Chapter Eighteen
Ransom
We’d decided to go to a restaurant apart from the hotel, a little ways down the road; it was windy and cold, but apart from the airport and the area around the town, most of the streets were navigable. The weather report had said that there was no real way out of the town, and Bethany’s parents’ house wasn’t accessible either. It was something about the snow ploughs or some issue with trucks.
“Aren’t high school reunions normally in summer?” I wasn’t sure if I’d made that point before, but as we sat down at an Italian restaurant--classic red sauce fare, with all the overworked dishes you would expect--I was curious again. It seemed weird to have a reunion in the middle of winter.
“They’d planned to have one in the summer, but everyone had other stuff to do, and it wasn’t all that well organized,” Bethany said absently, as she read over the menu.
It was a relief to be away from her former classmates for a little while, I had to admit. They weren’t bad people, and I’m sure in smaller doses I’d be able to handle them much better. But it was a strain to pretend to be Bethany’s loving, committed boyfriend, and keep my story straight, and chitchat with people who I didn’t know or care about.
“Someone should have done a snowman event,” I said, looking over the menu myself.
“I guess they were worried someone would complain...or make something not safe for work,” Bethany said.
I chuckled, picturing naked snow-women and giant snow dicks. “Yeah that would be a problem.”
In the back of my mind, I was still preoccupied with what I’d managed to learn the night before. I’d been fairly certain that part of the information I needed would be on the database that Bethany had access too, and I’d been right. Now, though, I was itching for the rest.
My parents had, in fact, adopted a child from the agency that Bethany worked with. The information on who they adopted was separated from their dossiers, because--of course--their adopted child had been a minor at the time. That was more sensitive information that I would gain access to if we managed to pull off Bethany’s plan and if she didn’t go back on her end of the deal. I needed the file on the kid, and then on the kid’s birth parents--if it was even still available--to know what I wanted to know. The adoption had taken place about twenty years before, so I figured that if anyone had the data, it would be Bethany’s agency.
I’d done the usual public records searches, but since the situation had been a closed adoption, it was impossible for me to get access to what I needed. The state had only barely been involved, in terms of paperwork to get the kid from the birth parents and into the organization, and I hadn’t even known what name to ask for. A helpful clerk at the family court system had informed me that even if I had known the right name, it was likely that the paperwork itself had been destroyed, since so long a time had passed, and the more relevant paperwork would be held at the agency.
I’d known my parents had adopted, but I hadn’t known anything else--and I had to know.
“Welcome to Buonasera,” a waiter said, coming up to our table. “Did you know what you wanted, or do you need a few minutes?”
I looked up from my menu and looked at Bethany to see if she was ready.
“Do we want an appetizer?” Bethany asked.
“I could eat part of one,” I said, glancing down at that section in the menu.
“I guess the arancini would be a good thing,” Bethany suggested.
“Sounds good to me,” I agreed.
I ordered a chicken piccata and Bethany got one of the chef’s specialties which had penne, grilled chicken, spinach and fresh mozzarella. She let me choose the wine. We made some small talk while we waited for our appetizer and wine to arrive at the table, and it was good--just relaxing, talking to Bethany like any other person, not having to pretend like I was in love with her.
When our arancini and wine came to the table, the idyll busted. A couple of people that Bethany recognized from her graduating class came in, probably seeking to get away from the crowd like we had. I couldn’t blame them for that, but it irritated me nonetheless. At least the couple sat down a few tables away from us, and at least they weren’t interested in having some in-depth conversation with us; apart from a quick hello and a comment on how nice Bethany looked in her sweater-dress, they didn’t really engage us. But it did mean that we had to start acting at least a little bit like a couple again, and to my surprise it was actually easier than I thought to just fall back into the little roleplaying game.
We got through the dinner and headed back to the hotel as soon as we could. There was some kind of movie night event going on, but Bethany and I both agreed we didn’t feel up to going to it--we just wanted to stay in.
Once again, we ran out of luck, when we ran into a couple of people we’d talked to separately the night before at the big dinner. “You two look so good together,” Bethany’s former classmate, Nadine, said. She was with Katie and Becky, all three of them working on the setup for the movie night, and they’d caught us on the way to the elevators up to our room.
“I do try to only date guys who make me look good,” Bethany said, glancing at me with a mixture of playfulness and sarcasm.
“It’s not hard to make you look good, babe,” I pointed out.
“I just can’t believe that the two of you went to an amusement park for your first date,” Katie said, shaking her head. “It’s such a weird, sweet thing.” I looked at Bethany sharply. I hadn’t said anything about an amusement park--she must have.
“Wait, I thought you said the first date you took her on was to your friend’s restaurant,” Becky said, pointing to me.
“It depends on which date you think of as our ‘first’ date,” I said quickly. “I guess you don’t think that dinner at Luciano’s restaurant counts,” I added, giving Bethany a playful poke.
“If I remember right, you didn’t actually ask me out on a date with that one,” she said, picking up where I was going with our cover. “You just said it would be good to get dinner with someone and your friend Luciano’s restaurant had just opened.”
“Oh, come on--that’s an obvious date,” Nadine protested.
“Technically, he hadn’t finished the contract with my company, so it better not have been a date,” Bethany said, giving me a mock-severe look.
The other three women laughed, and the elevator chimed to announce that it had arrived, saving us from the stress of the moment.
