Untrue Love Page 18

  What her fingers found there swelled beneath her touch, and Ellie’s eyes widened in anticipation.

  Their eyes locked, her fingers drifted lower, below the waistband. Just short of his manhood, she stopped.

  “Do you think I slept with Philip?” she asked, the tips of her fingers tantalizingly close to the tip of his shaft. “Is that what you think?” she asked, half teasingly and half in challenge.

  He closed his eyes and groaned in frustration. “I don’t know. How would I know? I don’t know you. I don’t know what you might do.”

  Her fingers drifted a millimeter lower. “You don’t know me, but even so you still want me?”

  His gray eyes snapped open again. “God yes,” he murmured, then took her head in his hands and kissed her hard. He nudged his hips upward, trying to hurry her fingers’ progress.

  She wasn’t going to make it that easy. “So it’s OK if I’m a slut, as long as I’m your slut?” Her fingers pulled back, almost exiting the cover of his pants.

  His eyes blazed. “Don’t use that word. You’re not anything like that. But you are reckless. I want to keep you safe.”

  Ellie knew she should stop. She should slow things down and ask him, in this moment of truth, what danger he was referring to when he talked about keeping her safe. The two of them had no chance of stopping, though, no more than if they had tumbled off the side of a building and hoped to stop falling before they reached the ground.

  Her fingers plunged down and circled around the velvety heat of his rock-hard rod. She grasped at it, her other hand working at the buttons of his pants. There would be no stopping now.

  His hands came down to her hips and, with a quick movement, he had her back against the wall. One leg came up between hers, opening her to him. Ellie was wearing tights beneath her skirt, and those flimsy layers quickly gave way to his assault. In moments the tip of his shaft was poised like a battering ram at her temple doors.

  For a long moment he remained there, their eyes locked and their fevered breath falling into a common rhythm. Then, achingly slowly, he began pressing inside of her. Ellie drew in a deep breath, her forehead falling to rest on his shoulder. Her fingers clutched at his back as she marveled at the feeling of being full once more.

  They clung together, and moved together. They breathed and groaned together. And, for a moment at least, they both felt a little less alone.

  61

  ELLIE HAD LONG since returned to her apartment, though a trace of Paul’s scent lingered on her clothes and hair, and she was poking listlessly at a document on her computer when she heard the rattle of a key in the lock. She looked up as her father slipped through from the hallway to stand in the dim light of the apartment foyer.

  “There’s no point sneaking in, Dad. Your cover is blown,” she said.

  He walked into the living room looking sheepish, and started to remove his coat and gloves. “I wasn’t sneaking. I just didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I’m already awake. So are you going to tell me what you’ve been doing on all these late nights?”

  He gave her a teasing look. “Man, I can remember the days when I was the one asking that question. As I recall, you never really gave me a solid answer.”

  She shrugged. “You don’t need to tell me what you’ve been doing. I just wonder why you wouldn’t want to.”

  He sighed and carried his coat to the closet. “It’s just…it’s nothing. I was on a date.”

  Ellie’s eyebrows climbed to the very peak of her forehead. “You dog! You really do have a woman in every port, don’t you?”

  He rolled his eyes. “And this is why I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Because it’s true?”

  “Because of the mockery!”

  She reached out and took his hand in hers. “I’m not mocking you, Dad. OK, maybe I am teasing you a little, but I’m happy that you’re out there and meeting people. Really, I am.” She squeezed his hand reassuringly.

  He flopped down on the couch next to her, let his head drop back against the cushions, and closed his eyes.

  “So who is she?” Ellie asked.

  “No one you know.”

  “How do you know whether I know her? You’re new in town. Maybe she and I are good friends.”

  “You’re new in town, just like me, and you don’t make friends. At least, you don’t make them quickly.”

  Ellie would have been stung by his words, but she knew that he was right. It took her a long time to trust a person, and without trust friendship was an impossible dream.

  “So what’s her name?” she persisted.

  “Her name is none of your business,” he said, keeping his eyes closed.

  “Is that her first name?” she joked.

  “It is, and her last name is ‘go to bed so that your father can get some sleep on this uncomfortable couch you bought.’ Seriously, would it have killed you to get a sofa-sleeper?”

  Ellie closed her laptop and started gathering the scattered papers on her coffee table. “I didn’t design my apartment for your convenience, Dad.” His breathing was already growing deep, though, so she switched off the light and headed for the bathroom.

  As she brushed her teeth, Ellie thought about how she really felt about her father dating some woman in town. If he liked her, did that mean he’d stay for longer? And would that be good news or bad?

  There were a lot of questions and she had very few answers, but she decided that she was OK with not knowing. As curious as she might feel, at the end of the day she didn’t want too many details about her father’s love life. Some things were better left under cover of darkness.

  62

  DONNA HAD BEEN standing in front of the wooden door for five minutes already. She was still no closer to knocking.

