compared to me. I can’t imagine past kissing, and maybe getting naked.” I laugh, a little hysterical at the edges. “Don’t worry. I diligently read the high school health textbook. I know how it all works.”

“Noted,” he says with a slight grin. I love his grins. That’s all I’ll admit about loving pieces of him, for now, because it’s been about eleven minutes since I met him and I’m not a completely idiotic fool. Just a
mostly
idiotic fool. He could smile at me and I’d do anything. If he ever finds that out, I’m in real trouble.

Thing is, the whole nature of our agreement means he probably already knows that. He’s experienced. He’s smart. He knows just where to touch me. Maybe that means he knows how to read me too.

“But,” I force myself to say. “I can’t imagine it for me, even after . . . after how we’ve been . . . playing. I can get it, you know—people liking what people like. I like . . .”

He stops beneath the lights of a quiet bar with outdoor seating. Light halos him. The sheen of his hair becomes angelic around his shadowed face. I see the top of his nose and the set of his chin and the deep hollows beneath his high cheekbones. “What do you like, Keeley?”

“Being safe.” The words jump out of me so quickly that I follow them with something close to a hiccup.

“Being onstage isn’t safe,” he says. “Being exposed that way.”

I nod.

He folds me into his arms. He’s dressed to blend in with every other twentysomething in New Orleans. He could be some grad assistant and no one would blink an eye. I like that he’s revealed himself to me this way, and I can’t help but adore how tightly he holds me. I feel like he’s holding me earthbound when I could float away on bad memories—no, be carried away by them, hoisted by a monstrous murder of crows.

“You’re here with me,” he says. “And we have some evening left. Let’s get a drink, if you’re up to it. Or anything else . . .”

I kiss the underside of his chin, feel him swallow. “I can imagine a lot. But a soda would be great.”

We find a table next to the sidewalk, where we become just another couple, just another pair of voices among dozens. My eyes are lazy, sleepy feeling, although I’m charged up like lightning ready to strike. It’s early October. I’m a late Midwestern thunderstorm—that last gasp before the cold comes. I don’t want to be cold. I want to sizzle. Jude’s doing a damn good job of making that happen.

“I want a couple less mysteries,” I say after taking a sip of Sprite. “Can we do that? A little at a time?”

Sitting close, he strokes the hair back from my face. “That’s the plan, remember? Loose as it is, the plan is a little at a time. Do you know what’s so good about it?”

“Hm?”

“It could happen at any time. Tonight. Weeks from now. There’s no telling how the moment will happen. That’s . . .” He shakes his head, then kisses me, hard, swift, without holding back. “That’s sexy as fuck.”

I shiver with want. I’m as wet as I can remember being, even more than when we were in the backseat of his car. Everything about me is humming, like an orchestra warming up. Nothing’s in tune yet, but it will be.

“So . . . we could go to your place?”

He hesitates, then takes a drink from whatever he ordered—scotch, I think. “Would you mind if we went to a hotel?”

The heat inside me dims.
Be honest.
Even about the hard stuff. “Are there things at home you don’t want me to see?”

“No, more like a person I don’t want you to see. Adelaide comes and goes when she wants. I don’t care if she knows about us—”

“She already does.”

“Ah.” He circles his forefinger around the rim of the tumbler of scotch. “She’s always been nosy when it comes to my personal life.”

“Pot, kettle, black?”

“Yeah, except I’m twenty-six. Eight years is a big difference. I don’t feel like turning on the lights at home and finding what’s his fuck’s coat in the foyer.”

“Dr. Saunders.”

“If you want to give him a different name, then yeah. Him.”

“You could text her? See what’s she doing?”

“If she gets in a mood, she won’t reply. It’s worse than not having asked in the first place.” He shakes his head vehemently. “She’s not going to screw with me tonight. Damn stubborn girl. You’d think—” He bites his molars together so hard that I hear them click. “Forget it, sugar. I didn’t mean to put all that out there.”

“It’s okay,” I say, glad my voice is steady. “Family can be tricky.”

He holds one of my wrists, there on the table, with the bar’s ambient lighting turning my paler skin and his tan skin into something symbiotic. A joining of sorts. It’s almost more intimate than how he touched me in the club. It’s possessive. I love that too.
Ugh.
I really need to find a thesaurus and get a stronger vocabulary going. A girl who says “love” too much in her head starts to get ideas. I don’t need any more ideas than I already have.

