Unwrapped (19 page)

“Good Lord. I’m not sure I can stand back up.”

“Then don’t,” Clifford said mischievously and picked her up. It was honeymoon style, and Mischa squealed in delight. Not many guys could do that so casually, but his arms! He set her down gently in front of the gravestones and sauntered back to the car. In a moment, he’d returned with his backpack and began to unpack a series of brown paper bags, preceded by a plaid blanket. With elaborate gestures, he spread the blanket on the ground, then picked Mischa up and moved her to it. In short order, a picnic appeared from the bags before her.

A thermos of hot cider was accompanied by a flask of rum. Sandwiches, chips, pre-packaged cookies, and two smallish apples rounded out the offerings. Mischa clapped her hands.

“I don’t cook, but I can grocery shop,” he said, divvying up the food. “I also find with enough of this—” indicating the flask, “it doesn’t matter so much how things taste.”

“A man after my own heart,” Mischa grinned, pouring stiff shots of rum into two red plastic cups.

“I am, you know.”

“You are what?” she asked, sniffing the cider before adding it to the drinks. Cinnamon-y, nice.

“After your heart, Mischa. I’ve never met a girl like you before.”

“A girl that lets you bang her in a cemetery?” This was getting uncomfortable as well as stupid. What was the point of talking about hearts when they were soon to be separated by such an unfathomable distance? Love was the strongest thing in the universe, but even
it
could be stretched to breaking when it had whole continents to cross.
Whoa.
She didn’t mean love. She meant lust. Love was what she felt when she looked at a Van Gogh. She was just confused because he had dressed as her artistic idol at the party.

“A girl who would take me to a cemetery in the first place,” he was saying. “It’s our first date, and you didn’t pick out a Drew Barrymore movie or a walk around the mall. You brought me to this overgrown, decaying graveyard and brought art supplies along. That’s just… cool.” He ripped open a bag of barbeque chips and started crunching.

“I suppose it says something about you too, that you think that’s cool. You are by far the weirdest rugby player I have ever met.” Mischa stole a chip.

“By virtue of being the only one you’ve met, I’m sure. But it’s true that I don’t have much in common with a lot of the guys I’m on the pitch with. Most of them don’t think art and sports can co-exist.” He reached over and wiped a stray bit of barbeque powder from her lip with his thumb. She kissed it.

“You have to admit it’s an unusual combination. I just can’t understand why someone with your kind of talent is working for a carnival instead of a gallery.” She pulled the onion out of her sandwich and tossed it towards a chattering squirrel a few stones away.

“Says the girl who has never been to Africa. I come from a bit of a bad neighborhood, where I share a house with my mother. We’ve been robbed twice in the last year. That’s just this
year
. I need all the money I can earn just to pay rent and replace the things that keep disappearing. In Jo-burg, stealing is a national pastime. People take things merely for the fact that they aren’t nailed down. I do handyman work at the supply shop to pay for my paints. It just isn’t practical to try to make a living from my pictures. That said, I have been trying to book shows here for the past year since I signed up with the foreign-workers company. And if I don’t sell a single painting, I have rugby club to look forward to at home. It’s where many of the Springboks got their start.”

“Home, Clifford.” Mischa wanted him to understand the dichotomy between what he said and what he
said
. “Home is in Johannesburg. So let’s not say things about being after my heart. This…whatever this is, it has an expiration date.” Mischa put her sandwich down, suddenly not hungry. She gulped half of her spiked cider down in one go. When she set the cup down, Clifford was staring at her intently. “What?”

“You are so beautiful. Let me paint you again. Right now.”

“I only brought the crayons, sorry.” Another bag, plus a small roll of material appeared like magic from the backpack. Of course. “Wait. You stretch your own canvases?” He looked puzzled.

“It saves so much money and space. Why wouldn’t you?” It was a fair point. From now on, maybe. She stared, fascinated, as he deftly unrolled and cut the material and stapled it to quickly assembled wooden frames. He handed her a completed canvas, and kept the larger one for himself. Stuffing the remains of her sandwich into his mouth, the paper plate became a palette. Mischa grabbed a pencil and started sketching. Clifford began to prime his canvas with long stripes of gold paint.

“I thought you used black as a background, usually,” she commented, glancing up.

“Actually, I start everything with gold. The metallic base gives that glow from the background, even after I do this.” With that, he upended a squirt bottle of black paint on his picture. Mischa shrieked.

“Oh my God! You are completely insane, you know that?” He winked at her and started tilting the canvas around like he was playing pinball.

“You know what they say about genius and madness.” When the black had been poured around into a thin enough layer, Clifford began to scratch lines into the wet paint with the end of his brush. At one point he grabbed a paper napkin and pressed it into a spot. When he peeled it off, the imprint of the quilting was left as a ghost in the paint. The face beginning to emerge from the primordial soup of his canvas was ghostlike in many ways, actually.

