Chapter Nineteen
After tonight, Tom was down to nineteen coupons. Nineteen more days with Flick as his roommate and lover. He spread them out on the coffee table, mainly to give Flick space in the kitchen. She was working too hard at pretending she wasn’t stressed about cooking for him. But also, so he could plan more carefully, because he’d screwed up the order.
Dear Tom, in retrospect, it was a cruel choice to have Flick cook for you on a Monday night. It’s a work night, so her preparation time is limited, and also because it follows the fantastic meal at Altri, so you’ve raised the stakes unnecessarily. Signed, Tom. P.S. Do better, you dickhead.
Altri. Great restaurant he’d always been meaning to try out. Killer meal, knockout dress, giggling fucking waiter, the thing with Flick’s foot on his leg and the dessert taste swap, and the way she smiled at him, held his hand like she didn’t ever want to let go.
Incomparable woman.
With her uncomfortable questions.
He’d talked about shrinking populations in Asia, for God’s sake. Do better, dickhead, because time is running out to understand what all this means.
There was the sound of a lid being clamped on a pot with too much force and he half turned to see Flick push hair out of her eyes. “Okay?”
She made back-off motions with both hands. “Nothing happening here. No reason to get excited. Play with your coupons. They are all the birthday present you’re getting.”
Best birthday present he’d ever had. It was a two-way trade and worked out just as well for the giver as the receiver.
There was no acrid smell of burning anything, so he put his finger on the Breakfast in Bed coupon and slipped it over the table’s surface till it was lined up behind the Massage coupon. What should come after it, dirty talk or the quickie, and who was meant to initiate the quickie?
It made sense to plot the remaining coupons out, but no matter which way he rearranged them it felt wrong. The order was imperfect, the activities were too specific, like Lingerie Shopping, or too vague, like Play a Game. Every way he scheduled them seemed wrong. Did a successful picnic need a weekend? Could they coordinate a lunch hour? What kind of game? Chess? Monopoly? Would’ve been fun to play Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto with Flick, but Josh took his Xbox with him and Tom hadn’t gotten around to replacing it. By the time he did, she’d be gone.
The more serious question—was it better to split the sex play up and intersperse it with other more mundane activities, or to gorge in one rolling wave of sexual excess?
It’s not like they weren’t having off-coupon couplings. They might as well have taken out a season pass to making each other come. Not that he had any complaints. He didn’t get this much action in college. The sex coupons just added an extra element of novelty.
And there were only nineteen days left for any kind of play with Flick.
There were ten days till the thirty minutes in his calendar set aside for Beau Rendel. Beau wanted to talk. Just a general chat, his admin assistant had said. It would be the I’m sorry this happened, I believe in you, I trust we have your continued loyalty chat. He’d like to put his finger on it and move it somewhere else like he could the coupon for tie-Flick-up-for-sex, which maybe should go before massage or after Flick told him a secret. Or maybe he could lose that coupon under the sectional; he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
Denise Revero wanted to chat too. Everything she said would be a secret as well, at least in the short term. She got time in his calendar tomorrow.
He stared at the layout of the coupons. He’d give Flick a break and ask her to make his new playlist tomorrow night. It didn’t matter if it only had one song. He had another night where he’d get to wrap around her as they slept, another day he’d wake to her faked morning-person cheer. She hated mornings. Thinking about it made him smile.
The breakfast-in-bed coupon should be scheduled for a weekend, so it didn’t have to have her out of bed early. There were only two weekends together left.
He swapped the Sixty-Nine with the Servant for a Day coupon, and then swapped the Servant for a Day coupon for the Kama Sutra Position of Your Choice, and then put Afternoon Delight between them only to realize they’d need a hotel to make that happen on a weekday. Managing his own work calendar wasn’t this complex.
And the only thing he was achieving here was the transfer of yet more glitter to surfaces that didn’t benefit from it, including the table, rug, his fingers and no doubt his face again. What was it with glitter and its inability to stick to whatever it was supposed to stick to and to shed everywhere else? Design flaw. Like these coupons were designed to lead him inexorably closer to Flick while relentlessly counting down to the day they parted.
That was an evil sleight of hand.
“It’s safe for you to come back over here,” Flick said.
He restacked the coupons in next-to-last order. “You didn’t set off any alarms.”
“Other than those internal ones in you. The ‘OMG what’s she doing now’ bell, the ‘is it safe to leave her unsupervised’ buzzer, and the ‘I can’t trust her with my things’ siren.”
“I trust you with my things.”
