The Love Coupon (Stubborn Hearts 2)

Chapter Nineteen

After tonight, Tom was down to nineteen coupons. Nineteen more days with Flick as his roommate and lover. He spread them out on the coffee table, mainly to give Flick space in the kitchen. She was working too hard at pretending she wasn’t stressed about cooking for him. But also, so he could plan more carefully, because he’d screwed up the order.

Dear Tom, in retrospect, it was a cruel choice to have Flick cook for you on a Monday night. It’s a work night, so her preparation time is limited, and also because it follows the fantastic meal at Altri, so you’ve raised the stakes unnecessarily. Signed, Tom. P.S. Do better, you dickhead.

Altri. Great restaurant he’d always been meaning to try out. Killer meal, knockout dress, giggling fucking waiter, the thing with Flick’s foot on his leg and the dessert taste swap, and the way she smiled at him, held his hand like she didn’t ever want to let go.

Incomparable woman.

With her uncomfortable questions.

He’d talked about shrinking populations in Asia, for God’s sake. Do better, dickhead, because time is running out to understand what all this means.

There was the sound of a lid being clamped on a pot with too much force and he half turned to see Flick push hair out of her eyes. “Okay?”

She made back-off motions with both hands. “Nothing happening here. No reason to get excited. Play with your coupons. They are all the birthday present you’re getting.”

Best birthday present he’d ever had. It was a two-way trade and worked out just as well for the giver as the receiver.

There was no acrid smell of burning anything, so he put his finger on the Breakfast in Bed coupon and slipped it over the table’s surface till it was lined up behind the Massage coupon. What should come after it, dirty talk or the quickie, and who was meant to initiate the quickie?

It made sense to plot the remaining coupons out, but no matter which way he rearranged them it felt wrong. The order was imperfect, the activities were too specific, like Lingerie Shopping, or too vague, like Play a Game. Every way he scheduled them seemed wrong. Did a successful picnic need a weekend? Could they coordinate a lunch hour? What kind of game? Chess? Monopoly? Would’ve been fun to play Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto with Flick, but Josh took his Xbox with him and Tom hadn’t gotten around to replacing it. By the time he did, she’d be gone.

The more serious question—was it better to split the sex play up and intersperse it with other more mundane activities, or to gorge in one rolling wave of sexual excess?

It’s not like they weren’t having off-coupon couplings. They might as well have taken out a season pass to making each other come. Not that he had any complaints. He didn’t get this much action in college. The sex coupons just added an extra element of novelty.

And there were only nineteen days left for any kind of play with Flick.

There were ten days till the thirty minutes in his calendar set aside for Beau Rendel. Beau wanted to talk. Just a general chat, his admin assistant had said. It would be the I’m sorry this happened, I believe in you, I trust we have your continued loyalty chat. He’d like to put his finger on it and move it somewhere else like he could the coupon for tie-Flick-up-for-sex, which maybe should go before massage or after Flick told him a secret. Or maybe he could lose that coupon under the sectional; he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

Denise Revero wanted to chat too. Everything she said would be a secret as well, at least in the short term. She got time in his calendar tomorrow.

He stared at the layout of the coupons. He’d give Flick a break and ask her to make his new playlist tomorrow night. It didn’t matter if it only had one song. He had another night where he’d get to wrap around her as they slept, another day he’d wake to her faked morning-person cheer. She hated mornings. Thinking about it made him smile.

The breakfast-in-bed coupon should be scheduled for a weekend, so it didn’t have to have her out of bed early. There were only two weekends together left.

He swapped the Sixty-Nine with the Servant for a Day coupon, and then swapped the Servant for a Day coupon for the Kama Sutra Position of Your Choice, and then put Afternoon Delight between them only to realize they’d need a hotel to make that happen on a weekday. Managing his own work calendar wasn’t this complex.

And the only thing he was achieving here was the transfer of yet more glitter to surfaces that didn’t benefit from it, including the table, rug, his fingers and no doubt his face again. What was it with glitter and its inability to stick to whatever it was supposed to stick to and to shed everywhere else? Design flaw. Like these coupons were designed to lead him inexorably closer to Flick while relentlessly counting down to the day they parted.

That was an evil sleight of hand.

“It’s safe for you to come back over here,” Flick said.

He restacked the coupons in next-to-last order. “You didn’t set off any alarms.”

“Other than those internal ones in you. The ‘OMG what’s she doing now’ bell, the ‘is it safe to leave her unsupervised’ buzzer, and the ‘I can’t trust her with my things’ siren.”

“I trust you with my things.”

“You’re absolutely correct.” She bounced the heel of her hand on her forehead. “You even let me put some of them in my mouth.”

Holy fuck. Nothing was sacred with her. “How is it you’ve lived this long?”

“It’s my special talent,” she said with an eye roll. “Now sit down and tell me what you’d like to drink.”

He chose the bottle of wine she’d brought home and sat at the place she’d set for him. He knew there was fish in this meal, but he’d abandoned the kitchen before she’d done much more than unwrap it. He could smell garlic and lemon and his stomach rumbled.