Learning Curves (12 page)

Fling
. She didn’t finish what she was saying; Brandon interrupted first.

“Still a lot of fun,” he whispered. A tiny thrill zipped through her at his admission.

He thought what they had was fun?

She was studious. Intellectual. Determined. But she couldn’t remember anyone who’d ever thought she was fun.

She grinned. Pretending to search for a more comfortable position, she wriggled against him, enjoying the way his breath caught as her ass brushed against his cock in a not so accidental way. No longer flaccid, it pressed insistently into her flesh. He wanted her again. Because, miracle of miracles, he thought she was fun.

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” She feigned innocence.

He laughed, his hand stroking across her hip before dipping down toward her damp curls. His finger brushed against her outer lips before dancing away to touch her inner thighs, spreading liquid heat across her core. He pressed against her clit and she jerked. After the orgasm she’d just experienced, she should be beyond arousal, spent, yet at the lightest of touches, she was ready to begin again. He moved closer now and she could feel his cock even more clearly now, not fully engorged but unmistakably stiffer than it had been.

“I don’t do fun very often,” he confessed. Leanne was surprised. He seemed so easygoing, so unencumbered by worry or self-doubt. She twisted around to face him. It was intimate here in the darkness, only his silhouette visible.

“Really?”

He sighed, his exhalation warm against her temple. Somehow the dark made it easier for her to ask such bold questions. Normally, she wouldn’t quiz someone like this but it had suddenly become important that she know what he really thought of her.

“Yeah.”

She waited, sensing there was more to it than a simple one-word answer, and after a long pause, he continued. “I’ve been on my own for…well, for a long time now. Since I was a kid. And between school and work and research and dancing, there just wasn’t a lot of time left over for anything else.”

In the silence that followed his explanation, Leanne wrestled with the questions crowding her mind. If she asked them, they’d cross a line in the sand, moving from casual to something else entirely. A friendship? A relationship?

Whatever it was, she knew it was too late to keep up the pretense. Here, in his arms, she the line had already been breached. They were no longer merely strangers embarking on a one-night stand.

“Where were your parents? Your family? Couldn’t they help?”

He laughed but the sound held no humor. “My parents were never much on success. They divorced when I was ten. My dad had been gone a lot of the time, so I didn’t really miss him. When he was sober, he was a long-haul trucker. When he wasn’t, he just made life miserable for the rest of us.”

What a barren childhood.

“I lived with my grandma after the divorce.”

“The one who hung your certificate?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. She was good to me and wanted me to do well, but it didn’t last and I had to move back in with my mom a few years later.”

“Why?” she asked, her fingers stroking the taut plains of his shoulders. She stopped, pressing against a knot of tension, and he groaned in appreciation.

“Nana died,” he said. “Heart attack. Mom didn’t really want me. She’d remarried and having me around was just a reminder of past mistakes. Brian wasn’t a bad guy or anything but he had his own kids, so he just let me do my own thing ’til I was old enough to get away and live on my own.”

And in those scant words, Leanne could make out the loneliness and fear that shaped him into the man he was today. He’d overcome physical and material deprivations but the emotional deprivations had marked him far more deeply. No wonder he claimed to have no time for fun. For all intents and purposes, he’d been on his own since he was a boy, shouldering burdens and expectations no child should have to carry.

She tried to keep her voice light, not wanting him to suspect how his history had affected her. “So why dance? You could have done a sports scholarship, gone into something more—” she tried to find a word that didn’t sound insulting, “—traditional.”

His lips twitched but he latched gratefully on to the new subject. “Wasn’t good enough. Lots of places offered. I played baseball in high school, football, some volleyball too. But it was just a few thousand dollars to play on the second or third string. I couldn’t pay my own way with that kind of money. I needed a full scholarship or I’d never see the inside of a lecture hall.” He shrugged and continued, “Then one of my guidance counselors suggested I try applying to dance. Turns out, they’re desperate for men. Wellington offered the best scholarship, four years tuition. Not my living expenses or books but it was better than any other offer I got and I was stupid grateful.”

He laughed again and this time there was real humor in his voice. “It took me most of my first year to get it through my head that guys like to dance too.”

“And did you?”

“Yeah, I kept thinking I was going to put in my four years, get a minor in something practical like accounting or business but somehow, I found myself spending more and more time in the studio. It just…it just felt like I fit there, you know? Then I started working for June, at the club, and everything seemed to click.” His voice was wistful.

“You should be proud. I can’t imagine overcoming those odds and succeeding like you have.”

“You know something?”

“What’s that?”

“I keep expecting someone to come and take it all away. That they’ll figure out I’m a fraud who doesn’t deserve the chances he’s been given. Straighten out the irregularities and send me back to where I belong.”

“No one thinks that.”

