Beautiful Stranger

on either side of her face, brushing my thumbs along her cheeks. “Well, that definitely warrants a trip to the men’s locker room.”
    “We’re alone, right?”
    “Completely.”
    “We didn’t get to finish earlier,” she said, pushing me back toward the showers.
    I felt my heart speed up at the feel of her in my arms again, the buzz of static in my ears. She stood on her toes to kiss me, her hands moving to the towel at my hips.
    “Hmm,” I said, humming against her mouth. I felt her reachbehind me and heard the water start, felt it run warm down my back. “You want to do this here?”
    She answered wordlessly, pulling her shirt over her head and shimmying out of her jeans.
    I guess that’s a yes, then.
    “My apartment is just downstairs . . . ,” I said, trying to slow her down. I could already imagine what it would be like to fuck her right here, to hear her screams as they echoed off the tile, but for once I wanted nothing but her naked body on my bed, top sheet and blankets in a pile on the floor. Maybe her hands tied over her head and strapped to the rails of my headboard.
    She ignored me, wrapping her fingers around my cock and leaning in to bite my shoulder. I tried to clear my head, remembering her expression as she’d walked through the door. It wasn’t unlike her to avoid answering my questions, but tonight she didn’t look hard and feisty; she looked wild for the wrong reasons. Her eyes were too bare, her face drawn. She’d only come for distraction.
    My throat was suddenly dry and I ran my tongue over my lips, tasting the cherry lip gloss she wore.
    I was a bit surprised by the Sara catalog I’d managed to compile without even realizing it. I knew what her face looked like when she came, the way her nipples hardened, and how her eyelids fluttered closed only at the very last second, like she wanted to watch every moment until it was suddenly too much.
    I knew what her hand felt like curved around my waist, her nails digging into my back and scratching up and down my sides.
    I knew the sounds she made and the way her breath caught when I moved my fingers just the way she liked.
    And there were things that were new, things I found myself noticing and wanting to see again and again. The little smile she made when she knew she had just said something funny and was waiting for me to catch up. It was the subtlest thing, just a slight tilt to the edges of her lips and eyes. A challenge.
    The way she gently pinched her lower lip when she was reading.
    There was the way she kissed me that day on the roof, slow and lazy and like there was nowhere else, nowhere at all to be.
    But I didn’t know this Sara. I’d always suspected that the feistiness I enjoyed so much about her was a form of self-preservation. But I never anticipated the way it would feel to see it gone like this; it was like a punch in the gut that took the breath straight from my lungs.
    I gathered her hands in mine and took a step back. “What’s going on?” I asked, gauging her expression. “Talk to me.”
    She leaned into me again. “Don’t want to talk.”
    “Sara, I don’t mind being your distraction but at least be honest with me about it. Something’s wrong.”
    “I’m fine.” But she wasn’t fine. She wouldn’t have come here if she were.
    “Bullshit. You’re breaking your own rules by even being here. This is better—this is real —but it’s also different and I want to know why.”
    She pulled back, looking up at me. “Andy called.”
    “I know,” I said, my jaw clenched tight.
    She smiled apologetically. “He said he wanted me back. Said all the things I once wanted him to say, about how he’s different now and he messed up and could never hurt me again.”
    I watched her, waiting. She pressed her face to my wet neck, getting courage. “He’s just worried about his campaign. Our entire relationship was a lie.”
    “I’m so sorry, Sara.”
    “I looked up Cecily.”
    I blinked, confused. “Okay?”
    “Something about her name stuck with me, and after you told me about her, I wanted to know what she looked like.” She pulled back, looking at me. “She was familiar, but it didn’t sink in until tonight. I’d met a lot of people with Andy and usually I’d forget their faces two seconds after I shook their hands . . . but I remembered her.”
    I nodded, my stomach warming, but let her keep talking.
    “So I went home and I looked her up again before I called him back.” She paused, her