Perfect Strangers

2

Estelle’s apartmentis the love child of Buckingham Palace and a nineteenth-century Moroccan bordello.

A neoclassical breakfront displays commemorative bone china plates from the 80’s royal wedding of Charles and Diana. Tufted red velvet sofas are strewn with purple silk pillows. Gold tassels draw back burgundy brocade drapes from soaring windows, the master bathroom is a riot of inlaid indigo-and-green mosaics, and imposing gilt-framed oils of grim ancestors and hunting parties on horseback garnish the living room walls. The ceilings bristle with a hodgepodge of lighting fixtures varying from ornate crystal chandeliers to carved bronze lanterns inset with colored glass.

The decorator was clearly schizophrenic, but by some miracle all the clashing elements come together to make the place feel homey.

I’m not surprised that I like its eccentricity. The older I get, the more rational weirdness seems.

I’m yawning and stretching my legs under the Egyptian cotton sheets of Estelle’s massive four-poster bed when I hear the moan. It drifts in through the window, which is cracked open to the courtyard outside.

I freeze, listening.

The moan comes again, louder this time. I flip the sheets over my face and sigh deeply as the moans continue to increase in volume and length. A quick check of my watch confirms it’s not yet six a.m.

I can’t be human at this hour without half a pot of coffee and something to eat with enough sugar that could induce a diabetic coma, and those two across the way are going at it like rabbits. Who has that kind of energy?

“Gotta be drugs,” I say to the empty room as the blonde nears orgasm. Hopefully the leaded glass windows will survive her ear-piercing screams.

Abruptly, I’m angry. Who the hell do these people think they are, disturbing my first night’s sleep in what Estelle promised would be a “soothing” and “healing” space? That racket is definitely not soothing or healing, I’ll tell you what!

For me, anyway. By the sound of it, the blonde is being healed from the inside out by some pretty spectacular dick.

Flinging off the sheets, I glare at the ceiling. I’m contemplating whether to throw open the windows and shout obscenities at them or leave a strongly-worded letter taped to their door, when I realize that my brain is the only part of my body annoyed by my neighbor’s frisky antics.

The rest of me is aroused.

Within seconds, I’m engaged in a mental argument with myself and another voice that’s Kelly’s, because she knows all my darkest secrets and is always showing up unannounced in my head.

Go ahead, girl. Rub one out. You deserve it.

Please. I’m not going to masturbate to the sound of my neighbors getting it on.

Why the hell not? They’re sexy as all get-out!

Because it’s pervy, that’s why not. And they’re not sexy, they’re showoffs.

Uh-huh. That’s why your lady garden just burst into flames, because they’re notsexy.

“Lady garden?” What are you, ninety? And I can’t help it if my vagina has a mind of her own! That doesn’t mean I have to listen to her!

Right. You’re not listening. Then I wonder why your hand’s between your legs?

I groan, banishing the conversation from my head as I squeeze my thighs together and try very hard not to enjoy the sensation of my fingers rubbing back and forth over the damp seam of my pajama bottoms.

Try—and fail spectacularly.

Truth be told, I’m shocked to discover I still have any erotic feelings at all. It’s been years since the slightest flicker of heat has touched my loins, even more years before that that I tried to pleasure myself. I had what I consider a solid sex life with my husband, though we weren’t adventurous by any stretch of the imagination. And though in the last dying embers of our marriage the sex disappeared altogether, I never turned to self-pleasure because I never had the urge.

My libido died along with everything else that mattered.

Except for yesterday, when a stranger’s searing blue gaze lit me up like a Christmas tree and sent shockwaves of heat pulsing straight through my core.

“I’m James,”he said, with a tone like he was already thrusting inside me.

A series of masculine grunts from across the courtyard has my fingers slipping inside my cotton pajamas and past my panties. I’m already soaked. I bite my lip and squeeze my eyes shut like a guilty child caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

A superheated, long neglected cookie jar, whose cookies are quickly crumbling to bits.

“James,” I whisper, picturing him on top of me.

He was a big man. Much bigger than my husband or the few lovers I had before him. I usually go for men with trim builds who look good in expensive suits. Your typical Wall Street type, a clean cut WASP with manicured nails who’d give himself a hernia if he tried to lift me.

James the rugged blue-eyed stallion could probably hoist me overhead with his pinky.

What would it be like to lie beneath a man that size? To feel all those muscles bunching as he flexed his hips, to feel the slide of his rough hands over my skin, to feel his hot breath in my ear as he grunted in animal pleasure the way the man across the courtyard is grunting?

Probably delicious.