“I’m the odd one out, Leanne. Everyone else belongs here. I just lucked into it.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it.” He smiled at her firm statement but Leanne knew exactly what he meant.

She’d spent years being the odd one out too, though she’d never gone without as Brandon so clearly had. She’d always been too smart, too brainy, too lost in her books to fit in. In academia, her weaknesses had become her greatest assets and she’d come to love the sense of belonging she’d found almost as much as the intellectual challenges. But her parents loved her, provided for her, made sure she had all the opportunities she could ever want.

Brandon had none of that.

He’d been forced to do it all alone.

Now, as a man, he chose to be alone. It was where he was comfortable. Where he fit in. Leanne understood him better now and knew why he chose to live the way he did. She’d been the first to claim that their relationship had a time limit. He’d agreed. Now, after getting to know him better, she saw that her motives weren’t as clear-cut.

If things had been different, she knew she could have cared for Brandon. Cared for him deeply. But no matter how good the sex, there could be no future for either of them. Not together, at least.

He’d told her their first night together what she could expect.

He didn’t do relationships.

It wasn’t personal. It was just how he was wired.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for the hurt of his past or for her sadness at the finality of her realization but she couldn’t stop the words escaping. “I’m so, so sorry, Brandon.”

His hand brushed away a strand of hair and he dropped a soft kiss on her lips. He rolled onto his back, pulling her across his body, his shaft probing her moistness insistently. He reached toward the bedside table once again and deftly sheathed himself.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, sliding slowly inside. Inch by inch, she could feel herself expand, stretching to fit his rigid form, before she began to rock against him, her thighs clenching and releasing in a slow, measured rhythm. “My life is what it is. I can’t change the past. Neither can you.”

She wanted to exhort him not to give up on the idea of love but the words lodged in her mouth and she couldn’t get them past the lump in her throat. After all, who was she to lecture anyone about the right and wrong way to live life? It wasn’t as if she was a paragon of balance and happiness. Still, even if she couldn’t say the words, she could show him. Show him with her hands and her mouth and her body.

She didn’t know if he could discern her message or not, but they made love again, slowly this time, their movements soft and gentle, as they rocked and swayed together, building toward their mutual pleasure.

Professor Armstrong’s office was cluttered with nearly forty years of research. Books lined the shelves from floor to ceiling: textbooks, paperbacks and antique leather-bound tomes. A framed poster from an international conference held in Dusseldorf in 1975 hung on the wall. A computer sat on the battered desk while on the windowsill, a neglected spider plant struggled to live.

It was, give or take the placement of the desk and the state of the plant, identical to every university office Leanne had ever sat in and it represented everything to which she aspired. Now, sipping the coffee her advisor had produced from his ancient coffeemaker, they neared the end of their biweekly review of Leanne’s latest chapter.

She’d been working on her thesis for more than two years now. In that time she’d spent countless hours reading, writing draft after draft, revising the three hundred page paper until, at times, she felt like Jack Nicholson’s character in
The Shining
, manically typing nonsense words over and over, until they had no meaning at all. But now, as she leaned back in the office chair and took another sip of coffee, she felt a surprising sense of satisfaction. All work and no play
did
make Leanne a dull girl. She finally found time to play and she’d never felt better.

Everything in her life was on track.

Armstrong’s concerns weren’t as serious as he’d made out. He wanted her to rework one of her arguments in the second-to-last chapter, and marked up the draft with his usual grammatical fervor, hunting down every misplaced semicolon with religious fanaticism. But today, not even his liberal application of red ink could dampen her mood.

Her body was loose and relaxed, well and truly sated after an incredible night at Brandon’s. They’d talked into the wee hours, alternating their late-night confessions with more mind-blowing sex. On her hands and knees. Straddling him. Bent across the bed, licking and sucking until they’d both been so exhausted, they’d fallen into a deep, mindless sleep, waking only when Brandon’s alarm went off at eight o’clock. She’d been running late but that didn’t stop them from enjoying a shower-time quickie. Standing up, her legs wrapped around his pounding hips, a sudsy, slick romp that had sent her hurling through the stratosphere once more.

What that man can do with a shower wand,
she thought with a silent giggle,
should be illegal.
Heck, it probably was in a couple of states, but given her explosive orgasm, she wouldn’t be turning him in to authorities anytime soon.

By all rights, she should be exhausted. But she wasn’t.

She felt…
happy
. Energized and enthusiastic, ready to take on the world.

She wanted to do a little dance where she sat. Happy was a strange sensation for her. Challenged or content, sure. But grins-and-cartwheels happy? Since dancing was out of the question, she settled for another sip of her fragrant dark roast instead.

“Everything all right, Leanne?” The startled expression on her advisor’s face brought her back to her surroundings with an abrupt jolt. He handed back her corrected chapter. “You seem a little…distracted this morning.”

