I could count the number of times I’d been on a date with a woman probably on one hand. I wasn’t a big dater. I took women out. Most women demanded at least a free meal before they let you fuck them, but I would hardly call those dates. I was never nervous before those. I was nervous now. I had no reason to be; I had taken women out before, but I wasn’t even taking Audra out. We were staying at her house.

On the one hand, this was a good thing because if we were in her house, nobody was going to take pictures of her and write disrespectful things about what she was wearing and her body. On the other, I sort of wanted to take her out. Out out. Wherever she wanted. Even an art thing. I could stare at paintings with her if she wanted me to. She seemed to like that stuff so much; if anyone could make it interesting, she could. It felt a little like hiding, meeting in her house, and I did not want to hide her. She wasn’t the sort of girl you refused to claim in public. I wanted to show her off.

I was out of practice. Not only that, the stakes were a hell of a lot higher this time than they had been any other time. I could not afford to fuck up again. She was not a girl who lacked options. I had to make myself the best one. She needed to know that I wasn’t fucking with her.

This was serious. There was too much riding on this. I lived in New York, and she lived here. She—for some reason I could not imagine—was entertaining my brother. Her ex was a loser who still visited her at her house. I’d made her cry too many times already. There were so many reasons for her to say no. That was why I didn’t go in without consulting an expert. Sissy was still in LA.

After lecturing me for about five minutes about how lucky I was and what she would do to me if I fucked up, she told me to just be myself. What the hell kind of advice was that? Be myself?

“Just don’t try and impress her. She works in an auction house; she’s seen and handled items worth millions of dollars. If she wants to go out with you, it’s probably not because she’s trying to become your ex-wife.”

“I need to impress her, Sissy. We didn’t just meet and hit it off at a coffee shop,” I said, not really wanting to go into the details.

“If you’re serious about her, then show her. She doesn’t seem like the type of girl who’s going to let you prove yourself in dollars and cents.”

And that was the problem. Not the problem, the challenge. Audra was not easy. She expected more from me than I had ever had to give to any other woman. I was going to lose a hell of a lot more if I lost her than I would with any other woman. I was not going to lose her, though. I was keeping her.

Guys have been courting women for centuries. I just had to listen to her and laugh at her jokes and tell her she was pretty, right? Maybe she wasn’t going to be as difficult as I was expecting. Like Sissy had said, I just had to be myself. She hadn’t asked me to bring any food or anything. Maybe she’d cook? I did bring her flowers, though. When had any man ever gone wrong with flowers? I knocked at her door. She opened it. She was in a short dress that didn’t have any straps, and her hair was down the way I liked it.

She smiled a shy smile that was adorable. Thai food and wine, the Zinfandel that came out of a box; that was our date. She was surprised by the flowers—white short stem Calla lilies. She had one on her desk at work, which was why I chose them. Hopefully, it was her favorite flower. We ate on her couch with the television on but muted. The cats had hung out for a while but disappeared when she turned the space heater on in her room.

I really liked her house, mostly because it was full of her stuff. Talking, I remembered the box with the tiara in it. I asked her about it. She brought it over and knelt in front of it on the floor in front of the couch, taking the stuff out. A couple of sashes, the tiara from last time and a bunch of glossy printed photographs. I sat down next to her.

“Can I see them?” I asked.

“Don’t laugh,” she said handing them to me. I had seen them before but not really looked at them. The first one was a young girl, maybe seven or eight, in a tiara smiling with a trophy at her feet.

“Is this you?”

“I used to do pageants.”

I looked at the next one. The girl in the photo was no more than two years old, tops. She was looking around as a smiling woman held the tiara steady on her head.

“Oh my god, this too?”

“That was my first pageant. I won overall in the toddler category.”

“You were like JonBenét Ramsey,” I said, reaching for the less offensive of the two child pageant queens I knew by name. “Did your mom make you do these?”

“No. My aunt. She only had sons, and this was the way she decided she wanted to bond with me.”

“How long did you do them?”

“I qualified for Miss Teen America before I retired.”

“Shit. You were a pro. Why’d you quit?”

“Because I wanted to go to college. I had two majors; I couldn’t do this on the side.”

“Did you want to?”

