Once we walked through the revolving door, rushing down the street through the December chill and the crowds of Christmas shoppers, I started laughing. We were walking so fast that our butts might as well have been on fire.
“Do I wanna know what’s funny?” His face looked strained, and I bit down another chuckle.
I shouldn’t have laughed. I had blood on my lower lip, and he was sporting a visible erection. But he looked so serious. Like he was ushering me to the ER, and not to his bed.
“Just the way we’re acting, like two high schoolers who just found out one of them has an empty house,” I said, fighting another burst of giggles.
He squeezed my elbow, and we cut the corner, almost jogging.
My laughing stopped when we walked through the glass doors to the skyscraper where we lived. Vicious punched the elevator button three times in a row and started pacing, waiting for it to ping open. He ran his hand through his inky black hair.
“Rosie’s home,” I said, swallowing hard.
He turned around to look at me, and I swear it looked like his erection was going to break through his zipper, or his zipper was going to break his erection. Either way, it was going to hurt.
“We’ll go up to the penthouse,” he said, shoving a hand deeper into his tousled hair and tugging impatiently.
“She could bump into us in the elevator. Or the hallway. Or…”
Truly, I didn’t care about Rosie catching us. I was a grown-up, and besides, we’d both brought men over to our old studio on occasion. When it happened, the other sister would make herself scarce. Nope. I was clearly stalling, and I didn’t know why.
“Fine. We’ll grab a taxi. The Mandarin isn’t that far. It’s a long shot this time of the year, but they might have a room or two available. If not, there’s always the bathroom at Starbucks.” He turned around and started stalking toward the entrance.
I grabbed his hand and stopped him, and our eyes met. “Really, Vicious? After ten years of waiting, that’s how you want to do this? In a hotel, in the middle of the morning?”
“Fuck.” His jaw ticked and he exhaled, closing his eyes. “What did you think was gonna happen when we ditched work? That we would catch a Jennifer Lawrence movie under the fucking covers?”
He looked so on edge I thought he was going to detonate on the marble floor. I flattened my palm against the collar of his dress shirt, and that seemed to soothe him a little.
“I bought Rosie a plane ticket to fly home to see our parents. She’s supposed to pick up her meds around six then go to the airport straight from there. We can still go back to the office and come back here after she’s gone.”
“Fuck no,” he almost spat. “We’re spending today alone.”
When he didn’t move, just stared at me like he was going to take me on the floor, I tangled my fingers together, twisting them. “I could show you New York.”
“What?” His brows furrowed.
“Show you New York. Show you where I like to go, where I like to eat. Show you why it’s so much better than LA, why Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen and Scorsese rhapsodize about this crazy place with this crazy weather like it’s paradise.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t do monogamy.” He tsked like I had asked him if he could part the sea. “And that sounds a lot like a date.”
“It’s not,” I protested, feeling my face heat. “Also, I vividly remember you asking me to go to dinner with you yesterday. What’s changed?”
“That wasn’t a date. I was just really fucking hungry.”
“Well, what makes you think I’d like to date someone as hateful and cold as you anyway?” I tilted my head like a bird, my eyes blazing with heat.
“I don’t know. I don’t care. And I don’t do dates,” he said again, taking a step back and shaking his head. His cheeks flushed pink, and this time it wasn’t only from the cold.
Sweet Jesus and his holy crew.
At this point, I’d had enough of this nonsense, so I decided to kill the conversation. “Really?” I snorted.
“Really,” he enunciated.
“So if I tell you I want to re-do our senior year in one day…to go ice-skating at Rockefeller Center and let you get to second base like two teenagers…” I erased the gap between us, kissing a sliver of his exposed neck, and his breath stilled. “And go eat at P.J. Clarke’s and move to third base in the bathroom…” I rasped the words against his hot flesh and dragged my eyes up to meet his stormy ones. “And end the day at a Broadway show where I’d do something very inappropriate under your seat…” We melted into each other, and sure enough, I felt the swelling in his slacks getting bigger against my stomach. “You’d say…no?”