Page 8 of Plunge

I grab a second champagne and then a third before Anya approaches me. “So,” she says, trailing her fingers down my arm. “Is your staff enjoying their permits to purchase booze?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I say, reminding myself I have to tone back the flirting. “None of them were invited.” Anya is a tiny woman with hoop earrings and killer heels. She’s wearing tight white pants and an off the shoulder top that tells me she doesn’t care much about modesty rules here in the Middle East. She must be off duty tonight.

She grins over the top of her drink as she takes a sip. I see that she’s got small jewels embedded in the polish on her fingernails. This is not the calibre of woman who usually seeks me out.

“So is this a typical Thursday night for the ambassador?” I slide my hand up the wall, adjusting my weight so I’m turned toward her.

She giggles and rolls her eyes. Shit.

“Come on,” she says, setting her drink down on a shelf, where it’s immediately gathered up by a staff member. “I want you to dance with me.”

When a beautiful woman invites you to her penthouse party in the sky and asks you to dance, you don’t refuse. Right? Even if that woman is very important politically?

I’m not a big dancer, but I move my hips in time with the pulse of the beat from the DJ who’s set up over by the tiger in the corner.

She wraps her arms around me and presses her body against mine. I have to see her maybe 3 times a year on official business and she generally shows up at the race track. This isn’t someone I can fuck and dash away like normal.

I sway against her awkwardly, wondering how to escape this, my hands placed lightly on her shoulders, until she rises up on tiptoes to place her lips near my ear. “I watched you watching the cars today,” she says with a smile. She grinds her crotch against my thigh and spins around. As she moves her ass up and down my leg, she looks over one shoulder and says, “Do you like to go fast?”

I feel the wind rush out of me at her words and I’m transported to another time, in another place, where the atmosphere was a thousand ways the opposite of this. “Do you like to go fast, Fletcher Crawford?”

Thistle McMurray had been driving me wild for years. I had thought I was going to knock her down a peg or two when I taunted her about going out for track. But then she’d shown me what she was made of, trying out for the team in all the wrong clothes, looking all the right ways as she flew around the corners and over the hurdles.

It took me another month to work up the nerve to ask her out, and I messed that up, too. Her mom had come over to visit my mom one day soon after, and they’d shooed us out into the back yard, where Thistle was doing her best to ignore me and I systematically made fun of her hair, her braces, and her running form.

Finally, she screamed at me: “Do you like to go fast? Do you?” All I could do was nod in response, struck dumb with lust for her. She scowled. “Better try to catch me, then.” And she took off through the gate behind my parents’ house, running along the creek bed and through the woods, her blonde ponytail swishing as she ducked under tree branches and dodged roots.

It didn’t take me long to catch her. She was fast, but I was filled with testosterone and probably a little bit more angst that drove me on. Instead of rubbing it in that I beat her, I wrestled her to the ground and grinned at her smugly until she shoved my head against the dirt and kissed me.

The memory of that first time washes over me so strongly. I hadn’t let myself think about Thistle in years. Ever since my brother’s phone call last week, I can’t concentrate on anything else.

I become aware of my surroundings again when Anya stomps on my foot in her high heeled shoe. “Hellooo? Fletcher?” She snaps her fingers at me and wiggles her ass again, trying to get closer. I stiffen without thinking, and she glares at me. “After the other night, I thought you’d be better at this.”

She stomps away toward another (more willing) dance partner. I run my hands through my hair and drag them down my cheeks, looking around the room. The music feels too oppressive, the smells too strong.

Anya is pissed, but by the looks of things with her new target, she’ll get over it quickly.

I slink out the door and call for a cab, and when I get back to the hotel, I lie awake all night trying to stop replaying my entire, doomed relationship with Thistle McMurray.

---