“No,” she scoffed. “I don’t miss it. The pageant world is fucked up. I started waxing when I was like, ten years old.”

“What was your talent? Did you dance?”

“I sang.”

“What was your go-to? Bye bye birdie? What do little girls sing at pageants?” I asked—a question I never imagined I’d ask in my life. She laughed.

“No, less show tunes, more Madame Butterfly.”

“You sang opera? You know what I’m gonna ask you to do now.”

“Then you should know the answer is no,” she said, smiling.

“Come on, just a little,” I asked. She shook her head.

“I don’t sing anymore. I probably couldn’t even if I tried.”

“How’d you get into opera?” I asked her. Her mother. Her mother used to be an opera performer and was now a voice coach. She was born and raised in Brooklyn and had graduated from NYU. She didn’t have any siblings; it was just her and her mother. No father. Apparently, her mom had fucked one of her professors and gotten pregnant. She’d been spared the stress of living in a two-parent household. She hated California—same—and her job was the only thing that had brought her here and was keeping her here. I had looked her up, but the Internet hadn’t turned up any of this stuff.

I was a little surprised when she asked about my family. Honestly, people tended to know a lot of stuff about me—about us—already. How much did she know? My exploits—mostly bad—had been public record since before I was born. I mean, that was my first sin, being the first-born son of Jackson Strickland’s rumored mistress au pair. Everything from then on had been my fault. Parties, girls, one or two nights in jail; nothing that serious, but then again nothing to be proud of.

The ugliest thought crossed my mind.

Sissy had told me to be myself. Levi Strickland was sort of a piece of shit. A rich piece of shit. A piece of shit who had had no trouble getting girls in the past, but something told me Audra was about to break my undefeated record. She wasn’t going to buy whatever bullshit I tried to sell her. I wasn’t trying to sell her on anything. This was already more than I had done with or for anyone else. She had met my mother. She had met Sissy. I was on the floor of her house looking at pictures of her when she was a kid.

I hadn’t had enough dates to compare it, but objectively, it was pretty nice. I mean, I wouldn’t change anything—not the Thai food, not the wine that came out of a box. Maybe the things that had got us here; the fights, the tears, her having to meet Debbie, her ever spending even an hour alone with Max, the last two times we had had sex…

I had wanted to be inside her the moment we met, even before that, watching her from across the room as she talked to Max in Dad’s old house. And then I had. We had sex, but it fucking pushed her away. If she wasn’t who she was, this would have been perfect. If all I wanted was to fuck, to pump and dump, her reaction would have been welcome.

But it wasn’t. I didn’t have words for what it was I wanted from her. The only word that came as close to describing it was everything. I wanted all of her.

It was getting late. She didn’t ask me to leave, but I had no intention of doing so, anyway. Fuck, even if all she wanted to do was just sleep in her bed like the last time. She didn’t stop me when I kissed her. When I held her by the back of her neck and pushed my tongue in her mouth. When I squeezed her tit through her dress or ran my hands over her thighs.

Her hand rested on my chest as she leaned into me, kissing me back gently, slowly. Her hand moved up, feeling over my collarbone and the side of my neck. I let go of her and started unbuttoning my shirt. She took over, pulling my shirt out of my pants and starting with the buttons at the bottom, working her way up.

“Pull it off,” I encouraged her. She peeled it off my body and looked at me like she didn’t know what to do next. I took her hand and placed it flat on my chest. She spread her fingers and ran it slowly over my pec, down my abs looking at me like she was scared she was doing the wrong thing. My fault. Yelling at her like that when she touched me that first time we fucked—not my best moment.

I didn’t dislike being touched. I didn’t put in work at the gym to feel myself up. I just wouldn’t usually encourage it with the women I saw. Once you gave them the eight, nine or however many inches you had to offer, there came a point it stopped being enough.

Some were happy enough with the publicity and the regular or semi-regular fucking, but others started asking questions, like why they’d never been to your house or met your mother, or why you had never allowed them to issue a public statement through their representative about you being a couple.

It stopped being simple. No touching kept it simple. It also kept it distant, which Audra had responded terribly to. Shit, I had too. I didn’t want her distant. I wanted her as close as I could get her. I wanted to possess her. Make her mine, only mine.

“Why did you… why didn’t you let me touch you before?”