“You hide it really well,” he says. “How nervous you are.”

“If I hide it so well, how do you know I’m nervous?”

He thumbs my wrist again. “Pulse like a butterfly in flight.”

I drag in a gulp of heavy nighttime air. “I think it’s been building in me for a long time. It’s harder to loosen up than I can explain. Harder than just willing it to happen. But it’s different with you.”

“So apparently I intimidate you, make your pulse race, and inspire you to set off fire alarms?”

I laugh, which feels good. “You’re impossible, you know that?”

“That’s a step up from arrogant asshole.”

“Oh no. You’re not out of that doghouse yet.”

“Jude Villars?”

I flinch and turn to find a couple standing on the sidewalk, within a few feet of our little table. The guy is middle-aged, maybe in his forties. The woman is way younger, although I think she’s already had collagen work on her lips. I take an instant disliking to both of them, not based on anything they’ve done—but because Jude snatches his hand away from my wrist. He picks up the tumbler and downs the scotch in a single gulp.

“Wes Templeton,” he says, standing quickly. “It’s been a while.”

They exchange handshakes. Jude angles his body so that I no longer have a view of the man’s face. The woman has knowing eyes, jaded eyes. She keeps looking between me and Jude with this itty bitty smirk on her fat lips.

I stare at my glass of Sprite. What I already drank is bubbling and sour in my stomach. I’d been so sure Jude’s suggestion about a hotel room was to keep me hidden. He convinced me otherwise, because Adelaide was an explanation that makes sense. But how can I believe any of it when he and this Templeton guy keep talking and Jude still has his back to me? I was hoping, in some secret garden of hope I didn’t know I tended, that if given the chance . . . he’d want to show me off.

Or at least introduce me.

The guy Templeton made sure his trophy wife got an introduction. Eve was her name. I don’t have a name right now. I have a glass of soda and a basket empty of expectations. I feel lower than low when he says his farewells and offers a masculine wave goodbye.

“I haven’t seen him in a year at least,” Jude says when he retakes his seat. “He was a consulting lawyer on a tricky merger. Nice guy.”

“Seemed that way.” My tongue feels like a swollen sponge. Then I shake my head with a sick little laugh. “And I thought the hotel was the bad part.”

“What does that mean?” His jaw is tight. I can see it in his eyes, that he knows what he did and he isn’t going to apologize. Our evening, my hopes, his seduction—they’re all in splinters now.

That doesn’t make me shrink back, thank God. My voice is quiet but strong when I meet his stare head-on. “You said the eight years between you and Adelaide was a lot. I’m barely three years older than her.” I wave a hand toward where Templeton and his wife had walked into the night. “Apparently that means I’m not worthy of the courtesy of an introduction to some company guy.”

“That’s my daytime,” he says tersely. “My
life
. It doesn’t have anything to do with you and me.”

“Why not?” I cross my arms. My thunderstorm power is ebbing away like clouds clearing. We’re whipping up a storm of a different kind—a tornado bearing down. “Guys like that
are
your daytime. They’re your real life. I don’t even know what you look like in sunlight. Okay, so you’re not hiding me from some person back at your house, but could you take me to a cocktail party with your colleagues? Could you handle how they’d look at you, with a student on your arm? You didn’t even have the guts to do it right here.”

“I do what I want,” he said stonily. I’ve never heard that tone of voice from him. He’s pissed off. That much is loud and clear. “I’ve done what I wanted since my parents died because no one’s allowed to contradict me. The legal paperwork says as much. I’ve had to earn the rest of my authority by impressing guys like Templeton and making sure they know who’s in charge.”

I’m numb all over. “And being seen with me would put an end to all that?”

“Now, you listen up, sugar.”

I rub my arms with the return of that word.
Sugar
. No, not the word itself. He’s turned it into an endearment. I hate the return of that tone. I’m lost all of a sudden, reminded that I’m just a small, disposable part of his big, important life. I’m treading water with no land in sight and sharks rubbing against my legs as they circle.

“What?” I ask.

I sound like my old self. My scared self. Because I
am
scared. Jude Villars has reminded me, loud and clear, of what I’ve tried telling myself over and over. It’s easier to leave possessions behind, rather than have them, cherish them, and see them taken away.