  Her left hand held a brown paper bag giving off an aroma of Chinese food that was making her stomach growl. Sooner or later she would need to make a decision, whether to knock or turn on her heels and gorge herself at home on far too much beef fried rice, after which she would feel even worse about herself than she already did.

  It felt like a real choice for longer than it should have, but finally Donna took a deep breath, lifted her right hand, and knocked.

  Before the door opened she heard sounds from the inside. She fought off one final impulse to flee, and forced a smile on her face.

  The door swung open. Glenn stood in the opening, staring at her without surprise. He crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame, waiting for her to speak.

  Donna wished that she had prepared something for the occasion, if not a speech at least something that sounded coherent.

  “Hi,” she said at last, holding the paper bag up. “Are you hungry?”

  The question hung between them for a long moment. To Donna it felt like the air itself was heavy. She was having trouble drawing it into her lungs. Finally he relented.

  “I’ve organized my life around one principle: Never say no to free food,” he said, making room for her to pass by him into the apartment.

  Inside she found a chaotic arrangement of books and papers that covered every available surface. A thousand jokes came to mind but she fought all of them down. She had a lot of apologizing to do before she could even think about making fun of his messy apartment.

  She looked for some place to put the food. There was no such place. She looked at him with the question on her face.

  “Oh. Right,” he said, stepping past her to clear a battered coffee table that sat in front of the couch. Even the couch’s cushions were piled high with reading material, but there was just enough room for them to sit if their knees touched. Donna found a place and began removing food cartons from the bag.

  “I’m a jerk,” she said, not looking up at him.

  “That’s not the noun I’d use,” he said, settling down beside her. She was very much aware of the feeling if his thigh pressed up against hers. “Or the verb. What you are isn’t anything to apologize about. I still think you
’re awesome. But the way you’ve been acting—”

  “I’ve been acting like a jerk,” she amended, still not looking at him.

  “You’ve been acting foolishly,” he agreed. “But I don’t know that I would have done any differently. You’re in love with another guy. What are you going to do? I guess I just have bad timing.”

  She swiveled so that she could look him full in the face. They were very close together, hemmed in on either side by the press of books and journals, and her nose was picking up an indescribable mix of aromas of which part was a scent that was uniquely his. She was starting to feel a little intoxicated with the presence of him.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. And about what you said. That what I’m feeling isn’t really love.”

  “Look, I was angry and disappointed. I had no right to say that.”

  “Maybe not, but you weren’t wrong. I’ve been thinking back over the time that I’ve known Evan, and while it seems like forever since I was first attracted to him, there was never a single moment in that time that I really, truly believed that he and I could be together. What’s worse, as frustrating and sad and depressing as that was, I think maybe I preferred it that way.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She looked away with a sigh. “Look at me! I’m not going to be winning any beauty contests. And Evan is tall and muscular and cute and popular. So as long as I spent a little time with him, I could pretend that we had something together. It was my favorite fantasy, and meanwhile I didn’t need to worry about being rejected by someone else. Sometimes not having what you want feels better than going after something and running the risk you might not get it.”

  Glenn reached out and took her hands, stopping her from dishing out any more of the food. He held them between his own until she made eye contact with him.

  “To me,” he said in a voice just above a whisper, “you would win every beauty contest. Do you know why?”

  “Why?” she asked, unconvinced.

  “Because I can see you. Really see you. Not like that ass-hat who took you for granted all those years. I can see you, and what I see is…gorgeous.” The last word came out in a rush.

  Donna looked deeply into his eyes, wanting to believe him, almost believing him, but she wasn’t quite there yet. Even so, it was so nice to hear his words that she wanted to bask in the glow of his admiration, but she hadn’t finished her confession yet.

  She broke the eye contact, but left her hands sandwiched between his. They felt good there. “The truth is, the idea of actually being with someone scares me. It honestly scares the shit out of me because I’d finally have something to lose. But the thing is, I realized in the last few days that the thought of never seeing you again scares me, too. And so I was thinking that maybe being scared isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe the fear shows me what I need to do.”

  He was smiling now, a gentle curve to his mouth that filled his face with warmth. “I don’t know what you need. I’m not sure you need anything, other than to be a little nicer to yourself. But I hope that, one day, you’ll come to want me as much as I want you.”

  She returned his smile. “I want that, too. I don’t love you, Glenn. I won’t lie to you. But I do really like you, and I enjoy your company, and I think you’re cute.” She took a deep breath, and then she took the plunge. “And the way you look at me sometimes leaves me breathless.”

  Her heart was pounding, and it beat deeper when he leaned toward her and their lips came together into a light, sweet kiss. Donna realized her eyes were closed, though she couldn’t remember closing them. All parts of her consciousness were absorbed in the feeling of his mouth against hers.

  He pulled back and smiled at her, laughter in his eyes. She grinned, then turned back to the cartons on the coffee table. “Are we going to eat? Because I didn’t get all this food just so that we can look at it.”

  Without looking away from her, and without relinquishing his smile, he took up a pair of chopsticks and reached for the carton of fried rice. “I’m starved.”

