“I have wine. Netflix. A bed.”
“Sex toys?”
“Uh…well…there’s me.”
“Even better,” she answered, stopping to pull him in for another kiss. Smiling through the touch of their lips, she felt something soar inside, an energy that was all-pervasive.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked, running his hand through her hair, pushing it off her flushed face.
“Because I’m with you.” A lump in her throat competed with her speedy pulse. She didn’t say things like that to men. With Alex, though, it just spilled out.
“Then I hope to make you smile more.” A kiss. A squeeze. And then—
“Home, sweet home. Welcome to the castle,” he joked, gesturing at the front door of a building that was pretty close in age and architecture to hers. Same locked main door, same entryway with mailboxes, same hallway with apartment doors. Alex lived on the first floor, and as he unlocked his door and let her enter first, she burst out laughing.
Bikes. Three of them. And helmets, pant straps, and assorted other bike accessories. Of course he and his roommate were Cambridge bikers. Of course.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“The bikes. It’s so stereotypical.”
“Of what?”
“The urban young doctor who is a fitness freak.”
“Not!”
“You’re fit,” she said in an incriminating tone, running her hands along his washboard abs, trying and failing to find fat to pinch at his waist. She reached around for a squeeze of his ass. Solid muscle.
“Okay, so I’m fit. Doesn’t make me a freak.”
“I’ll bet you compost, too. And in the backyard you have some cherry tomato plants, plus you use a solar charger for your phone, attached to the backpack you wear when you bike.”
His jaw was on the floor.
“See! I was right!” she crowed.
“Wrong on all counts.”
“What? But…”
“Although you just described my roommate to a T.” With that, Alex laughed and marched ahead into the carved out living room corner that served as the kitchen. A partial wall formed a counter for two bar stools, leaving a full view of the cooking area. The place was decorated in shabby chic thrift shop furniture, like hers. A dining table from the ’70s, a slim, steel gray IKEA bifold couch, a few halogen lamps, and posters from classic rock concerts ranging from Pink Floyd to The Doors.
Photographs of everyday locations in Cambridge peppered the walls, all black and white, with intriguing composition. Josie wandered around looking at them closely. A bike tire. The foot of John Harvard’s statue. A crest on a building from Harvard University. An espresso cup on a laced-steel table top. “Who’s the photographer?” she asked as Alex opened a bottle of something he pulled from the refrigerator.
“My roommate. John. He’s out of town for a few more weeks on a fellowship.”
“Medical?”
Pop! Alex used a manual corkscrew to open what she now discerned was a white wine—Chardonnay, from the looks of the label—and he poured a glass for each of them into very nice, if mismatched crystal wine goblets.
“Yes. He’s a lab rat. Oncology.”
“MD and Ph.D.?”
Alex nodded, sipping his wine. He seemed nervous, a bit rattled. Being on his turf was a change, and it gave her a touch of comfort to know that Dr. Perfect cared about what she thought.
“Nice,” she said, holding the wine glass out after taking a sip.
He shrugged. “It’s wine.” The two shared a smile and Josie looked around. Dark wood baseboards and trim. Wide doorways. Tall ceilings. The heating bills were probably a nightmare in the winter, like hers, but it beat the tiny little modern apartment buildings with crazy-high rent, or the brick cubes that sardined people into cookie-cutter apartments.
“How long have you lived here?”
“About a year.” His sentences were clipped. He was really nervous. What a change! Usually she was the nervous one on a date. Was this a date? He’d invited her over for a glass of wine, so she would count it as a date, even if she was dressed in a tank top and wore Crocs. Was he awkward because he wanted to hurry up to the sex part? If this was just a booty call, maybe she was reading his signals wrong. Indecision set in. Her own self-consciousness took over, blended with the noxious aftertaste of her conversation with her mom.
Awkwardness from one person was one thing; when both were being weird, it compounded the feeling by a factor of eight. Finally, he broke the silence.
“This feels really weird.”
Ah, shit.
“Yes,” she conceded. But why? she wondered.
Placing his glass of wine on an end table, he turned and put his hands on her shoulders. “I feel like a geeky eighth-grader because you do that to me, Josie. Like a stumbling teenager with his first crush. And now that I invited you over, and you’re here, in my apartment—my space—I don’t quite know what to do next.”
Josie brought her glass of wine to her mouth and drank it down in two gulps. Alex’s serious eyes remained on her the whole time. “You what?” she squeaked.
“I said that I like you when we were on the phone earlier.”
She nodded.
“And that sounds so lame,” he chuckled. “What I should have said is this.” Bending his knees slightly, he made a heartfelt attempt to come eye to eye with Josie, but it didn’t quite work, so he dragged her by one hand to the blue couch, pulling her in for an embrace. Curling her legs nimbly around his waist, her ass nestled into his lap. She studied him from an angle, heart thumping, wondering what the hell he was going to say next. The room was silent, with the faint hum of a fan in the background and the distant, slow whoosh of cars driving down the small street. Wine loosened her up, and whatever weirdness had descended between them earlier faded as he opened up about his own weirdness. It felt good to be weird with someone.
That was new.
She liked it.
“I haven’t really dated a woman in a long time. Not like this. And I realize,” he said, his voice going low and hushed, “that it’s been a very short time, but this isn’t just…casual for me.”
Blink.
“I’m really enjoying spending time with you. I don’t get much free time. I have to be at work in twelve hours or so, and then I don’t have another day off for three days. But whatever time I do have off, I want to spend with you.”