Page 12 of Service Included

Nico stepped through the door carrying a square electric fan balanced between his hip and elbow. “Found this in the laundry room.” He handled the metal box with ease, and the way he’d coiled the dangling cord around one wrist emphasized the strength of his forearm. More strands of hair had escaped his short ponytail, falling along his cheekbone and drawing attention to his mouth. If she hadn’t been reading that magazine, she wouldn’t have let her gaze drift lower to his shirt, which conformed to his chest, or dart below his belt, where his jeans stretched tight enough to hint that he tucked left.

Shock coursed through her. What the hell had happened to her self-control? Her manners?

“Do you want it?”

When she jerked her gaze back to his face, she caught him similarly glancing the length of her body, all the way to her bare legs, and then rising again past where she assumed, hoped, prayed, that her aroused nipples didn’t show through her industrial-strength bra.

He lifted the fan and raised his eyebrows. Did she want it, he’d asked, presumably meaning, did she wantthe fan.

“Thank you,” she managed. He seemed to be waiting for a gesture, but she didn’t—couldn’t—move, uncertain whether her knees would support her if she abandoned the bench. Although possibly if she took a step toward him, she wouldn’t stop until she’d pressed against his clingy T-shirt, and that wasn’t acceptable either.

He moved in her direction. She couldn’t look away from his dark stubble, guessing that he hadn’t shaved since yesterday. She wasn’t an expert on men’s facial hair, but she’d volunteer to track how many weeks it took him to grow an ’80s mustache.

Please let him blame her flushed skin and breathing on the early summer, the temperature, moving boxes, on anything but the truth, as expressed with a word as outdated and tacky as the magazine she’d been reading: She was horny.

To set the fan on the tool bench, he came close enough that his arm nearly touched hers. She wouldn’t describe his hands as huge, not like the fireman’s in the story. Nico’s were in scale to his tall, lean proportions. The encircling cord compressed individual dark hairs on his forearm, reminding her that before cell phones, most men had worn wristwatches, the wide bands emphasizing the difference between a masculine wrist and her own. The few times she’d borrowed a watch had felt moreintimate than borrowing a sweater, perhaps because a man’s pulse usually beat directly under the band.

“Shall I plug it here?” He even spoke like a librarian’s offspring.

“Sure.” Somewhere, a universe existed in which she would be witty, maybe even sparkling. “I mean, yes, please.”

Observing his hands as they unwound loops of cord from his wrist felt as intimate as watching someone remove clothing. What would it look like if he spread those work-roughened hands over her breasts? Or even—and this vision was so filthy that her brain paused all its other functions to marvel at the perfection of its lewdness—what would it look like if he wrapped his hand and fingers around his own cock? If instead of electrical prongs sticking out from between his thumb and fingers, it was the big fat head of his penis?

One part of her brain recognized that she’d let her imagination sail too far, and yet, somehow, the high rasp of her own breathing, the deeper sound of Nico’s, even the dull buzz of the ceiling light, were all louder than the voice cautioning her that single mothers must always be careful.

Inserting the plug into the wall outlet required him to stretch across the plywood bench, which brought his arm and shoulder into the envelope of her space. Work had warmed his scent, melted away any shampoo traces and left a man who smelled like his natural skin. She suspected that even though she hadn’t been toting boxes, arousal had worked the same transformation on her body.

“There.” He turned to face her. “Ready when you want it.”

He meant the fan, nothing else. “Thank you.” She mirrored his position, shifting to brace a hip on the bench. They became two pieces that could fit thigh to thigh if they slid toward each other. He looked relaxed, half smiling and seemingly without the self-consciousness that afflicted her. His body alignment, the way hisshoulders tilted one direction but his hips rotated at a different angle, evoked the classic lines of Michelangelo’sDavid. Men like Nico, men who had the poise of an artist’s model, made her ache for enough talent to sketch from life. Maybe if she’d spent a decade in a studio, she’d be a person who could casually wield a pencil or charcoal to evoke the human form on a blank page. Or she’d be able to manufacture the warmth of flesh from inert clay well enough to recreate the dip where a man’s waist connected to his hips, to form the rise of his pelvic bone and breathe life into a male Galatea.

“What are you thinking? Your expression—” He broke off his question and raised both eyebrows.

“Ahh, aboutcontrapposto.” The art term wasn’t the least confusing answer she could have given, but at least she hadn’t blurted out that he made her want to sculpt nude torsos. She’d take the label geek over cougar.

“Is that a…” His brows lowered as he made a guess. “Coffee place?”

She felt her cheeks heat enough that it must be noticeable, even in the increasingly stuffy garage. “No, it’s an art term for a specific pose.” His smile and the way he leaned closer to her as she spoke invited her to continue, so she waved a hand back and forth between their bodies. “The way you were standing, weight on one leg, shoulders and hips twisted in two different axis. Axes? Axises?” She always saw these words in her head, but stumbled on the pronunciations.

At least the interruption when he looked down to check his unconscious pose enabled her brain to close her mouth before she could ramble about how the sculptor Polykleitos had tried to capture the ideal male proportions through mathematical ratios. Under no circumstances would the phraseideal male proportionsexit her lips.

“Is that what you do?” He looked at her again. His brown eyes seemed darker than they had a moment ago. “Art history?”

“Sort of.” She had this nailed. Normal topic, normal speech, normal respiration—well, maybe not quite. “I work for a video game company in Seattle. It’s called Bronze Age Digital.” Usually, she let people think she was a techie rather than explain that she advised on details like clothing and architecture for developers of an ancient civilizations role-playing game, but she might as well tell Nico the complete story. “I check that stuff like the art and settings look authentic. Gamers always complain if a hoplite spear looks like a medieval pike instead of adoru. Always.”

“Bronze Age?” He grinned, but it wasn’t mocking. “Sounds modern compared to my regular job.”

“What do you do?” Work was a safe topic compared to imagining how his arms would feel wrapped around her.

“Geology. Surface process interaction with volcanic landscapes.” He held out one hand, palm up, and ran the fingers of his other hand across it rapidly. “Lava, meet erosion.”

She was undeniably the lava. Her eyes fell to the T-shirt slogan she’d noticed earlier. “Ergo the chert shirt? I assume that’s a rock?”

He nodded. “A sedimentary one, sort of like flint, often used for arrowheads. Today, we use it for roadbed gravel.”

Her turn to nod.

“Mostly, I spend summers doing field work near Bend, but my old roommate founded Full Service when we were undergrads. He still runs it. I pick up jobs for him when I’m around. I head out next week, in fact.”

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