Beautiful Stranger

“Okay. Touch me over here.”
    He raised an eyebrow, ran a long finger across my collarbone, from one shoulder to the other. “What exactly are you offering?”
    I met those strangely backlit eyes that seemed soamused by everything around him. He looked normal, so sane for someone who followed me through a club and bluntly told me he wanted to touch me. I remembered Andy, and how rarely—outside of keeping up appearances—he ever wanted my touch, my conversation, my anything . Is this how it happened for him? A woman would pull him aside, offer herself, and he would take whatever he could before coming home to me? Meanwhile, my life had become so small I could hardly remember how I used to fill the long nights alone.
    Was it greedy to want it all? A career to die for, and a crazy moment here and there?
    “You’re not a psychopath, are you?”
    Laughing, he bent to kiss my cheek. “You’re making me feel a touch crazy, but no, I’m not.”
    “I just . . .” I started, and then looked down. I pressed my hand flat against his chest. His gray sweater was unbelievably soft—cashmere, I thought. His jeans were dark, and fit him perfectly. His black shoes were unscuffed. Everything about him was meticulous. “I only just moved here.” It seemed a fitting explanation for how much my hand was shaking against him.
    “And a moment like this doesn’t feel very safe, does it?”
    I shook my head. “Not at all.” But then I reached up, wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, andpulled him to me. He moved willingly, bending down and smiling just before our lips met. The kiss was both the perfect kind of soft and the perfect kind of hard, with the scotch warming his lips against mine. He groaned a little when I opened my mouth and let him in, and the vibration set me on fire. I wanted to feel every one of his sounds.
    “You taste like sugar. What’s your name?” he asked.
    With that, I felt my first real pulse of panic. “No names.”
    He pulled back to look at me, eyebrows inching up. “What’ll I call you?”
    “What you’ve been calling me.”
    “Petal?”
    I nodded.
    “And what’ll you call me when you’re about to come?” He gave me another small kiss.
    My heart jerked hard in my chest at the thought. “I don’t think it matters what I call you, does it?”
    Shrugging, he conceded, “I don’t suppose so.”
    I took his hand, brought it to my hip. “I’ve been the only person to give myself an orgasm for the past year.” Moving his fingers to the edge of my dress, I whispered, “Can you change that?”
    I could feel his smile against my mouth when he bent to kiss me again. “You’re serious.”
    The idea of giving myself to this man in this darkcorner scared me a little, though not enough to change my mind. “I’m serious.”
    “You’re trouble.”
    “I promise you, I’m not.”
    He pulled back just enough to examine my eyes. Back and forth his gaze moved until his eyes curved into that amused smile. “The fact that you have no idea how you come off . . .”
    He turned me, pressed my front to the edge of the glass wall so I was looking over the balcony at the mass of churning bodies below. Strobe lights pulsed down from iron beams that extended across the club just in front of me, lighting the floor beneath while keeping our upstairs corner virtually black. Steam began to blow up from vents in the dance floor, covering the partiers up to their shoulders; waves broke out in the surface as they moved through it.
    My stranger’s fingertips teased at the back edge of my dress, and then he lifted it, slid a hand down the back of my underwear, over my backside and between my legs to where I positively ached for him. Even the vulnerable position didn’t embarrass me as I arched back into his hand, already lost.
    “You’re drenched, sweetheart. What’s it you like? The idea that we’re doing this here? Or that I watched you think about fucking me while you danced?”
    I didn’t say anything, too afraid of what the answermight be, but I gasped when he slid a long finger inside me. Thoughts of what I should do blurred along the edges as I thought about boring Sara in Chicago. Predictable Sara who always did what everyone expected of her. I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I wanted to be reckless and wild and young. I wanted to live for myself for the first time in my life.
    “You’re a tiny little thing, but when you’re slippery like this, I’m quite sure you could