“Come on!” I yelled, pulling her to a run as the double-decker bus slowed to a stop up ahead. “We’re going to miss it!”
The city was in full motion, the energy of Tuesday night in Manhattan alive and well, and I’d already bumped into approximately one million people loitering in my way since leaving Melody’s parents’ apartment. Tuesday wasn’t a typical party night, but some kind of sugar rush had obviously descended on the city this week.
On active nights like this, there was really no other choice than to use your body as a human battering ram if you wanted to make it anywhere in a timely fashion.
Melody hadn’t told me she lived with her parents, and the surprise of her mother answering the door honestly threw me for a loop. The weird part was that the more it played out, the more uncomfortable she seemed about the whole thing, the more it started to feel like a good loop—like one on an extreme roller coaster I’d been waiting in line for thirty-four years to ride.
“Miss what? Why are we running?” she yelled as she tried to keep up from behind. “I have to warn you that on a sliding scale of enjoyment from one to ten, the fact that you’ve already got me engaged in exercise has this date starting at a negative two.” I smiled as I slowed my steps and swung her up and into my arms to carry her.
“Ahh,” she shrieked. The people around us jumped out of the way to avoid her flailing feet while she scrambled to make sure all of her parts were covered. I very nearly made a joke about it being nothing I hadn’t seen before, but I realized how terrible of an idea that was before it ever even got off the ground, thank God.
“What the hell are you doing, Will?” Melody questioned with a slap to my chest.
I crossed the street, avoiding cabs and cars as I did instead of answering, and I didn’t put her on her feet until we made it to the bus. Only then did I set her down to pull out our tickets and hand them to the driver as I ushered her on board.
“What the hell? What are we doing?” she repeated, tired of no answers. But this wasn’t really the kind of thing you could explain without visual aids. If I popped my cork too early, it’d be disappointing for both of us.
The cork.
The.
Not my.
Though, really, popping my cork early would be pretty fucking disappointing too.
Again, I ignored her line of questioning—after briefly considering teasing her if she lost ninety-nine percent of her vocabulary when she stepped outside of the office—and motioned for her to precede me. “Let’s go upstairs. Much better view.”
She dug her heels in, holding me at a stop behind her. “Why are we on a bus full of tourists?” Hell of a pair of heels they were, by the way. Stiletto, thigh-high boots that just skimmed the bottom of her, short—God, painfully, beautifully, short—black skirt.
I snapped my fingers in excitement. “Ah, thanks for reminding me.” I reached into my back pocket to hand her a disposable camera. “So you don’t miss anything.”
She almost tripped as I pushed her up the stairs, and when her angry eyes met mine over her shoulder, I worried for the first time that maybe this hadn’t been such a great first-date idea after all. But under all of that anger lived passion—a side of Mel I’d been dying to see since I’d laid eyes on her in that awkward exam room the first day—and curiosity over intelligence won out. I blame my Y chromosome.
“Will—” she started again when we reached the top of the stairs to an almost packed bus.
Turning her body to mine with a hand at her hip, I slid the other hand up and into the loose curls of her crimson hair. “Have I told you how happy I am that you changed your mind? How happy I am that some small part of you found me irresistible?”
“Will,” she said again, but this time it was a whisper.
The emotion of her word yanked the cord attached to my chest and sucked me in, luring me as if the call were designed specifically for me. In that moment, I was nothing but her prey.
Desperate for gratification, for some physical reassurance that I wasn’t fourteen steps into the twelve it would take me to lose my mind, I touched my lips to the skin of hers. Heat, raw and exotic spread from my mouth to my chest at first contact, but when she pushed up onto her toes and touched her lips to mine, once, twice, the blaze spread all the way to the end of every limb.
When the bus started to move, rocking us so hard that I had to catch her with an arm around her back and the other hand to the railing, I forced my lips to back away.
She smiled, and I realized at once that sometimes moving away has its perks.
Directing her to a seat, I let her scoot in first and settled beside her before wrapping an arm around her shoulders and leaning in to whisper in her ear. “Is this a bad idea? Do you hate it?”
I moved closer as I scented the intoxicating fruity allure of her skin. She shivered and leaned in to whisper in my ear. “Not anymore.”
“Good. I didn’t want this first date to be like any other first date you’d ever been on. I know you know the city, but this way, from now on, I’ll have memories of this everywhere I go.”
And, hopefully, so will she.
Truthfully, I was also hoping posing as tourists would aid in anonymity. I didn’t exactly get recognized everywhere I went, but it happened a whole lot more than you’d want it to on a first date.
She laughed. “Well, you’re definitely succeeding there.”
“I promise dinner at the end of the bus tour, though.”
“Well, well, look whose grade just shifted up the scale to a four point five.”
“Four point five?”
She winked. “What fun would it be if there weren’t any room to improve? I know how you doctor types are. It’s the challenge that drives you.”
