“What?” I asked.
“They have vegan pizza! I’ve been searching for a place since I got here.”
“Vegan?” I asked, and Stacy’s eyes shot up to mine. “What?”
“Vegan. No meat, no dairy. Basically, nothing made from an animal.”
My eyes drifted up as I considered how many pieces of bacon I put away a day alone. “I am not vegan.”
Stacy laughed. “I gathered. Technically, I’m not either, yet. I’m trying.”
“Why?” I asked with grime to my voice that was judgemental and rude. “I’m sorry. That came out rude.”
Stacy shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I don’t understand myself, sometimes. I just can’t give up cheese.” She chuckled at herself as she looked over her menu, and I found myself just staring at her. “I assume you’re going to get regular pizza then?”
I didn’t respond, so she looked up again. “Gabe?” I pulled back a bit, and Stacy shook her head. “Sorry, Gabriel.”
“Nope. As it turns out, Gabe sounds good, too.” I laughed. “And yes, I’ll be getting pizza with meat like a normal person.”
Stacy giggled. “Hey! If it’s cooked right, it tastes good.”
I boldly reached a hand across the table and rubbed Stacy’s cheek. “Okay, gorgeous, sure it is.”
“You have to try it,” she replied, leaning into my touch. “Just one slice.”
“I’m okay.”
She raised an eyebrow, and a mischievous look crossed her face. “Okay, I’ll make you a deal.”
“Okay,” I responded, knowing there was nothing she could say to convince me to eat a piece of pizza with fake cheese and no meat. That wasn’t pizza. That was bread with sauce.
“If you eat one whole piece of the vegan pizza,”—she took hold of my bold hand on her face and raised it, sticking her tongue out and sliding it up the side of my thumb—“instead of just dropping me off, I’ll invite you inside.”
6
Gabriel
The pizza barely touched the inside of my mouth. It wasn’t just that Stacy was perfect in every way, though that was a majority of it. I hadn’t been with a woman in well over a year. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but unlike my brothers’ playboy tendencies prior to meeting their partners, I considered myself a romantic. I dated one girl almost all the way through high school, and unlike the typical, cliche story, it was she who broke up with me when we got to senior year and still hadn’t had sex. Neither of us had lost our virginity yet, and I wanted it to be special.
My dad was careful not to spoil my brothers and me with unlimited access to our family’s money, and we earned allowances the same as other kids. I was trying to save up what I would need to rent out a nice hotel, buy dozens of roses and candles, maybe even get her a nice, sexy nightie, something to really commemorate the occasion.
Apparently, she wasn’t willing to wait that long.
The weekend I attempted to pull off our big lose-our-virginity night, I discovered that she was sleeping with someone else, someone she’d already given her virginity to two months prior. She liked my family’s money and clout and stuck it out for that reason. Even after sad, lovesick Gabriel was willing to forgive her and take her back, she told me she couldn’t be with someone so innocent and let me go. It took me a few years to recover from that. My brothers finally got me plastered on my twenty-first birthday and took me out to meet—and eventually have sex with for the first time—a woman whose last name I didn’t even know. I tried my hardest to get her to date me, not wanting to have lost something so special to a woman I wasn’t involved with. For a while, it worked, but eventually, she came to the same conclusion my first girlfriend did—I was too innocent.
I made Alessandro try and teach me how to be a dog after that. How to sleep with women an
d not call them back, how to date a woman just enough to get sex out of her and then leave her alone, how to find women who were only interested in sex and nothing more. I would call his efforts successful, given that I spent the next year sleeping around with any woman I could get my hands on, but it made me feel gross. My brothers called me soft, but I thought there was something to being with a woman you actually cared about, something they all eventually learned when they started meeting the loves of their lives and getting married. In truth, my father’s infidelity had made them all ideal husbands—the murderous line of work aside.
In all the women I’d dated or slept with, nothing ever felt as sure to me as Stacy did. I didn’t get that sinking feeling that we wouldn’t talk again. Things were moving fast, but I was okay with that, and I knew she was, too. We were smitten.
Stacy made good on her promise. As soon as we finished eating—packing up more to go than we might have, had something else not been etching away at our patience—we got in my car and drove right to her house. As if to boost that I was, in fact, invited inside, the second the car was in park, Stacy reached over and took the keys out herself, clutching them in one of her porcelain hands as she climbed out and started up the pathway to her front door without looking back.
I wouldn’t pass a test on what the inside of Stacy’s house looked like. The second we were inside her front door, my hands were already wrapping around her waist to pull her to me. She was facing away from me, but I buried my face into her blonde waves and took a deep breath of her shampoo, which mingled well with the flowery scent of the rose crown woven in. She leaned back against me, put her hands up, and linked them behind my neck. She was like a pristine statue. She had a lithe form with a modest bust and a pert, squeezable behind that was already arching up to tease a lower appendage of mine, which was already fighting against the restricting fabric of my pants. My hands massaged over the thin layers of her dress, working their way down her sides and over her stomach. The breath she let out when my fingers finally slipped under the article and made their first contact with her skin was intoxicating. It hovered somewhere between a moan and a gasp, saying it was a feeling she hadn’t prepared for but wasn’t opposed to.
She stepped away from me, seductively dropping my keys onto the table next to her door before looking over her shoulder at me. Her long lashes flicked up and down while she scanned the sight of me before turning her attention away again and started to slowly, deliciously ascend the stairs, taking extra care to step one foot over the other in a way that had her hips swinging like the pendulum of a clock. I moved to follow her but not too quickly, keeping the sight of her framed in front of me. I bit my bottom lip and did my best to memorize the view. If I were a lesser man, I’d take out my phone and take a picture, but we weren’t there, not yet.
When we got to the top of the stairs, the entire upper floor was an open layout that spanned out into a large bedroom. It seemed like a nice enough house, but my mind was on a single track. It had its eyes on the bed and Stacy heading straight for it. I’d had to make my peace with not having the things I truly wanted a long time ago.