“You’re absolutely correct.” She bounced the heel of her hand on her forehead. “You even let me put some of them in my mouth.”
Holy fuck. Nothing was sacred with her. “How is it you’ve lived this long?”
“It’s my special talent,” she said with an eye roll. “Now sit down and tell me what you’d like to drink.”
He chose the bottle of wine she’d brought home and sat at the place she’d set for him. He knew there was fish in this meal, but he’d abandoned the kitchen before she’d done much more than unwrap it. He could smell garlic and lemon and his stomach rumbled.
A bowl of steamed vegetables went down in front of him and then a plated meal.
“Smoked cod with creamy parsley sauce on garlic potato mash,” she said with a TV-game-show-host arm wave.
“It looks good.” A cautiously hedged comment if ever there was one. He’d expected something less competent from the banging about and the stress on her face, and it must’ve showed in his tone.
“It tastes good too, you enormous heaving lump of doubt. You thought I’d fuck up. I don’t like cooking. I’d almost rather do anything else, but I know how to do it.”
The greater part of valor would be to eat and make approving noises at this stage. Not difficult. It was very tasty. “It’s really good.”
She grunted, eyes down on her plate. They were sitting close enough for him to open his arm like a bird wing, elbow out, and nudge her ribs. “You could cook this when we have Wren and Josh over, when he’s back for an office leaders meeting, or we could do something together.”
“Are you completely crazy?” She put her utensils down and turned to him. “You and me in the kitchen collaborating? It would be like Thunderdome. Two men enter. One man leaves.”
“Ah—”
“You want to impress your friends, or at least not horrify them. We collaborate beautifully in the bedroom. We even manage to rub together remarkably well outside the bedroom now, but together in the kitchen...” She took a sip of her wine and he waited on her final pronouncement. “Man, you have a death wish.”
Not a death wish, but there were other things he wished for. Primarily for more than nineteen coupons.
Denise Revero had an interesting opening for him in San Francisco. The sign-on bonus would more than compensate for the inconvenience of moving. He’d like the weather, but he hesitated. Selling up was a big deal. He’d had enough of moving around growing up, and he’d never seriously thought about Frisco before.
“I’m not saying you should jump on this opportunity, but it might be a waiting game otherwise,” Denise said.
“Let me think about it.”
“Twenty-four hours, Tom. If I don’t hear from you by this time Wednesday, it’s a pass.”
Fair call. He’d have time to think about it overnight. But pounding the treadmill didn’t give him any clarity. Neither did drawing up his mental pros-and-cons list. It was a balanced ledger, which meant he needed some factor outside the rational motivations to sway him. The only thing swaying him Tuesday night was Flick.
He put playlists together by adopting other people’s. Legitimatized theft of their efforts. Flick had a whole other way of working it out that required headphones and dancing. Not that he would see what she was dancing to. Not that it mattered. There was a certain clarity in the shift of her hips and the roll of her pelvis, and the only decision he cared about was whose bed they were sleeping in after they’d finished messing up the sheets.
He waited until she wasn’t flailing around and slipped in behind her, hands on her hips. She pushed the headphones off one ear and looked back at him. “I’m working here.”
“I appreciate it.”
She leaned back into him. “You’re far away tonight.”
“You’re the one in another world.” He pulled the jack from the socket for emphasis and she took the headphones off, taking a seat on the coffee table.
“Talk to me.” She made a come-on gesture with her fingers.
“There’s a job in Frisco.”
Her eyes popped wide. “You’re thinking of quitting Rendel.”
“I have to keep my options open.”
“Of course you do. So, this job?”
“It would be a good move.”
“But you’re hesitant.”
“It’s a—” He stopped, both the pacing he was doing and defense of the job he was about to make.
“Tom?”
He needed a coupon for it. Take Job in San Francisco. Earn a Big Sign-On Bonus. The problem was there’d be no Flick in Frisco, same as there’d be no Flick in Chicago. “It’s good. It’s not good enough to move for.”
“Even though Rendel screwed you over.”
He held his hand out to her and she took it. “Don’t remind me.” He drew her to standing. “Whatever is on that playlist will be enough.”
“Hmm, I’d like to—”
“Enough.” What wasn’t enough was the number of nights he had left with Flick. He took her to bed, but she didn’t stay there. For the first time since they’d started sleeping together every night, he woke to find her missing. He found her in the kitchen, staring into the refrigerator, backlit by its light, tumbled hair halfway down her back, T-shirt hitched up over one hip, the sleep shorts she wore pulled tight across her squeezable little ass as she leaned over.
“Didn’t I feed you enough?”