For one thing, it was a little disconcerting to see this stark vision of herself appearing before her in black and metallic like an old-fashioned daguerreotype. For another, he worked so quickly that it felt more like a magic show than an art project Mischa was riveted as he practically threw paint at the picture, only to wipe, smudge, or scratch it off. The layers were piling up, and she was beginning to see how he achieved the textures she’d been so entranced by at the Phoenix gallery show.

Clifford glanced up and caught her staring. He brushed his hair back as he smiled at her, leaving a little smear of paint on his olive forehead. Her stomach lurched a little. He was so goddamned sexy already, and that bit of paint knocked him firmly into the “adorable” category as well. The passion he applied as thickly as paint to her portrait made watching him feel as intimate as their encounter over the tombstone. Mischa sighed. Knowing there was an expiration date wasn’t going to make it any easier to let him go at the end of the year.

November

“So do I finally get to meet your carny in person?” Heather had chosen just the right moment to ask, as Mischa was manhandling the turkey into the oven.

“You…met him at…the party last month,” she grunted, finally levering it in and heaving the door closed. Turning to face her roommate, she wiped her hands on her apron. “He was the artist of the hour, remember?”

“Yes, but I kind of don’t care about art. And I didn’t know you two were doing it at the time. Which, thanks for keeping from me, by the way.”

“You may not care about art, but your boyfriend, is he your boyfriend? He’s outlasted most of them. He gets it. That shit is beautiful. I am insanely jealous that he paints so much better than me. Also, the sex is good. But that’s that. I only invited him to Thanksgiving to show him a piece of American culture he wasn’t going to get at the carnival.” Mischa finished the conversation, washed her hands and opened a can of pureed pumpkin. If she was busy enough, the knots in her stomach at seeing Clifford again might get distracted and untangle themselves.

“If it’s only a sex thing, how come you’ve spent every weekend for the last month driving to wherever the carnival goes? You can find sex in D.C., you know. Just because we live in the Fruit Loop doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of men available for one-nighters.” Evidently Heather was not finished with the conversation.

“Good lord, Heather, just because it’s funny doesn’t mean you have to refer to my beloved Dupont Circle like that, you hag. And I visit him because he is the best artist I have ever seen in my life. Don’t make that face at me. Seriously. I am learning so much from him. Watching him paint is like a master class in art. It kills me, the way he just makes up stuff on the fly and it works so well. I have no creativity. I just collage and paint on it. No innovation. Of course I’ll travel to get free lessons in cool.”

“Say what you want. I see your glow when you come home.” Heather had no right to be so smug, not with the glow Antonio gave her, but Mischa chose to concentrate on pouring her filling into the pie crust instead of protesting too much. Her roomie wandered back to her room, thank goodness. Truth be told, she was kind of nervous. It was one thing having crazy-cool sex in her Mazda Miata, but completely another to have Clifford in her apartment, celebrating a cornerstone of American culture with all her friends. Well, with all her roommate’s friends. Mischa was still working on finding a circle as tight as the one she’d left when she’d moved.

The buzzer interrupted her mother’s stuffing recipe. “Grab that, will ya?” she yelled to Heather, who was predictably irritated at having to pause her video game. Mischa rolled her eyes and cranked the Green Day.

“It’s for you!” came the hollered response, although the two rooms were only feet apart. Well, if Mischa was going to do all the cooking, Heather could at least play butler. She turned to yell that, but came face to face with Clifford in a suit. Oh, dear God. Clifford. Six foot something, muscular rugby-playing Clifford, in a tailored, pinstriped suit. Suddenly, Mischa had a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

“Hi,” she whispered, suddenly shy despite all they had shared with each other. Conscious of her dark lipstick, she offered her cheek for a kiss. He produced a bottle of wine from behind his back and she grinned. “You didn’t have to do that. We were just going to crack a box of Franzia.”

“My beloved. No one should ever drink Franzia, especially on a holiday. This is a South African wine. Let’s share it before anyone else shows up.”

No one ever had to tell Mischa twice to open a bottle on a holiday. She pulled a corkscrew out of the junk drawer and directed Cliff to the glassware cabinet. Once the cranberry-red liquid was poured, she
cheersed
him.

“What was that? You have to make eye contact.” Clifford’s Afrikaans accent had grown stronger during his time on the road with no one but his South African buddies to talk to.

“I do? You do?” Mischa had never actually heard that one before, and she considered herself fairly well-versed in drinking etiquette.

“Yes, or else you will have bad sex for years.”

“That cannot be a thing. You just made that up!”

“Nope. It’s a thing. Ask your other foreign friends. Americans are notorious for their rude cheers.”

