I could even feel him while he slept. His presence—that thing about him that I sensed even when I couldn’t see him. It hummed, calm and quiet, but it was there, not to mention the fact that his arm was wrapped around me. He was big and hard and warm. We had shared a bed together, and it was just before six in the morning.

I had been conditioned by Hecate and Hephaestus to wake up invariably at the ass crack of dawn. If I wasn’t, I’d be woken up with sandpapery kisses all over my face. Right on cue Hephaestus walked into the room, jumped up on the bed and head-butted me, meowing. They had been up on the bed too at some point of the night, but they’d escaped to tend to their important nighttime kitty business.

I never stopped them from coming up on the bed with me. They were hairless. It was warm. They liked it. Was this embarrassing? Was I a cat lady? The answer was yes, but did Levi think so? I wasn’t pre-chewing their food for them or building shrines in their honor, but I’d known enough guys in the past who had taken umbrage. He hadn’t seemed to mind them. He wasn’t allergic—that was good.

I carefully removed myself from him to fill up the food bowls. I went to the bathroom and rinsed my face. I had been crying the night before; my face was a little puffy. Attractive. I had asked him to be gone in the morning, but how mad was I that he hadn’t been? Not mad enough to wake him up and kick him out.

I walked back into the room to check my phone, taking it to the kitchen with me to get the coffee started. Would he want to eat when he got up? I didn’t really do breakfast at home; what would I prepare? What did he like? With a body like that, he probably hadn’t eaten a simple carbohydrate in his life. What about coffee, though? Did he have any allergies? I used Almond Dream in my coffee; was he violently allergic to nuts? Would he go into anaphylactic shock in my bed? Was I going to kill him this morning?

I was being frantic. I’d just give it to him black, and he’ll tell me if he didn’t like it that way. I had to relax. I had seen and felt too much of him to still be this nervous about talking to him. We needed to talk this morning. Last night had been… eventful. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to tell Max I had gotten home safely, or reply to any of the calls or messages Zahira had left for me. I had messages from Zahira from the night before asking me to meet her for breakfast, saying that she wanted to talk to me. It was too late to make it now. I asked her whether she’d be free during my lunch break. How was I even going to begin telling her what had happened in the last eighteen hours?

I walked back to the room with two coffees. He was still asleep. Hecate was dozing on his chest, and Hephaestus had burrowed under the covers in the space between his body and his arm. He was on his back. Should I wake him up? He had work to do, right? I did. I didn’t want to leave him here when I left—no way. I walked over to the bed and placed his coffee on the bed stand beside him, climbing onto the bed on the side I’d slept on. I fought the urge to touch him. I really wanted to. He was right there. One of his arms was up on the pillow, his right arm, the tattooed one. I reached for it, holding his hand and squeezing.

He squeezed back. I watched his face as he woke up. He scrunched his nose up and sighed deeply before opening his eyes. He took a second to take in his surroundings, the woman on the bed, the cats, daylight streaming through the window. He looked at me and smiled.

“Hi,” he said. His voice was deep, drowsy and sexy.

“Hi. Good morning. I brought you coffee. It’s black. I don’t know what you like to put in it.” He sat up—as up as he could sit without spilling Hecate off his chest. He scratched her behind the ears drinking some of his coffee before putting it back on the bed stand.

“Black is fine. Thank you. What time is it?” he asked.

“Almost six-thirty. Too early?”

“No,” he sighed. He covered his mouth yawning. He was tired. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it had, a little. Just because he seemed superhuman didn’t mean he was. He still got tired. He would still get drunk if he had too much whiskey. Still fall when he tripped over something. “I need to get on California time,” he joked.

“Were you in New York?” I asked. He nodded. “Why did you come back?”

“I wanted to see you again. I couldn’t stay in New York after the last conversation we had.” He reached for me, and I didn’t hesitate to take his hand. “I’m sorry, Audra.”

“Buying me expensive art and antiques isn’t going to make me forgive you,” I said.

“I know it won’t,” he said. “But I’m not going to stop. Give me another chance. I want to see you again.” I looked down at our hands.

“How long are you here before flying back?” I asked.

“I leave again after the auction. It’s New York, Audra, not New Zealand,” he said smiling. “I can come back. I want to come back. Tell me when I can see you.”

“Are you asking me out on a date?” I asked carefully. He smiled.

“Let me take you out somewhere,” he said.

“Can you come here tomorrow night?”

“Here?”

I nodded. Here. What did a date with a guy like him mean? A three-course dinner somewhere stuffy and formal where I would have to wear a gown again? I wanted him… well, to myself. I had seen how he could be when he was comfortable and relaxed; that was at lunch with his sister and me. I wanted that man. It was all the same man, but I wanted him to feel like he could be like that with me. For that, we needed as few distractions as possible.

“Doesn’t it count as a date if it’s here?”

“Okay. Here,” he conceded. He let my hand go to drink his coffee.

“Are you hungry?” I asked. He lifted Hecate off of him so he could stand up.

“Not… for food,” he said, looking at me. His gaze could have burned my pajamas right off my body. He came around the bed. He took the coffee cup from my hand and set it down before pulling me up. He kissed me, holding me tight to his body. My shirt had ridden up, so he was touching my skin.

“I have to go to work,” I whispered, breaking the kiss.

“Just give me fifteen minutes,” he mumbled, kissing my neck. He palmed one of my tits, squeezing my nipple under my top. Ooh, I felt that. My breasts were pretty tender; I was probably pre-menstrual, the sensation was magnified. I could feel him hardening between us.

