“You too,” I murmured amusedly, content to watch him slip naked between the shadows.
“I’ll go get us some coffee and something to eat.”
“There’s a café on the corner. A skinny latte with an extra shot of espresso, please?”
“I thought you were cappuccino with two yellow packets?”
I laughed, and buried my face in my pillow to hide my rush of euphoria. It didn’t work.
“What?” he asked, pausing in his dressing and looking over his shoulder. I took in the harsh, unexpected angles of the gray and pale gold palette of his face. The artist in me took over. My infatuated hysterics came to a skidding halt.
His face held me completely enthralled for a stretched moment. It was as if his features had been separate once, like they’d belonged to different men, and had somehow come to rest uneasily on this face. The mouth belonged to a sensual, sometimes angry person who had learned control the hard way, the brow to a strong man who had known suffering and loss, the nose to a warrior, the rare smile to a fifteen-year-old small-town dreamer and heartbreaker.
The eyes, which could go hard and also surprisingly soft, belonged to a poet who could see my art. Who could see me. I resisted a wild urge to spring up from the bed and grab my sketchpad. Here was one of the things that had drawn me to Evan Halifax from the very start. His face, staring back at me steadily from the nine by twelve inch screen of my computer, silently speaking to me.
“Anna?” he asked, his brow creasing in confusion.
“What? Oh, nothing. It’s just… I was thinking how nice it was. That you know what kind of coffee I drink in the afternoon.” He turned to me slowly, hitching up his pants and swiftly fastening them over his taut abdomen. “But this is our first morning together,” I added.
“Ah,” he said, his face smoothing into a contained mystery yet again. “And you have a different coffee preference in the mornings.”
My flash of artistic vision fled. I was having trouble reading him again. But then he took two long strides to the bed and leaned down. He gave me a hard, swift kiss on the mouth. Zap. That electrical conduit between us, that primitive knowledge, sizzled again to life.
“I want to know all your morning preferences,” he said against my parted lips a moment later. “I want to know what you’d prefer every minute of every day, Anna Solas. I want you to be happy.”
When he returned twenty minutes later, he kicked off his shoes and tossed off his jacket before he climbed back into bed with me. At first, a playful, intimate mood prevailed. I feasted on almond croissants, fruit from a plastic cup, and his rare smiles.
I tried to feed him the last strawberry. But his mood had sobered as the light grew brighter in the room. He turned and caught my wrist, the red fruit hovering just inches from his lips. I felt a sinking sensation. His intense passion in bed and our new intimacy could erase that sad, brooding side of him.
But not forever.
“What have you got planned today?” he asked me, carefully removing the strawberry from my fingers and dropping it in the cup I held.
“I’m at the museum today from noon to six,” I said, referring to one of my two jobs. They were definitely jobs, not careers. In my mind, I was a painter, first and always. But according to the IRS, I couldn’t list that officially as my occupation. So until I made enough to support myself with my painting, I paid my rent and kept ramen noodles and canned soup in the pantry by working part-time as both a museum docent at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in sales at a posh, but substantial art gallery called Yume in the Mission Bay area—Tommy Higoshi’s gallery.
“So you’re not at the gallery this evening?” Evan asked, twisting to set the fruit cup on a nightstand.
He rolled over to face me. His hand snaked beneath the blanket. He spread it on my naked hip. Sexual awareness flickered through me yet again. His hands were large and warm. If I painted those hands, how could I demonstrate how they had started to encompass my world?
“Anna?”
I blinked at his slightly amused tone, willfully jerking my awareness from just beneath his opened hand on my skin and back to our conversation.
“No, I’m not at the gallery today.”
“Do you enjoy them? Your jobs?” He ducked his dark head and our mouths met in a brief, warm kiss. I squeezed a curving, dense shoulder muscle in my palm.
“They aren’t my ideal jobs or anything. But I get by with them well enough.”
“You’d rather be using your days to paint, wouldn’t you?”
“God yes. That’s the dream.”
“Why does it have to be a dream?”
“Because it’s the opposite of reality,” I said, striving to sound airy despite the nearness of his mouth and his scent and the memories of what we’d done in this bed all night filling my head. He’d dominated my body. My senses. My spirit. It hadn’t been an intentional thing on his part, I don’t think. He hadn’t thought to conquer me. His hunger had ruled him during the night. And it ruled me, in turn. He’d made it clear, somehow, that he’d dominated me sexually because I’d dominated his thoughts.
“Reality is making rent and paying bills and eating,” I told him.