Page 19 of Edge of Secrets

My eyes were wet and my throat couldn’t stop shaking. My heart still galloped wildly. I could barely breathe. I could not believe what I had just done—and with a virtual stranger, too, in my own stairwell. Any one of my neighbors could have come up the stairs at any time and seen everything. I had completely lost my mind.

My gaze slid away from his. I was too overcome to meet his eyes. So that was what an orgasm felt like on the far end of the scale. I’d thought that I knew, but this experience was infinitely more intense than anything I’d ever experienced. Overwhelming.

He stroked my cheek with a gentle fingertip. “Amazing,” he whispered. “So. Any new executive decisions coming down the pipeline?”

Oh, that opportunistic bastard, messing with my head. I wanted to yank him inside my apartment and eat him alive, and he knew it. If this is how he could make me feel fully clothed, in my public stairwell, with nothing more than a hot tongue-kiss and some dry humping—well. I didn’t dare to imagine how it would be in private, in the dark. Naked. With him all over me. Beneath me. Inside me.

But not tonight. I was too fragile, too compromised, unsure of both myself and him. I shook my head, and mouthed the word.

No. I didn’t have the breath to actually say it.

“Got it,” he murmured. “There’s just one more little thing I really need to know.”

I blinked at him nervously, still breathing hard. “Um. And what might that be?”

He reached down, pinched my skirt, and tugged it up just a couple of inches over my knees. Then he looked at me and smiled. “Mmmm,” he said. “Dimples. Cute.”

“What the hell?” I slapped his hand sharply away. “Stop that!”

He stepped back. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m overdoing it, huh?”

“Yes!” I snapped. “Back off!”

He started down the stairs, walking backward like he didn’t want to take his eyes off me. “You’re sure you’ll be okay alone?”

“Me and my chubby knees will be just fine,” I said tartly. “Good night.”

I stayed there until I heard the downstairs lobby door click closed behind him, far below. Then I fumbled with my keys.

Once inside my apartment, the alarm armed and blinking an angry red, I sank down onto the couch without turning on the light, still shaking. My throat ached and burned, as if a tuning peg were ratcheting the tension relentlessly tighter and higher.

I was so angry at myself. Not for kissing him, or for letting him make me come, but for depriving myself of the rest of the experience. Because I was chicken-shit.

As usual, there was always a compelling reason not to reach out and grab something good when it was offered. I could have been stark naked, being pounded deliciously against the wall by the hottest man I’d ever fantasized about, right now. But no. I was all alone, shivering in the dark, feeling sorry for myself.

Like a pussy-footing coward.

Chapter Eight

Duncan

I stared at the screen of the online version of The Golden Thread Poetry Journal and sent the relevant pages to print. The collection of short lyric poems by Antonella D’Onofrio were really hard to grasp. I wanted them to exist in a solid, physical form. As if being able to hold them in my hand might help me understand what was in them.

The pages churned out of the machine, and I tried reading them again, but no dice. It was the tenth time I’d gone through them and I still had no clue what the fuck she was getting at.

The poetry thing baffled me on so many levels. The poems themselves were gibberish, but it was the way they made me feel that alarmed me most. Like a cliff had suddenly appeared in front of me, and I was reeling backwards to keep from falling.

Except not in a bad way. Which made no sense. And I usually didn’t like it when things didn’t make sense. I always scrambled to fix it, order it, organize it.

This was different. This defied fixing, ordering, organizing.

I read the poems again, searching for that strange, vanishing feeling they elicited. It was like glimpsing something out of the corner of my eye, but having it disappear when I looked at it straight on. Or trying to spot a star so faint, I could barely sense that it was there. Just a tiny, teasing blur of light in the sky. The vague idea of a star.

I stared down at my stubborn boner with unfriendly eyes. I’d tried to deal with it in the shower, with the help of some extremely vivid water-sex fantasies: Nell—naked, soaked, and soapy, hair drenched, face rosy—pinned to the shower wall, her legs draped over my arms. Whimpering with delight at each deep, slick thrust.

I’d come so hard I practically knocked myself out, so why I still had a tent pole poking out of my sweatpants was beyond me. Maybe it was the poetry. Hah.

I couldn’t believe how completely I had bulldozed through all my fine principles. I’d gone all alpha on her, grabbing her, kissing her, making her come. God. Peak experience. One that could totally fuck my professional life, depending on how she felt about it after the fact. I’d left myself wide open to attack. Thinking with my dick.

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