I shook my head with a chuckle. “I don’t know, Mel. In this case, victory sounds pretty good to me.”
“Excuse me?” I heard as a soft tap rapped on my shoulder.
Mel’s face scrunched, especially at the corners of her eyes. I knew from watching her with Marlene that this was her face when annoyed. Ironically, the sight of it kept me from being the same.
I turned to the moment-interrupter with a smile. “Yes?”
“Would you mind taking a picture of us? Times Square is coming up, and we really want to get one of us with all the lights!”
“Sure,” I agreed, watching as Melody’s crabby wrinkles deepened. Absently, my hand lifted to the side of her head so I could smooth a finger over them. They cleared immediately.
“Oh, thank you so much!” the stranger gushed from behind us. “Did you want us to take one for you too?”
“Got your camera?” I asked Melody.
She shook her head, but the seed of a smile I’d planted on her face with my touch started to grow.
“We’d love a picture,” I told the woman behind us as I noted our location—54th and Broadway. “You better get your phone out. We’re close.”
“Oh! Thank you! You’ve been to New York before?”
Mel made big eyes, but I ignored her. “A couple of times. First time was our honeymoon.”
As Melody’s mouth widened in shock, I waggled my eyebrows.
“Oh, how romantic!”
“It is, isn’t it?” I asked. Melody pinched the inside of my thigh so hard I jumped.
I winked. “Don’t worry, baby. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”
Rose stained her cheeks, spreading out rapidly like food coloring in water.
The bus slowed to a crawl as we made it to the iconic Midtown location, the flashing lights of each sign swirling and mixing across the red of Melody’s blush and coloring it every other hue.
I grabbed the tourist’s camera and counted down. “Three, two, one.…smile!”
The normally blinding flash of the photo blended in with the show of lights for us, but by the way they blinked, I guessed it didn’t feel quite the same on the other side.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “Night pictures are tough.”
“Oh, that’s okay!” the woman said, waving her temporary blindness away. She apparently did most of the talking for the two of them, and quite frankly, her fellow looked glad of it.
“Here,” she went on, holding out her hand. “Let me get your picture before it’s too late.”
“Oh, that’s—” Mel protested.
But I cut her off with a yank of my arm, pulling her into my side and shoving my face into her neck as I handed off the disposable camera. “Memories, Mel.”
The light of the flash going off made me smile deeper before looking up for one posed picture of the two of us smiling.
As soon as it was done, I reached out for the camera with my left hand and held out my right to shake.
“I’m Will, and this is Mel,” I introduced.
“I’m Susie, and this is Frank.” Frank gave a halfhearted wave.
“Where are you folks from?” Susie asked, carrying the conversation once again.
“California,” I said before Mel could ruin the fun unknowingly.
“Oh, wow!” the woman exclaimed excitedly. “California! We’re from Kansas. Always wanted to see the big city! But, oh my gosh, the West Coast sounds so exciting too! What’s it like?”
I turned to Melody and invited her to speak with an encouraging grin. It wasn’t the most orthodox way to hear about her life on the West Coast, and California wasn’t where she’d actually lived, but it helped me get to know her all the same. And being in on the little fib together gave us something to share right off the bat.
“Well, it’s actually really peaceful. We’re from northern California, not Hollywood like you see on TV. We love to make day-trips up north to the real Pacific Northwest. Seattle and Portland are some of the coolest towns we’ve ever been to. If you want to go to the West Coast, that’d be our suggestion. There’s a real family feel in the air even though they aren’t small towns.”
Funny thing was, as she spoke to Susie, Melody’s eyes never once left mine.
Slow motion.
The bounce and swirl of her curled auburn hair, the swing of her hips—even the time it took for the long lashes of her eyes to meet and move away again.
All of it seemed to take forever, and yet, the night had gone screaming by like a high-speed train. Two hours of laughing at each other and breathing in the energy of the New York air on the double-decker bus, an hour and a half of pizza and beers at a pub down the street, and the last hour here at this bar, watching and feeling Melody lower her walls and dance with me, over in an instant. But I remembered each moment in vivid, terrifying detail.
The feel of her fingers clenching my thigh as she settled into our tourist ruse, the speck of tomato sauce she licked from the corner of her lips with just the tip of her magenta tongue, and the bounce of her breasts as she jumped in excitement at the beginning of each new song all vied for my attention, only to be pushed out of the way by each and every single new thing she did.
This was the best date I’d ever been on, and by some stroke of luck, I’d managed to keep us in dark enough corners that outsiders were equally in the dark on my identity. It was also the longest, and somehow, I still feared its premature end.
I pulled her closer, inhaling the hints of soft vanilla seeping from her skin, and continued leading our bodies to the rhythm of the music playing inside the bar while silently hoping that I could find a way to stretch this night out longer.