She blushed. What was wrong with her? Sure, a blistering night of sex was great. She and Brandon complemented each other in many unexpected ways, but she needed to keep her feet firmly on the ground and not let their fling thrust her off course. Not when she was so close.

Armstrong pushed back his chair. “I’m sure it’s nerves, eh? Never fear, Tuesday will come and I have every confidence that you’ll acquit yourself admirably in front of the Walters committee.”

The committee. Her stomach rolled and the feeling of euphoria dissipated.

Unlike many other lucrative postgraduate prizes, the Walters conducted the final interviews publicly. The first rounds had been based solely on the applicants’ written responses and academic accomplishments: articles published, awards earned, letters of reference from distinguished faculty. But the finals were different. The selection committee visited each of the five short-listed candidates’ universities personally. They would quiz Leanne on her research plans, judging her breadth of knowledge and her skills as a speaker and a thinker. She would be required to answer questions from the gallery too. Unscripted questions about her work and her thesis, designed to draw out her position and articulate her ideas. It was going to be the most public of trials but Leanne felt confident in her abilities.

She knew the other candidates, by reputation if not in person—they would mount a formidable challenge. They wouldn’t have made the list otherwise. But she’d been preparing for this moment almost as long as she knew what a doctorate was. She was ready.

She couldn’t sing to save her life.

She couldn’t dance without causing bodily harm.

But when it came to her research, Leanne wouldn’t step aside for anyone. She was the best. All she had to do was prove it in five days’ time.

“I’m ready,” she said with confidence. “I’ve been practicing my responses. My thesis is strong and it breaks new ground in the field of eighteenth century literary studies. I’m ready.”

He nodded, his craggy face breaking into a lopsided smile. “Excellent. And given what I’ve learned about you, I also know there’s no risk of academic skeletons either. It’s one of the reasons I was so happy to support your application when you brought it to me last spring. You’re just the type of person the university wants to put forward for a prize like this.”

“Skeletons?” she joked. “I’m an English major, Dr. Armstrong, not a biology student.”

She felt a surge of nervousness when Armstrong didn’t laugh in response. “Plagiarism. Academic dishonesty, unfinished degrees or personality conflicts,” he hinted, his voice dropping seriously. “Personal challenges like drugs or alcohol. That’s what the committee is most afraid of. Scandals.”

“Well, there’s nothing like that in my past, I can assure you.”

Then a thought occurred to her.
What about Brandon?

Surely, in this day and age, sleeping with someone wouldn’t be grounds for being looked over by the committee. But their unorthodox hookup…Would that count against her if it ever came to light? She doubted the Walters people would look kindly on someone who frequented a club like the Foxe’s Den, first-time visitor or not.

She shook herself.
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Talk about borrowing trouble. There was nothing to be afraid of. There was no scandal, not in her past and definitely not in her present. She was single. Brandon was single. He wasn’t her student—they didn’t even work in the same department. There was nothing about their relationship that the committee could object to.

Right?

No. And besides, the interview committee would never know if she indulged in a fling. They were interested in her mind, not her sex life. She breathed a sigh of relief and concentrated once more on deciphering Armstrong’s revisions.

The gravel crunched beneath Leanne’s tires as she pulled to a stop in the parking lot. The club wasn’t due to open for several hours yet and the lot sat empty in the late afternoon sun. Without complaint, Brandon had shuffled his schedule so he could be free tonight but it meant they hadn’t seen each other since Wednesday night because he worked Thursday and Friday nights ’til close.

Yet the memory of being held in his arms, of his hands stroking her hair, as they’d talked late into the night refused to subside, and she’d found herself reliving their exchanges more often than she was willing to admit.

It had been difficult enough coming to terms with the idea of a wholly physical relationship. But Brandon’s understanding and penetration into her conflicted psyche hinted at the very real but unsettling possibility that he could offer more than just sexual satisfaction.

In the interim, with her bed feeling uncomfortably wide and lonely, she’d put in long hours, readying her thesis and preparing for her public interview next week. But while she was no closer to defining was happening…
maybe…possibly…
between them, she couldn’t deny she was eager to see him again.

She pushed open the heavy front doors. Inside the club, the overhead lights were on. It looked mundane, the stage a simple black dais, the infamous private booths quiet and unremarkable when viewed without the dazzle of bright lights and the throbbing accompaniment of the DJ’s music. A lone janitor vacuumed, rocking out to an invisible tune, no doubt courtesy of the small white ear buds visible through her hair.

“Excuse me?” Leanne shouted, trying to make herself heard above the whine of the machine. She waved her hand in a wide arc. “Excuse me? Do you know where the office is?”

