I ignored it. I stood in front of him and put my hands on the back of his chair, leaning over him. All the way down. Sure, I was wearing the obscene T-shirt, but underneath it I had nice tits and I wasn’t afraid to use them. I never had been.
I bent lower, lower. Brushed my cheek against the stubble of his beard and felt it against my skin. I loved the feel of a man’s beard, to be honest. Somehow harsh and soft at the same time.
He smelled good. I knew he would, because I’d smelled his scent in the bed I’d slept in. Clean, soapy, a little bit sweaty because he’d probably been working out. I nuzzled him lightly, feeling the heat of his skin, the pulse in his neck, and I tilted my mouth toward his ear.
“I said no to the date,” I told him.
I heard him take a breath. He put his hand on the back of my neck, under my hair. Then he stroked slowly up the side of my neck, his skin gentle on mine, moving up beneath my ear until his palm cupped my jaw.
Against his neck, I closed my eyes. Andrew had never touched me before. It felt so good I wanted to cry. I never wanted it to stop.
He kept his hand there, and we stayed that way for a long moment. It was an embrace, almost. Or as close as either of us was willing to get.
Then Andrew turned his head so his lips were against my ear, his breath against my neck.
“Tessa,” he said. “Go home.”
SEVENTEEN
Andrew
Thursday.The routine of my fucking life. Get up, work out, shower. Dress. Today the housekeepers came, and when they were finished I ran two loads of laundry and answered the door to Tessa’s air conditioner repair crew, who got her key from me and started work at her house. I turned on my across-the-street feed and kept an eye on it.
Today was doctor visit day, and Dr. Arnaud showed up just after one. He was a black man in his mid-fifties with close-cropped hair, wearing a comfortable short-sleeved button-down shirt and khakis. It was a casual outfit, but he still managed to look like a man who was not only working, but smarter than anyone else in the room.
He took my blood pressure, checked my heart and lungs, and asked me questions. Except for the legs, I was probably Dr. Arnaud’s healthiest patient; I didn’t have anything else physically wrong with me. His semi-regular visits were primarily about the meds I was on.
The suicide attempts meant I was depressed, of course. There was anxiety in the mix, as well as PTSD from the accident. They tried different drugs that were meant to help regenerate my nerves, though none of them had worked so far and I was off them at the moment. Medicinal weed jacked up my anxiety and insomnia, so that was a no go. There were drugs for pain and for sleeping that I said no to. Still, my blood usually contained a mix of some kind of cocktail.
Like I’d told Tessa, it wasn’t the chair. It was the man that was in it.
“Things are looking good,” Dr. Arnaud said when we were finished. He was sitting on my sofa, writing out notes and a couple of prescription renewals. “You’re in prime shape, Andrew, so much so that I’m not sure why I need to keep coming here. You could come to the office sometime.”
“And leave this paradise?” I asked, gesturing around me.
“Ah, the sarcasm. Still in full effect, I see.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Is that so?” He paused his scribbling to point his pen at my monitor feed. “You keep looking at that shot of the house across the street.”
“My neighbor is getting her air conditioning fixed while she’s out, and I promised her I’d keep an eye on it.”
“Isn’t your neighbor an elderly lady?”
I hate talking to people, but when you see the same people enough times, a few things inevitably slip out. “The elderly lady died and her granddaughter moved in.”
Dr. Arnaud blinked his dark brown eyes twice at me, and basically saw everything inside me like an X-ray. “The granddaughter is pretty,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
I scratched my beard. I was going to trim it as soon as he left. “No comment.”
“So she is, then. What does she do for a living?”
“At the moment, she’s at a photo shoot, modeling bras.”
“Good lord, son.” Dr. Arnaud rifled through his classy leather messenger bag. “Hold on a minute.” He found a stack of brochures and picked out four of them. “Take these.”
“What?” I took them and looked at them. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”