Page 2 of The Flirtation
“Excellent weekend,” he replied. “You?”
“Good great. Totally adequate. Very fine Monday and Tuesday as well.” Part of me was dying to know if his weekend was excellent because he’d spent it getting blown by some gorgeous French model on the Thames or whatever, part of me wanted to blow past the requisite superficial small talk so I could avoid having to talk to himabout—
“Good great. Your beau back intown?”
Dammit. It had been weeks since he’d brought it up, I thought maybe he’dforgotten.
Allow me to explain: I had totally lied to him about having aboyfriend.
A few months earlier, during a video chat, I’d commented on his golden tan and he’d mumbled something about going on a “mini-break” over the long weekend. I’d instantly pictured him canoodling with a supermodel on some beach on a Greek island, felt overwhelmed with irrational jealousy, panicked, then blurted out that my boyfriend and I had “enjoyed a relaxing weekend in.” It wasn’t a lie if you counted boyfriends that you plug in and then put back into a drawer when you’re done with them, and I did, so I wasn’t lying. I referred to him as Mr. Potter, immediately realized how dumb that sounded to someone who didn’t get the joke, and then brilliantly saved it by informing Luke that my boyfriend’s first name wasHaruki.
Luke blinked twice. “Haruki Potter? Really?Wow.”
“He’s half-Japanese,” I said. “He’s an electrical engineer.” This also was not exactly a lie, as my Hitachi Magic Wand was an electrical device and it had engineered dozens (okay hundreds) of orgasms. “He went to MIT. He’s out of town a lot, working on…international electricalprojects.”
“He sounds wonderful,” Luke said. “Like awizard.”
He is a wizard. By harnessing the power of electricity, he can give me a full-body orgasm in three minutes or less. I don’t have to make shameful trips to the drugstore for batteries in the middle of the night and I don’t have to waste time going to a restaurant and making small-talk with him before getting to the good stuff so I have time to do things like laundry and catch up on work emails, give myself a pedicure, think about how good you look in your crisp whiteshirts…
“He’s very effective and efficient,” I had said, and then immediately changed the subject back to my client’s closing contracts. In order to emphasize the fact that our flirtation was purely professional and had in no way meant that we were genuinely interested in snogging each other, as they say across the pond, after I’d revealed my relationship status we maintained the same way of relating, toning it down only ever so slightly. I honestly kept meaning to tell Luke that I didn’t actually have a boyfriend but it was never the righttime.
This time I pretended I hadn’t heard his question and proceeded to ask him about accounting and the steering committee. After shifting gears and launching into a five-minute lightning round of catch-up regarding the status of various aspects of the merger, to my surprise, he casually brought it upagain.
“That project in Venezuela wrapped upyet?”
Shit I wish I knew how long electrical engineering projects took to complete, or even if that’s what they were called. Best to remain confident yet vague.“He’s done with that one but now he’s in…” I scanned my office for ideas and landed on the Russian nesting dolls on a shelf. “Moscow. Another projectthere.”
“Wow, he’s really all over the map. You must misshim.”
“Yeah well, you know, you get used to doing things on Skype.” I froze. What did I just say? “I mean,talkingabout things on Skype. We just talk. About work stuff, mostly. His and mine. But, you know, in a fun way.”Shut yer pie hole, Avery Davis.“We’re both really work-focused right now, so, that’s why it works so well. I like to focus onwork.”
“I can see that,” he said, with a tone of voice that I could notdecipher.
I didn’t want to end our video chat on this note. “Oh—did you end up picking out a gift for your client’swife?”
He smiled. “I did, yeah.” He had been in a bit of a panic last week when he was invited to a client’s home for dinner and found out that his American wife was celebrating a birthday. He’d asked for advice and when I’d asked him the woman’s age-range I recommended a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and some good hot cocoa. Seemed like a safe present for an American woman in her sixties. “She was delighted. You got it—spot on. I’d been meaning to thank you, sorry Ididn’t.”
“Oh no, I’m glad I could help.” There. I had reminded him of how awesome and not at all ridiculous a woman Iwas.
It looked like he wanted to say something important, but then he said: “Well, I’d better let you get back to it, then. Or maybe you’d rather get somesleep.”
“Oh I can never sleep after talking to you, Luke.” I said it lightheartedly, but betrayed myself by looking away before I’d finished the sentence and not looking back up when I should have, blushing when I should have been smirking, pausing to catch my breath instead of giggling. I felt naked, and not in the goodway.
“I know what you mean,” he said finally, voice barely above awhisper.
There was a fairly long silence, and I was quite certain that we were both saying things to each other in our heads, things we wouldn’t dare say out loud. In my head I was saying:I want to lick your face.In his he was probably saying:You American women are sodding bananas and I need to end this callimmediately.
He finally nodded and looked away from his computer and said, “Yep, coming.” To his assistant, I imagined, or possibly he just pretended that someone was beckoning him so he could escape from me “Right well, I’ll message you after my meeting with accounting and the steering committee laterthen.”
“Literally can’t wait,” I said, and then ended the chat before I could say anythingelse.
The sun had not yet risen over the Statue of Liberty on that hump day, but my favorite part of it was already over. Despite how foolish I’d felt, my cheeks were sore from smiling so much and my heart wasracing.
Luke
Ireally oughtto have been concentrating on the conference call with my client’s accountants, but I could not stop thinking about Avery. That was the problem with scheduling our Skype chats at the top of my work days—it was so difficult to focus on anything besides her beautiful rose-tinted lips for at least an hour afterwards, and I always had a ridiculous grin on my face. It hadn’t helped that that morning she’d had a glow about her, and when her hair was up in one of those loose buns all I could think about was what it would feel like to kiss her long smooth neck. I was not grinning at that moment, though. I couldn’t get over this Haruki situation. Part of me couldn’t believe that Avery was still in a relationship with him, but part of me believed she was just maintaining a long-distance relationship with someone so she could keep her career on track. Which meant she was not so unlike myself,really.
I say “indeed” when someone on the other end of the call pauses, and it is all I can offer before my thoughts return to Avery’s smooth, pillowy lips. I often wished I could simply ask her to stand up and tilt the camera down so I could see the rest of her, wished I could reach through the monitor to touch her creamy skin and shiny hair. I’d never known a woman who could interest me so thoroughly without even touching me or jauntily exposing a hint of flesh. I simply liked who she was and how I felt when I was talking toher.
If it weren’t for her boyfriend, would I have flirted with her more or less? Probably less. As if the Atlantic Ocean weren’t enough of a buffer between us, I think I found her so attractive that if she didn’t have a boyfriend I might have kept finding excuses to visit New York, and that made meuncomfortable.
Truth is, it was the simplicity of our relationship that made it so appealing. Or to be even more truthful—it was the fact that it could barely be categorized as a relationship at all that I found whatever we had soirresistible.