The woman turned, attracted by the movement. Shutting off the vacuum, she looked at Leanne expectantly.

“The office?” Leanne mouthed broadly.

Jerking her thumb toward a narrow set of stairs set beside the bar, she returned to her work without another word, leaving Leanne to make her own way.

Reaching the top of the steep steps, she was struck anew by how nondescript it all seemed. It could be any office for any business, with its cluttered desktops, battered coffeemaker and outdated fax machine.

Of course, the three dozen or so signed eight-by-tens, each displaying a different scantily clad man, hinted that
something
might be a little different. Even then Leanne had to concede, for seminude glamour shots, they were displayed neatly and with a sense of flair.

Brandon sat at one of the desks, a pencil jammed haphazardly above his ear. His whole attention was absorbed in the spreadsheet on the monitor—a spreadsheet, which, if the tight clench of his shoulders were to be believed, was not cooperating.

Yet even stressed out, the stymied frustration evident in his body, Leanne couldn’t help but marvel once again at his overwhelming masculine beauty. Somehow, she’d expected that during the days they spent apart, she’d magnified his appeal, built him into something more alluring and attractive than reality warranted.

Seeing him now, in a worn t-shirt and jeans, his short hair spiked by frustrated hands, he was incredible. Two days away and she felt as though she’d forgotten details: his firm, sensual lips, full and tantalizing. The corded muscles of his neck. The strong, capable hands typing quickly against the keyboard. She remembered the feel of his fingers as they slid inside her, stroking, stretching, filling her. Even now, the mere memory had her clenching her thighs.

“No, no!” Brandon repeatedly jabbed the delete key, bringing a smile to Leanne’s face. Some of her physical longing dissipated beneath an unexpected wave of affection. “Tell me again why you won’t calculate the payroll taxes, you hunk of junk.”

His tone was so at odds with his usual unruffled calm that Leanne couldn’t contain a bubble of laughter from escaping.

At the sound, Brandon whirled round. His eyes lit with masculine appreciation as he took in Leanne’s outfit and he whistled softly.

“You look…” He shook his head in wordless admiration as he rose from his chair, closing the gap between them and taking her hands in his.

“You look fantastic.” He kissed her lightly, surveying her from the top of her elegant updo to the tips of her very high, very sexy shoes. He took a second look when he spied her delicate fishnet stockings and his smile widened.

“If my profs had looked like you, I never would have missed a class,” he said. This time, the kiss he pressed against her mouth was hotter and more lingering, its intent clearly seduction. “Although I definitely would have had trouble concentrating, I’m afraid.” He ran his hands down, over her hips, skirting her short hemline before clasping them against the small of her back.

She laughed and looked down at her scarlet cocktail dress. “This is a little more upscale than my usual look but Mom would skin me alive if I didn’t dress up.” She paused then added, with a twinge of unexpected bitterness, “Mom’s big on appearances.”

A small frown pulled at his lips and he squeezed her reassuringly. “Well, in
my
opinion, you look sexy as hell. All I’m going to be able to think about during this dinner is just how high those kick-ass stockings of yours really go.” His hands made the foray down again, and this time they didn’t stop at her hem. “Wanna give me a hint?”

He felt solid, his body pressed against hers. Being held in his arms, Leanne felt safe and cherished and beautiful. Brandon still wore a look of bright humor but his eyes were no longer lit solely by desire. They had softened with compassion and understanding. His worn cotton shirt smelled fresh, and she allowed herself the luxury of tucking her head against his shoulder and soaking in the sense of calm certainty he seemed to exude. It was hard not to succumb to the feeling of rightness that invaded her when he teased like this, laughed like this, held her like this.

Was a real relationship really so impossible?

He’d called her sexy.

Again.

Once, she could excuse as the heat of the moment but twice?

Twice was something else entirely.

She’d tried to resist his charm. She’d spent days and days reiterating her career goals and all the reasons they couldn’t be together, but here, in his arms, all her arguments seemed like paltry straw men. He squeezed her tightly, and their bodies meshed from knees to shoulders but there was nothing seductive about his embrace now. He seemed content to simply be close, dropping a tender kiss in her hair.

The reassuring gesture made her eyes sting. Leanne could finally admit that there was more to this relationship than just sex, however hard she’d fought against it. That maybe, if they both gave it a chance, this could grow into something permanent. But there was one unavoidable reality. If she won the Walters Prize, she’d be moving on, and Brandon was staying at Wellington to finish his degree. No matter how much she liked him, she couldn’t set her goals aside for the mere possibility of something more. Like a sexually explicit term paper, their relationship had a deadline. And that deadline made her heart ache.

She straightened and pulled out of his arms. He let her go readily enough but his face looked momentarily bemused. Eager to change the mood, she quickly redirected the conversation toward the upcoming dinner.