“You look chipper today,” Ava, Elias’s twin, said the next evening as they sat on the porch of the house she and her husband shared.
“Chipper?” He frowned at her. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word used before.”
“Well, it’s how you look. You’ve been down since you haven’t been working. I would say that I feel bad for you, but I like seeing you more often. When you’re working I get the exhausted zombie version of you.”
“Fourteen-hour surgeries will do that to you.”
“Did you have fun last night? You met up with some friends?”
“Yeah,” he lied, not knowing why he did. He told Ava nearly everything, but he didn’t want to share his night.
He hadn’t just hooked up with some random girl. He took someone’s virginity and spent the morning making love to her all over again. He really liked Cricket, but he wasn’t sure if it was because he was in a weird headspace in that moment or if he just thought she was refreshing. If they had met in Miami, he probably wouldn’t have spared her a second look, but they hadn’t met in Miami, and this was no typical hookup.
He wanted to see her again, to be with her again. But this morning when he kissed her goodbye, he’d made no move to prolong their connection. He didn’t ask for her phone number; he didn’t suggest they meet up again. He had just walked away.
There hadn’t been hope in her eyes, no expectation. She’d just thanked him and kissed him softly and waved him off. He respected that about her. He might have been weirded out if she wanted to turn this one-night stand into a relationship.
But she didn’t seem to want to, and he wasn’t looking for a relationship, either, but he wasn’t sure he could just leave it at one night with her.
“I’m glad you went out. Are you planning to see them again?”
“I was just thinking about that myself. I might head over to Carlos’s and stay with him for a few days.”
“You getting sick of me already?”
“No...kind of. Yeah, actually. You and your husband kiss so much I wonder how your lips haven’t fallen off. Though Carlos and Virginia aren’t much better.”
“They aren’t.” Ava smiled. “When you fall in love, really fall in love, you’ll find yourself being the gross person you never thought you would be.”
“I sincerely hope not.”
“You can hope all you want, but when you’re with the right person, you can’t help it.” She looked over to the house next door. “Since Derek opened up a new studio space, we can actually use our house as a house. This place is bigger and we aren’t going to be using the one next door. We were planning to rent it out, but I would much rather have you there. You can come and go as you please, and you won’t be subjected to my husband and me making out all over the furniture.”
“It might be nice to go forty-five minutes without having to be subjected to that, but I don’t want you to lose any rental income for me.”
“Lose money? Ha! I was planning to charge you double market value.”
“I might head back to Miami soon. I was thinking about taking a trip somewhere. Maybe I’ll visit Mom.”
“You’ll last three days there. There are five women in that house. They’ll smother you to death.”
“They will,” he said grimly. His mother and aunts were likely to kiss the skin off his face. But he had to go somewhere, because if he didn’t, he would find himself going back to see the woman whom he hadn’t been able to get off his mind all day.
* * *
Cricket sat at the desk in her office and stared at her blank computer screen. She was supposed to be writing. She had left her job to concentrate on writing her next book. She had doctorates in anthropology and biology, and she had just spent the last ten months in India and sub-Saharan Africa studying small pockets of isolated populations and the illnesses that affected them. She had notebooks full of notes, but today she couldn’t make her fingers work with her brain. And it was probably because her head was still filled with Elias. Two days later and it all still felt like a dream to her, so incredibly magical that it had to be unreal.
She had been with Phillip for a long time. He had been incredibly sweet and gentle. He would hold her for hours and kiss her softly. But there was no hope of sex for them. She had been to doctors with him. They had seen the best in the world—no one could help them. She had assured him that it was fine. That the intimacy they shared was enough. And sometimes it was. He would touch her between her legs, using his fingers and his mouth to bring her pleasure. It had been satisfying for her, even though she felt something was missing. After a while they stopped being intimate altogether. He was more like a brother or a good friend, and still she’d been willing to marry him. He’d been the one to break it off. He’d said that she deserved passion and babies and a life he could never give her. She was deeply hurt by it, because she had never wanted kids and passion faded. She had never asked for a different kind of life.
But then she had been with Elias, who was gentle and sweet with her, too, but he was also strong and powerful, and she needed that. He had made love to her that night and once again in the morning. She had stayed in bed that entire day, in her used sheets, not wanting to get up and change them because she didn’t want to lose the scent of him.
She kept thinking of how he felt inside her, that slow, hard slide that made her incoherent. Just thinking about him now was making her aroused. There was a persistent throb between her legs that wouldn’t go away.
She knew he wasn’t looking for a fling or a relationship, but she wanted to see him again, just to spend a few more hours in his strong presence. She simply liked him. She couldn’t say that about any other man she had been in contact with for a long time.
Her cell phone rang, and she looked at the caller ID to see that her mother was calling.
Her mother, the brilliant Dr. Frances Lundy. Born into abject poverty in the projects of New York City, she’d gone on to earn a perfect score on her SATs and been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools. Frances had paid her way through medical school to become one of the top cardiothoracic surgeons in the world and the chief of surgery at one of the best hospitals in the country. And to top it all off, she had snagged herself a billionaire. Her mother was the most brilliant person she knew, and Cricket was still slightly afraid of her.
“Hello, Mom.”
“How are you, honey? Your father is here. Say hello, Jerome”
“Hello, precious! I miss you. Come write your book here. We’ll have so much fun.”
They would. Her father was a giant goofball and the most creative person she knew. He’d invented a smartphone that could hold a charge for three days. It was the bestselling phone in history, and that was only in the last ten years. He had over 150 successful inventions to his name. Cricket often wondered how her parents got together when her mother was so by the book and her father was so off the rails. “I purposely didn’t come home because I knew it would be too much fun with you. I wouldn’t get any work done.”
“And here I thought,” her mother stated, “that you were avoiding the long interrogation I was going to give you about spending nearly a year in the most poverty-stricken, disease-ridden parts of the world. I worked incredibly hard to make sure you would never have to witness those conditions, and at every opportunity you go back into them.”
“My research could help millions of people, Mom.”
“I know,” she said softly. “If you weren’t so brilliant and kind, you would be a sore disappointment to me.”
“Gee, thanks.”