Beautiful Stranger

elaborated, but my mind turned completely blank when I struggled with what else to say. What else had happened? We arrived. Had some hors d’oeuvres. Max and I danced, and then I asked him to take pictures while he pounded me on a table.
    By the time I remembered the rest—the dinner we’d missed, the silent auction he’d gone to attend, the beautiful garden I’d escaped to after our . . . encounter , too much time had already passed for me to add to my one-word answer.
    “Good,” she said, and I could hear the smirk in her voice. “I’m glad you decided to come. Max and Will apparently host that every year and they raise a ton of money for the charity. I think it’s amazing.”
    “Amazing,” I mumbled in agreement, remembering Max in a tux. Good sweet baby Jesus, the man was born for black tie. He looked pretty amazing half naked, too.
    I looked out the window, remembered the throbbing heat of his breath on my neck.
    “I’m not pulling back,” he growled, spreading a huge hand over my breast. “I just want to push farther and farther and farther in.”
    My breasts weren’t small but the size of his hand had made me feel tiny, like he could pick me up and snap me in half. Instead of feeling afraid, I had spread my legs wider, welcomed him deeper.
    “Harder.”
    He pulled back to look at me. “My hand, or how I’m fucking you?”
    “Both,” I’d admitted, and he bent back low to my neck, biting me.
    I found myself wondering about the pictures he’d taken and shivered slightly. I tried not to imagine him looking at them. Maybe even touching himself while he did . . .
    Chloe cleared her throat and pulled a few periodicals from her box. I blinked, hard, and looked down at the journals in front of me. Jesus, where was all this coming from?
    “I saw you talking to Max,” she said. “You guys danced for, like, three songs, too. Did you just meet him that night?”
    Was she a mind reader? What in the actual hell, Chloe?
    I didn’t look up, and instead mumbled, “Yeah, we just met at the”—I waved my hand in the air—“the thing on Friday.”
    “He’s gorgeous,” she said.
    Poke. Poke.
    I could feel her gaze on me. Chloe was the least subtle poker in the world. She dropped a hint like a strike fighter drops bombs. “Don’t you think he’s gorgeous?”
    Finally I looked up at her and rolled my eyes. “Knock it off. I’m not going to swoon for you over Max Stella. He seemed nice, that’s all.”
    She laughed and shoved a few books on the shelf. “Fine. Just making sure you weren’t caught under his spell. He sounds like a great guy, but yeah, definitely a player. At least he’s up front about it, though.”
    She watched me for a minute as I struggled to not react to that. It was a fair dig on Andy, and was the kind of thing she could say in a year or two and we’d both laugh and say, “I know, right?”
    But for now her words just kind of dissolved into awkward silence.
    “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Bad timing. Did you know that Max and Bennett went to school together?”
    “Yeah, he mentioned something about that. I didn’t know that Bennett went to college in England.”
    She nodded. “Cambridge. Max was his flat matefrom their first day there. He hasn’t shared many stories with me, but the ones he has . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head as her attention returned to the books in front of her.
    I was supposed to be uninterested, completely uninterested in all of this, right? So I studied my thumb, and only then did I notice a fresh paper cut.
    Get it together, Sara; your brain is so fixated on Max that you no longer sense pain? That’s pathetic.
    So how does one look when one absolutely does not care about the stories that Chloe may have heard? I mean, obviously the fact that he hasn’t shared many stories means that he’s shared some .
    Right?
    I alphabetized a giant stack of periodicals, pretending to be engrossed. Finally, the question felt like it was choking me and I relented. “Like, what kinds of things did they do?”
    “Just guy stuff,” she said, distracted. “Rugby. Brewing their own beer and the insane parties after. Taking the train to Paris and blah-blah escapades.”
    I wanted to strangle her. “Escapades?”
    She looked up suddenly, as if she remembered something, and her dark eyes definitely had a mischievous shine to them. “Hey, this reminds me. Speaking of escapades . . .”
    My stomach fell to my knees.
    “You disappeared on Friday