She jumped like he’d poked her and he was on the other side of the counter. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry for waking you.”
He slid onto a stool and yawned. He was half awake but he didn’t miss the endearment. “You haven’t gone wandering at night for a while. Worried about Drew?”
“Yes.” She closed the fridge door and it was harder to see her in the gloom, but he thought she shook her head. “I talked to his wife, Jeannie. He’s doing okay. His pain is being managed. No more trips to the hospital for now.”
“Uh-huh.” He yawned again. “Flick, you wouldn’t be spinning me a tall tale, would you?”
“Why would I bother?” She rounded the counter and shoved him till he stood. “Back to bed.”
“You’re not hungry?” If he was fully awake he’d have a better idea if she was being truthful.
“Only for a victory in whatever game we’re going to play.”
Hmm, he still needed to think up a specific game. “Pool.” She shoved him again so he let her lead him to the bedroom. “Do you play pool?”
“I might’ve played a game or two.”
That probably meant she was a hustler and had played for gas money.
At the end of the workday, in a half-empty dive bar, watching Flick sink the five ball in the corner pocket in their first game of eight ball, he didn’t give a damn that she was chasing him all around the table.
She’d come to the bar from the office and was wearing a dress he’d zipped her into that morning, and heels lethal enough to puncture a car tire, which should’ve made leaning over a pool table impossible. It was impossible from the standpoint of not being able to take his eyes off her. The hem of that dress rose to show off the backs of her thighs, just high enough to drive all other sensible thought from his head. He was all about the next solid she sank and hoping she made a mistake soon, and the cheesy fries they were going to eat later and one more beer and fuck, she was wonderful.
He’d turned down an interview for the San Francisco job, but Denise was still on the case. He needed an option to turn down how bright Flick burned in his eyes so he could see past her, to when his life would settle back to normal. Maybe then it would be easier to decide what he wanted to do with his career.
“Hot damn,” she said, her seven hitting the cushion but not rolling far enough to fall in the pocket. “You’re up.”
She had one ball left on the table. “You might’ve played before,” he mimicked. “I’m being hustled.” He knew it when she pocketed a ball on the break.
“I haven’t played for years.” She chalked her cue, struggling to contain the wickedest twist in her lips.
“But when you did?”
“I didn’t pay for a lot of meals, or books, bus fare, or my phone account.”
“You know there’s a coupon I was reluctant about.” He approached the table, studied the layout she’d left him. His seven stripes and the eight ball, her one remaining solid. And the cue ball. “It’s the one where I get to tie you up.”
“You feel bad about that?”
He stepped into her space, the toes of his shoes to the toes of hers, made her look up at him, locked eyes, then took the chalk out of her hand. She fought him, tightening her fingers around the cube for just a second, eyes flashing as he eased it from her grip. “Not anymore.”
He pocketed his first ball to the sound of her laughter. Played better pool than he bowled, despite the distraction she was. That red dress that hugged her hips. The way she lounged against the wall, one leg crossed over the other. The weight of her long string of pearls kept safe in his pants pocket. The knowledge she watched him as hungrily as he’d watched her as he moved around the table lining up his shots, chasing his stripes.
They played four games and won two each, sat at the bar for burgers and fries, and when a table opened up, played the decider.
She racked the balls and set up for the break. “This needs a side bet.”
I win, you stay in Chicago. Christ. Sixteen days and he’d clear his head. Be able to think straight again.
“I win and you tell me a secret,” she said, and broke, sending the nine into the side pocket.
That was better than the alternative, that he carved open his chest and put his still-beating heart in her hands. “I win, you let me cook for Wren and Josh Saturday.”
“No. That’s not the deal. The deal is I cook so you can spend time with them.”
“I win and the deal is I cook and you help me in the kitchen.” He didn’t want to see her stressed about cooking for guests.
“Death wish,” she muttered, and then sank every stripe on the table.
He sank every solid.
And then he sank the eight ball.
In drug parlance, an eight ball was an eighth of an ounce, three-point-five grams of coke. An eight ball of blow would punch a hole in his head and let sunshine and all the ancient wisdom of the world in. An ounce of coke would smack down every one of his inhibitions and anxieties and it’d be so fucking good, it would ruin his life.
He took Flick home and she held his hand on the street, and that felt like sunshine though it was the dead of night. He stripped her out of the dress that he’d zipped her into while his new playlist made her hips shake and her arms twine and she kissed him like it was the only thing worth winning and that felt like wisdom.
Flick was his eight ball and he’d never felt so high as when he was with her, and when she left he’d be ruined.