“I want you to. Don’t stop,” I instructed her when she moved her hand. She put her hands on my shoulders and straddled me, grinding into my crotch as she did. I held her close, making her wrap her arms around my neck. I kissed her. I sucked her tongue into my mouth, feeling her hands run through my hair and down my arms.

I didn’t think she’d let me touch her like this, but I wasn’t about to ask her to stop. I pulled her dress; it came off over her head. Her underwear was almost the same color as her skin. I moved us up onto the couch and let her stretch out on her back before covering her body with mine. I worked on the hook of her bra so I could suck on her hard, rose-colored nipples. She arched her back, moaning when I did. Her body was soft and open. Her skin was so smooth. I could smell her perfume or lotion or whatever on her; sweet, and gorgeous, like the way she tasted.

I pulled her panties off, so she was naked. I was hard, the kind of hard that hurt a little. I kissed my way down her body, catching her clit between my lips. She writhed as I sucked her. My hair wasn’t long enough for her to pull on, but she would have been if it was. She writhed and whimpered under me. We had fucked twice, and I hadn’t tasted her yet. This was way overdue. I ate her out like I was starving. I pushed two of my fingers into her, and she lost it. Not three thrusts later she was coming. Losing her mind. Shaking and screaming.

I kissed back up to her mouth pulling my dick out with one hand.

“Take them off,” she said, reaching down and pulling my pants down. I stood and took them off watching her face as I did. Her green eyes were burning with lust. She bit her lip, and one of her hands went between her legs. I knelt between them, pulling her hand up to my mouth to lick her fingers clean, tasting her. I leaned over her, keeping her pressed between my body and the couch.

“Do you want me to use a condom?” I asked her.

“No. Fuck me,” she whispered.

I pushed into her, slowly, watching her face. Her lips parted making a little ‘o’ and her brows knitted up. She moaned. I was stretching her out. She was so tight. Her walls felt like velvet on my cock. I fucked her slowly, not like the last times. I took my time feeling her soft pink center. In and out. I couldn’t keep it up. The closer we both got to coming the faster I went. She came before I did, moaning my name, hanging onto me like she was scared I’d vanish. I shot inside her and sagged onto the sofa, pulling her on top of me, so I didn’t crush her.

She kissed my chest softly as we both recovered. She was in a good mood, right? Ruining the mood was the last thing I wanted to do, but fuck, I had to know.

“What’s going on between you and Max?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she sighed with her head on my chest after a few seconds.

“Do you like him?”

“I don’t dislike him.”

“Come on, Audra,” I said, sitting up to make her lift her head to look at me.

“What has he said about me?” she asked.

“He told me that you guys went out.”

“The only time we’ve been anywhere together was the dinner at his house. The dinner you were also at.”

“You’ve never seen him any other time?”

“Are you guys in competition or something?” she asked.

“No… it’s not him; it’s anyone. It’s everyone. I’m not going to share you.”

“You want us to be exclusive?”

Yes.

“I don’t want another man touching you.”

“You know that’s a two-way street, right?”

“You don’t have to worry about other men touching me, sweetheart,” I told her. She smiled, giggling a little.

“You know what I mean,” she said, looking down at my body. “I like you, a lot, and I want you, but I can’t do casual. I won’t.”

I looked at her. I touched her face, so she’d look up at me. Girls always asked me this shit, but it was different this time. I had asked her first. I really didn’t want to let her go. This wasn’t the worst situation, but it could have been better.

“I’m not seeing anyone else,” I told her. “I’m not going to if you and I are seeing each other.”

“What about when you go back to New York? You work there. You live there. I work and live here.”

“What aren’t you saying, sweetheart? Tell me.”

“If this turned into anything we would be long-distance. The only reason I would ever do that was if I knew it would turn into something in the end. If I knew that at one point, we’d be together, physically, in the same place.”

Move back to New York with me, I thought. I was going to say it, but I didn’t say anything. I hugged her a little tighter.

“I don’t want to stop seeing you just because I live in New York.”

We could work something out. Her head came back down on my chest, and I ran my fingers through her hair. She was mine till I had to fly back the next night. She was mine, period. What was a little distance, really? It was time and money and effort to get to her, but all that? Not enough. Not enough to make me leave her alone.

Nothing was.