“We’ve got a date with a movie of our own, and I think Beth needs a good, hot bath,” I said, herding Bethany onto the elevator with me. We said goodbye to her friends and I punched for our floor. As soon as the girls left and the doors closed, I sighed with more than a little relief that we hadn’t managed to get caught out at a moment like that.
“That was close,” Bethany said, and I nodded.
“Obviously, we need to hammer out a few more details on our story,” I pointed out.
Bethany looked at me for a moment. “Yeah, that would probably be a good idea,” she agreed.
We got to the room and a devil of a thought occurred to me. When the door closed behind us I saw that the housekeeping staff had been in and straightened everything up, but left behind the non-perishable parts of the bottle service we’d ordered the night before. Apparently, we’d earned the right to keep the bottles, by paying so much.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched as Bethany kicked off her boots and took off her coat. “I have an idea,” I said, reaching over to the cart and picking up the bottle of vodka. It was still more than half-full, and while I don’t normally drink every night, I thought it might spur things forward a bit.
“What’s that?”
“We quiz each other, the way we did the first day,” I suggested. “But instead of the normal forfeits, for each one we get wrong, we have to take off an item of clothing.” Bethany crossed her arms over her chest and half-smiled.
“You say that after I’ve already taken two things off--that’s not fair,” she said.
I shrugged and took off my own jacket and shoes.
“Now we’re starting out even,” I said happily. I should have been more discreet--I knew I should--but I couldn’t resist the temptation to see this gorgeous woman naked once again.
She held my gaze for a moment longer and then her smile grew on her face. “Okay,” she said. “We can do that.”
I almost laughed. No matter what she’d said before--even the night before--about orgasms, it was obvious to me in her eagerness that she wanted to get me naked again, and that she wanted to be naked with me. Whatever I’d accomplished the night before, I’d done a good job of things--good enough for her to actually be interested in messing around.
“Let’s have a drink while we’re at it,” I suggested, getting to my feet to mix us both one. We’d had a glass of wine each at the restaurant, but it wasn’t enough to get either of us even close to tipsy--maybe lightly buzzed, but that was it. I mixed us each a vodka and tonic, and we clinked glasses as we settled in for the game.
“What was my major in college?” she asked.
I thought about it for a moment. I know she’d said something to me about it, but it was hard to pull up in my mind. “You started with literature, right? And then went on to something in psychology, with some kind of business minor.”
Bethany chuckled. “I guess that’s close enough,” she said.
“That’s not something I would even know if I actually was your boyfriend, anyway. You have to pick fair questions,” I pointed out.
Bethany rolled her eyes. “Fine, your turn.”
“What is my favorite thing that you cook?” I could see that I’d gotten her with that one--it wasn’t a question that had come up, but it was one that absolutely could.
“Damnit,” she said, sighing. She shook her head, took a sip of her vodka-tonic, and slipped one of her socks off.
We went on like that for a while, asking each other questions, getting them wrong--or getting them right. I really did want to make sure that we both knew each other well enough to get through the last day or so of the reunion without tipping anyone off to what was really going on, but I also couldn’t deny that I really wanted to see Bethany naked again. The little taste I’d had the night before hadn’t been enough.
It was ridiculous, since she was just another woman, and one I was probably never going to see again--I didn’t think she was all that interested in seeing me again, at least not consistently, no matter how things had gone down the night before. And I should have been focused on making sure I kept up my end of the deal and that Bethany kept up hers. But as both of us lost one bit of clothing after another, I found myself getting more and more excited at the prospect of being alone with a gorgeous woman who I knew could make me come hard.
I started coming up with harder and harder questions, trying to get rid of Bethany’s sweater dress, her leggings, as much as I could get her to take off. She was obviously doing the same--I realized it when I got a question from her that I couldn’t even remember us talking about at all, something from her middle-school years that there was no way I could have known.
Finally, we were down to underwear--boxers for me, and a pair of panties for Bethany. We’d finished our first drinks and I got up to make us another round.
“We should really make it interesting,” I said, as I poured a vodka-cranberry for Bethany and another vodka-tonic for me.
“What do you mean?”
I hadn’t missed the way that she’d blushed more than once when I was taking off my shirt, or my pants. She had the look on her face of someone who was starting to get turned on, but was desperate not to show it.
“Well, we’re both down to one last thing to take off,” I pointed out. “But we’re not really done getting to the bottom of what we need to know about each other to pull this off.”
“So how do we go from there?” she asked, licking her lips. Nervousness or arousal? I couldn’t tell, but I would have bet the latter.
I grinned and handed Bethany her drink. “Every question we get wrong, we have to do some kind of physical act to the other person,” I said. “Like--start with a kiss. Just a peck on the lips. And then move up.”
Bethany considered it for a moment and sipped her drink.
“I think we can do that,” she said, giving me a quick, raking look.
I could see the wheels turning in her head, and I knew we were heading towards something good--even if we didn’t necessarily end up achieving the goal of knowing each other as if we’d been dating a year.
“Whose turn is it?” I sat down with my drink and took a sip. I could feel the heat starting to pool in my groin, though I hadn’t started to get hard yet. But I knew I’d be hard soon enough, and I was already thinking of how difficult I could make the questions, to see how far Bethany was going to go with me.