The items appeared and disappeared about the place with bewildering frequency. He tolerated it. Flick had the larger of the two bedrooms and the attached bathroom and only those two suitcases of possessions. Was it that women had more things than men? Was it just that Flick’s things were an extension of her personality and needed room to expand around the fairground of her life?
One morning, he found a banana-curved metal prong on the kitchen counter. Six inches, ends sculptured to a point. He had no idea what it was. Goddamn hoped it wasn’t a sex toy, because if it was, he couldn’t imagine what you did with it. It was gone when he got home that night.
Every day was an exercise in wondering what he’d find. The day he found a bra hanging over a lamp was the day they’d have words.
They also had words on Thursday night, though technically it was Friday morning, the witching hour of 3 a.m. Tom fumbled to answer his ringing phone, dread in his throat. No one called at this time unless it was an emergency.
“Are you in your bedroom?” Prank call. He almost hung up. “Don’t go. It’s Flick. I’m locked out on the balcony.”
“Where are you?” He shook his head, trying to clear the sleep fog.
“I’m locked out on your balcony.”
“My balcony?”
“I didn’t do that thing with the lock like you showed me and I’m stuck out here.”
He shoved the covers back and swung his feet to the floor. “And this is my problem how?”
“Don’t be a shit. Come and let me in. It’s cold out here.”
Cruelly summoned, he padded out to the living room and there on the balcony facing him, silhouetted by the night lights of the city, was Flick in her makeshift pajamas, a tiny sleeveless T-shirt that didn’t meet the edge of the skimpy briefs she wore, her hair wild around her face and shoulders and her arms wrapped around herself.
He’d have laughed, but she was furious. She was also too much to take wearing so little when he wasn’t properly awake. A shock to his senses, all firm legs and goose bumps, raised nipples and curved hips and belly. He stood on one side of the door and she glared at him from the other as if it was his fault she was stuck out there, so he did laugh, and she threw her hands up and that made it worse, because there was more of her to see.
He should’ve made it a condition of her stay that she wear flannel men’s-style pajamas that didn’t make him think about how he’d like to warm her up when she went walking about in the middle of the night.
He slipped the catch on the door and slid it open. “Why did you close it?”
“I didn’t want to wake you.” She looked over her shoulder toward the city. “It’s louder than you think out here when it’s quiet everywhere else. Sirens and traffic.”
“And yet, here we are.”
“It was that or slowly freeze to death.”
“What were you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“You come out here in the middle of the night with your phone to think?”
“You have a problem with that?”
“I’m awake in the middle of the night and that’s a problem.”
“Are you going to let me in, you big goof?”
He had to step back out of the doorway to do that. He had to stop his sleep-befuddled brain letting his very awake hand cup her ass as she slid by. He followed that peach-shaped ass across the living room.
“Stop looking at my ass.”
“I rescued that ass. I get to look at it.”
She stopped and turned and he was too close. Her shoulder brushed his ba
re chest. She flipped her hair back and the movement shifted her breasts. He shouldn’t have said what he was thinking. He should’ve stepped the hell back, but he was mesmerized by the shiver that rippled through her and the come-at-me look in her eyes.
Enter the Gravitron.