Hold Her Close

When Jon pulls back, he’s smiling. “Dinner?”6JonHoly hell, I almost lost control. Sadie felt so good that I didn’t want to pull out. No, I wanted to bury myself deeper until all she could feel was me. I wanted to finish inside her like some kind of claiming ritual to show her that she was only mine.

The thoughts were so close and so real that they shook me. Because I still feel that. I want that. It’s impossible, given that we barely know each other, but deep down I know that I want Sadie in a way that I’ve never wanted anyone. Not even Kristy.

She looks so beautiful laid out on the floor, her hair pooled around her head and her skirt revealing her toned thighs and stomach. I find a towel from my bag and gently wipe off her tummy. “Sorry about that,” I tell her. She just laughs and closes her eyes, luxuriating in her post-orgasm bliss. After I’ve cleaned her up, we put ourselves back together before I grab the backpack I brought and start unpacking the food and arranging it on the table.

“Holy crap,” she says. “When you said picnic, I was picturing something like sandwiches and chips, maybe a nice cheese and a baguette, but not…” She sweeps her hand over the table that’s now set with several steaming plates.

“A full-on Italian meal?” I laugh. “I’m not used to having an assistant yet, but he can make things happen when I need them to.”

Inside the bag were two plates of pasta puttanesca, still hot thanks to the thermal bag it traveled in. There’s also a toasty garlic bread crusted with parmesan and soaked in truffle oil. I place the cloth napkins and cutlery on the table. A perfectly aged bottle of Bordeaux rounds out the meal, and I pour us each a glass. But before I reach out my hand to Sadie to help her off the floor and pull out a chair at the table for her, I have second thoughts. She looks so peaceful and relaxed lounging on the floor. I don’t want to disturb that scene. So I bring everything down off the table and place them on the floor, including the candles, and we dig in like that, nestled in the cushions, candlelight dancing across her rosy face, her feet in my lap.

“So what did you think of the interview?” I ask. We haven’t seen each other since it aired.

She makes a little face. “It was good. And it’s doing really well. It’s been the number one viewed clip on our website all day. I wish I had been able to do it.”

“You know I never would have told anyone.”

“I know,” she sighs. “But then even if you hadn’t and we’d wanted to see each other again, we would have been in the same situation. People would question how I’d landed the interview.”

“I’m not so sure,” I say, smiling. “I think we could have spun it the exact way that we’re going to spin this.”

One eyebrow lifts. “Oh? What even is this?”

“I’m not entirely sure, yet, but I know it doesn’t end here on this hillside tonight.”

She looks at me searchingly, quiet for a moment. “Okay, so what’s your plan. How are we going to spin this? How do we even know that we’re going public?”

I brush past that part. “Simply that we met at the interview, hit it off, and fell deeply and madly in love with each other at first sight. You know how everyone loves that kind of story.”

Sadie smiles slowly. “They do love that, but I don’t know that they’ll buy it.”

“I guess we’ll see.”

“Let’s see how the rest of the date goes before I commit to saying that I’m deeply in love with you.”

I take a bite of my pasta while watching her. That’s all I can ask, I suppose. “The sports reporter didn’t ask all your questions,” I tell her.

She looks surprised. “How did you know?”

“Because you handed him like four pages of notes, and there was no way the questions that he asked covered that much paper.”

“Yeah,” she admits. “He did skip a lot of them.”

“Ask me now.”

Sadie straights up. “Really?”

“Of course. I don’t have anything to hide. I’ll even be on the record if you want.”

A laugh. “On the record? You’re nuts. You’re not the subject of a story. Certainly not my story.” Then she looks a little nervous. “And besides, I had to…research you. To write all the questions. In this totally bizarre way we are strangers but I know so many personal details about you. I feel bad about that. It seems unfair.”

“I figured you’d have done some digging before the interview. Don’t worry about that. I understand it’s your job. And besides, I’m the one who initiated this. I kind of forced your hand at cyber-stalking me.”