“Levi,” I said, pulling my top back down. Our eyes met, and I saw how much he wanted it.

“Ten minutes. Five. You won’t last ten,” he growled. He turned me around and held me to him, tight while his other hand went down my shorts, inside my panties. I gasped feeling his fingers rotate over my clit a few times before two of his fingers were inside of me. I moaned feeling him finger fuck me. I reached back and held the back of his neck. His dick, completely rigid pressed into my back. I didn’t last long. I couldn’t. He whispered dirty things in my ear, about how hard he would make me come, how wet I was for him, how hard he was going to fuck me the next time he saw me.

I completely unraveled, coming around his fingers, collapsing forward so his arm around me was all the support I had. He spun me back around before kissing me senseless. I felt dazed in his arms, high from feeling him, really fucking feeling him. He wasn’t guarded. He wasn’t keeping me at arm’s length. I felt dangerously attracted to him like I was getting back what I felt for him. I needed to get to work, and I did, after sucking his dick before he went to take a shower.

I wasn’t an auctioneer, I worked behind the scenes, you could say at Strickland’s, but I had felt like this particular auction had taken years to put together, not just weeks. Saying I had been the head appraiser and cataloguer in the Jackson Strickland Collection auction had to count for something. Max’s guests from the night before had sure been impressed. This was like my Titanic. My Saving Private Ryan. My Mona Lisa. A lot of them had just asked me why Strickland’s didn’t have art storage services, and what Max had done to get a girl like me to be his date. I’d just thank them graciously for helping make the auction a success and asking them to talk about what lots they had put their guarantees on.

Oh yeah, Max. I’d have to talk to him. At the very least thank him for the night before, maybe apologize on behalf of his brother. Something. I was obviously in the middle of something with the two of them. Things were different now, in a way that made me feel I couldn’t talk to Max anymore, not even as a friend. Levi and I were going to have a date and maybe more dates after that. He wasn’t going to tell me who I could and couldn’t talk to, but going to see his brother would be outright baiting him. I wasn’t going to do that.

Work slogged by hour by hour before it was time to break for lunch. Zahira and I had chosen a place walking distance from Strickland’s to go to. French bistro—there were no good Asian places in SoMa which was what I really wanted. She was there before I was even though she had a longer way to travel.

“Hey,” I said, flopping into the seat across from her. “I’m sorry I took so long to get back to you,” I said, preempting her worry.

“What happened last night? I was this close to coming over to make sure you hadn’t been taken or something.”

“Taken? By who?” I quickly ordered my meal. “I was at a dinner party. I got home just fine.”

“You were with Max Strickland, right?” she said.

“I was.” She knew everything. Everything except what had happened last night. “It wasn’t a date.”

“The pictures could have fooled me,” she said.

“The what?”

She handed her phone to me. There was two of them, grainy, really shitty quality, but I could recognize myself in them. Max too. They were at his house—before the dinner when we were talking to the guests. He had said the function was private; how the hell had anyone gotten these?

“I don’t know how anyone took these. It wasn’t a publicized event. How did you find them?”

“Looking up Max Strickland. Whoever took them, they’re out there now. You are now the mystery woman linked to Max Strickland.”

I frowned.

“I’ll call him,” I said. This wasn’t serious. Maybe part of the catering staff was trying to cash in on some scandal. I wondered whether Levi had seen them. It wasn’t a secret that I’d been with his brother last night. He had been there too.

“I didn’t know you were spending so much time with Max.”

“It was his dad’s funeral. I met the entire Strickland family,” I said. Our food came. I doused my salad in vinaigrette to make it edible.

“Watch out around Max,” she warned.

“Why?”

“He’s… he’s sort of made a name for himself with a few girls I know,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“He… he likes to pay for his dates if you know what I mean,” she said. I didn’t until it finally clicked.

“He hires escorts?” I asked. She nodded.

“How would you know that?”

“I’m not just a painter, Audra. The art classes don’t cover my supplies, rent, and student loans,” she said looking down. I paused trying to digest what it was that she was telling me. She was… oh.

“So, you’ve… have you? With Max?”

“I haven’t, but I know enough girls who have. Apparently, it doesn’t matter who he’s been romantically linked to; he’s always hired girls on the side. He makes girls sign NDAs, pays them hush money, all sorts of stuff.”

Could I have one bombshell at a time? We had been friends for how long and her other career hadn’t come up once? I was more interested in that than Max and his NDAs.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I think you need to be careful. I think he might be using you. If not using you, definitely being dishonest with you.”

“I… I’m not with Max. I don’t care who he sleeps with. You just told me you escort on the side,” I said.

“Do you think I’m a hoe?”

“No… I’m just surprised. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“It’s not exactly something you can just bring up over lunch,” she said. I laughed. She just had.

“Do you know… has anyone ever been… does Levi hire girls?” I asked.

“Some girls have gone to parties he’s had at hotels, but that’s all I can tell you about him.”

I stopped there, not really wanting to hear any more about Levi’s romantic history. The guy had a sex tape online. One which I hadn’t seen, but doubtless millions of people had. He was… I didn’t know what to call him regarding this. Whoever he dated, or whatever before me was not really any of my business, as much as I wanted to know. What would knowing even do for me?

Nothing. It would be like watching that sex tape. We were connecting, finally. Talking without having fights and actually seeing each other the next night, on a real date. If I really wanted to know I would ask.

Whatever he wanted me to know, he would tell me.