  63

  ELLIE WAS THINKING about Paul. She was missing him, which bothered her. She didn’t know what they had together but she was pretty sure that she shouldn’t be missing him already. They had fun together. It was intense when they got together. Roller coasters were fun and intense, but she didn’t find herself missing them when she wasn’t at an amusement park.

  It has been days since their two encounters, the first in her living room and then again in his office. If Ellie was the blushing type she might have flushed crimson at the memory of what they had done in a place where it would have been so easy for her father to walk in on them. What had they been thinking? They weren’t thinking, and that felt better than she could have imagined.

  It had been too many days since that feeling. She would have preferred to see him again, but Paul was out of town on business. She hated the fact that she was counting the days until he got back.

  She shook her head and tried to focus on what was right in front of her. Her office desk was blissfully free of the clutter that had gathered over the course of the previous quarter. She knew it was a temporary reprieve only. On the other side of that barrier sat her once and future teaching assistant Donna.

  The girl was looking better. Not so much in what she was wearing—that was still a cry for help—but something in her expression and the glint of her eye suggested that things were better for her.

  “Something’s happened,” she said. “Give me the details.”

  Donna gave her a blank look. “Excuse me?”

  “You look different. Something in your life has changed. Is it a man? Is it that guy from before, the one you were going on a date with?”

  Donna blushed a deep crimson. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  Ellie gave a quick nod, her suspicions confirmed. “So it is a man. You don’t need to tell me.” The tone of her voice suggested that the girl did, indeed, need to tell her, if not sooner then later.

  Donna grasped for some way she could change the subject. “I saw you with that hot trustee. Is he your boyfriend now?”

  Ellie gave her a sour look. “That is none of your business.”

  This time it was Donna’s turn to give the look. “So my love life is a proper topic of conversation, but yours is off-limits?”

  Ellie nodded. “Yes, it is. That’s the difference between you and me: I ask the questions, and you answer them. Anyway, he’s not my boyfriend.”

  Donna seemed unconvinced, but she let it go. “Well, that’s good. I saw him last night. At first I thought he was with you, but then I saw that it was someone else.”

  Ellie was puzzled. Paul was back in town? “Where was this?”

  “At a place called Il Bistro. It’s an Italian restaurant just off downtown. I haven’t been there yet, it’s too expensive. But I was walking past it on my way home, and I saw them seated at one of the tables. It looked like they were having a nice time. It’s very pretty in there. They have those little white Christmas lights up along the ceiling. I have a fantasy that someone will take me there on a special date sometime.”

  A little flame of suspicion was beginning to kindle in Ellie’s chest. Of course it was entirely possible that Paul had simply finished with his business earlier than he expected, but what else might he be up to? “Tell me about the woman he was with. Was she pretty?”

  Donna considered the question. “Sure, I guess. She has really nice hair. Blonde, of course. I hate blondes. I always wanted to be blonde. I even bleached my hair once, in college, but it didn’t go well. I should have bleached my eyebrows, too, but I was nervous about fumes getting in my eyes or something. So then I had long blonde hair to go with my bushy black eyebrows and I looked like a man wearing a wig. Complete disaster. I died it back to the original color a few days later.”

  Donna looked away, considering. Should she feel jealous of this other woman? Maybe it was just a business meeting, or maybe they were just friends, or ma
ybe she didn’t even care what Paul did in his spare time. She couldn’t decide how she felt about all this.

  “So he isn’t your boyfriend, is he? Should I have told you about the blonde woman? I’m such an idiot, I didn’t think that you were actually—”

  She glanced back at Donna. “No, don’t worry about it. I’m just curious. I had heard he was in Chicago on business.”

  Her eyes drifted to the window. She was still unsure how she felt about this news, but now she had some new questions, and she would do what she needed to do to get an answer.

  64

  “EXCUSE ME, YOUNG lady, but are you here alone?”

  Ellie looked over her shoulder in irritation, only to stare in dull surprise at her father standing there, his breath misting in the brisk afternoon air.

  “Dad! What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I might meet my daughter for lunch. So I was walking to her department, and what did I find along the way but you! Do you have anything to do or can we get out of this wind and into some place with central heating?”

  “Umm, sure. I was just going to grab a sandwich, but we could go somewhere I guess.”

  Her father was hugging himself and rubbing his arms vigorously. “Great, because I can’t feel my toes, and…oh, hi,” he said without enthusiasm to someone behind her.

  Ellie turned around to find Karen standing behind her, looking back and forth between her and her father. “Hi. I didn’t expect to see you today.”

  “Neither did I,” her father said, sounding very much uncertain of himself.

  “So,” Karen said, looking at Ellie sideways, “are you two having a good day?”

  “Do you two know each other?” Ellie asked suspiciously.

  “Not really,” her father answered, a little too quickly.

  “We’ve run across each other,” Karen added. “I had no idea you two were…what are you, anyway?”