“I think you’re making this up. The wine, however, is delightful. You are not making up the talent in your country.”

“Says the girl who has been having such good sex that she cannot imagine going back.”

Mischa was forced to cheers again, as that was a valid point. She could not imagine starting over with a stranger, someone who didn’t understand her desire to get away from the home of her youth, her lust for painting, her pleasure in the overlap between art and hairstyling, the way she liked to be touched…Christ, anyone who wasn’t Clifford. That was not good. She knew full well that there would be a stranger soon enough. Cliff would leave, and she’d be back to blind dates and accepted invites from random men at bars. As was her normal reaction, she knocked back half her wine.

“You okay?” Clifford asked, a concerned look on his gorgeously chiseled face.

“Thanksgiving, babe. It’s a strange kind of holiday, where you’re meant to feel grateful and stressful all at once. Will you help me do the potatoes?”

Cliff gamely removed his jacket and rolled up his dress sleeves. “I only know how to boil and mash. Is that how you do it?”

“Almost! Except Heather’s grandpa said we had to add garlic and cream to make them taste like she remembers. Only we don’t know how or when to add them and he lives in a nursing home so we can only ask questions once a month when her mom visits. So… here’s some garlic and cream?” Mischa grimaced at him. He gave one of those sun-bright grins in return.

“I’ll work it out. Watching you in an apron is inspirational.” He bent down and kissed her, first gently, and then more urgently. When she pulled him away, his pupils were so black with desire she didn’t bother resisting. Fingers tangled in hair, gripped, released.
Cooking was not normally so sensual
, Mischa thought, but who cared, because she was already trying to pull his slacks off.

It wasn’t much of a struggle, being as he unzipped himself and arched his hips, but keeping things quiet with Heather in the next room still added an air of urgency to their rendezvous. Mischa grinned up at him with her burgundy-tinted lips before smearing the paint job all over him as she sucked his cock. Using his vocals as her cues, she alternately licked and sucked, trying to keep things unexpected. The fact that he was uncircumcised was also unexpected, as they typically moved to protected sex so quickly she hadn’t noticed, but she liked the way it made jerking him easy.

It was only a few moments before he warned her of his impending release. Mischa redoubled her efforts, bearing down with her mouth as her nails made themselves known on his shaft. He pulled her hair even harder as he yanked her away from his throbbing member.

“What?” she asked, breathless. His normally coffee-colored eyes were jet black as he pulled her up by her hair and clenched her against him. Mischa found herself relaxing into his hard body even as she worried about what she’d done wrong.

“That’s not how I want you,” he murmured, deep and sexy, into her ear. The potatoes went flying as he swept one arm over the work surface to clear it. Tossing her as if she weighed nothing across the kitchen island, he pushed up the skirt of her crushed-velvet babydoll dress. Before she’d caught her breath, he’d grabbed her fishnets and ripped a hole large enough to pull her orange silk panties aside. Mischa wanted to be annoyed about his destruction of her carefully chosen outfit. Annoyance was no longer an option as he forced two fingers inside her with one hand while rhythmically pressing against her clit with the other. Now, the annoyance was making sure Heather didn’t hear over the bleeps and bloops of her video game.

Mischa pushed back against him in ecstasy. “Don’t move,” he growled in her ear. The feel of his breath combined with his command made her shiver, but she obediently stopped squirming. “Good girl.” He teased her opening, sliding his cock up and down her wet folds. When she begged, he only chuckled.

The minute it took him to unroll a condom down his hard length felt like forever. When he lined up and entered her, she sighed. His strong arms encircled her and she surrendered to his rhythm. She never knew how much she craved that submission until Clifford showed her what she was missing. The pressure built inside her until she lost control. It took a moment for the stars to clear from her eyes before she realized that loud noise had come from her. And that the video game in the other room appeared to have been paused. And that Heather was asking if things were okay and that her voice was getting louder and she was totally on her way into the kitchen and Cliff was still inside her and oh dear.

By the time Heather burst in, Clifford had grabbed a stray potato and peeler. From Heather’s perspective, he was showing Mischa how to peel a potato when she knocked most of them off of the island.

“Idiots,” Heather mumbled and headed back out. When the game started back up, Mischa let out the peal of laughter she’d been holding back. Clifford nipped her ear and finished quickly.

Over seconds of really delicious mashed potatoes at dinner, they grinned at each other. With Antonio monopolizing Cliff for most of dinner, she’d really had a chance to get to know more of Heather’s friends. They were really cool. Mischa raised her glass of South African wine and made deliberate eye contact as she tipped her glass at her lover.
Shit, not the love word again.
She downed her drink and turned back to Melissa, the girl beside her.

“You said you swing dance? I’ve always wanted to learn how to swing…”