I raised the jacket up so it was covering my mouth and cheeks, trying to look casual about it. He was doing a much more elegant job of casually revealing the sort of body I hadn’t even seen before in movies. He was a mix of contradictions: broad but slender, his skin looking both rugged and velvety, his lines soft but also defined. And his fingers were beautiful—I hadn’t noticed it before though I’d been watching him driving for a few hours and even yelled at him over his damn hands, but watching them work to take his clothes off was definitely getting the message across. His fingers looked better alongside one another than I thought fingers were even supposed to look, his nails neat and shiny.
It was lucky for me that my hands were already occupied in holding up his jacket, or I might have made some embarrassing concession to my sudden desire to get closer to the action.
And what did it matter if he knew? He probably did know that women fell over themselves the instant he took his clothes off. And the whole point of our encounter was that he intended to convince me to marry him… or to play along with intending to marry him, which was more or less the same thing these days, at least physically. On some level, he was making an offer of intimacy. Surely he’d be actually happy to hear that I wanted to be intimate with him, considering how offended he got about any notions of sexual assault.
Well maybe it wouldn’t matter to him, but it definitely mattered to me. I didn’t want to end up overwhelmed by sexual feelings for a man, it was much more comfortable when it worked in the other direction. I just didn’t know if I had any way to escape it.
Devin slid the shirt off, folded it so the bloody sleeve was quickly tucked out of sight, and set it down on a shelf nearby before turning to the fresh shirt he’d laid out on the table. He seemed to slump, just a little, and inhaled hard as the shirt folded over his back. It was like he was breathing in that freshly laundered brilliance.
“Maybe you should have sealed the deal with me before you let slip you’re actually sexually attracted to your clothes,” I suggested.
Devin turned to me so I got a front row seat to the ressembling of his tie: like every other step of this process, perfectly executed. A pair of hands like that would be able to do all sorts of things for a lover…
But something about his expression cooled that thought down fast and hard. My face had gone hot under his gaze, and not for the reasons I would have expected.
“Sex isn’t everything, Julia,” Devin said. “It isn’t even most things. Mostly, it’s the least convenient way of scratching an itch we all have and we all can do something about without needing to go there.”
Well that just drew my eyes straight back to his moving fingers. I imagined him touching himself in preference to a woman, for convenience… and somehow, I doubted he would be going about it in a clinical and practical way.
I hadn’t realised that sort of imagining could turn me on before, because I’d never tried to imagine that. But the fires were definitely being stoked down below, so to speak. I shuffled in my ridiculous heels, my feet aching with the sudden strain being placed on them, and then I actually tipped sideways and only managed to catch myself on the nearby wall.
The shock of briefly falling shook some sense back into my head. Maybe Devin was telling me more than he intended to here. A man denying an interest in sex was either lying… or there was more going on than he was willing to admit. Perhaps there was some trauma in his past, or perhaps he just had his own reasons for thinking sex could be a danger to him. The hazards were not the same for women as for men, but a man sleeping with a woman still had to run the risk of causing a pregnancy with her he would then have little power to control… and even if he did everything he could to prevent that, there was still the need to trust his partner with some matters. Devin seemed to be making a show of extending a certain degree of trust to me, but I wasn’t fooled. I doubted he ever truly trusted anyone. I knew what that felt like when it was coming across too, because my parents had never trusted me either. I’d learned well from them.
Maybe I was the woman Devin didn’t know he needed, who would actually be able to help him shed some light on why he behaved in a particular way.
More likely: I needed to get away from Devin before I talked myself into one of a number of courses of action that wouldn’t be good for me.
I didn’t realise Devin was trying to get me to give his jacket back until he removed it carefully from my fingers. “Distracted, and after how intent your study of me was before.”
“Yeah well, maybe I saw enough.” I turned my face aside as he pulled the jacket back on to avoid revealing my response to him, but when he took my arm to link it back into his, I had to look up, and the sight of him perfectly organised again and with a fresh, fragrant shirt drew a little inhalation out of me as if I hadn’t tried so hard to suppress my natural response.
“Are you hungry yet?” Devin asked. I’d refused anything other than water on the way there, genuinely too disoriented to feel like eating but also determined to be stubborn in whatever ways were left to me, and I was starting to feel like I could have taken a bite out of the print depicting a fruit bowl that was hanging above the desk in Devin’s room. But now… well, there was a different sort of hunger building in me that was taking my mind off the needs of my stomach again.
And Devin didn’t need to know anything about that. If I was lucky, I could disrupt this evening before it got me into any sort of trouble.
“Reservation for O’Hare,” Devin told the man at the little desk near where we came out in the elevator. He nodded, then checked his computer, then started nodding at us in a more manic way. One could only imagine what sort of note was left there about this particular customer, but at least the desk guy was primed to help.
“And by the way,” I spoke up before he could reply, “Mr. O’Hare kidnapped me from my bed last night, and instead of taking me home he’s insisted I come out with him to dinner. And wear these shoes.”
The guy peered over the edge of the desk at the foot I was wiggling illustratively, but I wasn’t sure that he could see enough to really understand. “Um, very nice ma’am, I’ll just show the two of you to your table.”
“I…” Devin stepped away immediately to follow him so I was left completely alone at the desk and had to stagger after the two of them until I was back in earshot. “Um, did you not hear what I just said? I’ve been kidnapped, I need you to call the police for me.”
The guy’s laugh was nervous. “Now, we are well-known here for our seafood experiences, serving locally-caught produce…”
He was too scared to go against Devin… no, that didn’t make sense, because he seemed perfectly relaxed telling Devin about the new cheese menu they’d just launched. He was too scared to talk to me.
I’d had this sort of interaction with men before too, though usually I’d been engineering it. He thought I was joking, and he didn’t understand the joke.
It was because I was too calm about the whole situation, wasn’t it? I didn’t fit the bill of a woman who looked kidnapped. Was I going to have to turn into a blubbering mess just to get someone to take me seriously? Because that sounded incredibly embarrassing and I didn’t want to do it.
“Look, I can take care of it myself if you can just give me access to—”
“Julia.” I didn’t like it one bit, but Devin’s voice shut me up right away. He sounded like a father snapping his child into line. “We’ll just take a moment to consult the menu,” he said as we stopped in front of an empty table by the window, “and then I’d like to order some wine.”
He turned on me fast as the server happily excused himself. “What do you think you’re doing, Julia?
”