Coda Books 04 - Strawberries for Dessert (MM)

them. I kissed his bottom lip softy, teasing it with my tongue. His eyes drifted closed, and I felt one of his hands on my side. He was finally relaxing again. “Whatever you want to do,” I told him.
    He smiled a little, and opened his eyes to look up at me. “You’ll laugh at me.”
    “I won’t laugh.”
    “You will.”
    “I promise that I won’t.”
    “Okay,” he said as he put his arms around my neck. “I want to go shopping.”
    He was right. I laughed before I could stop myself. “Are you serious?”
    “I told you you’d laugh,” he said, but he was smiling, and I was glad I hadn’t offended him.
    “I’ll do anything you ask,” I said, and I meant it.
    For the entire day, I simply followed him. I had been to New York once before, many years ago, and didn’t really know my way around, but he seemed fairly familiar with it. He had picked a hotel close to the theater we were going to later, but it was a few blocks from the main shopping district on Fifth Avenue. We decided to take a cab to the far end and walk back. It turned out his style of “shopping” wasn’t as painful as I might have expected. He mostly window shopped—unless it was a gallery. We went in every single gallery we encountered.
    He couldn’t seem to decide how he wanted to behave around me now. For a while, everything would feel normal between us. He kept up an almost constant monologue as we walked, talking about the people he saw and last trips to the city and the style of the jackets in the store window and whatever else happened to cross his mind. He could be wickedly funny when he wanted to be, and he was good at making me laugh. Slowly, his guard would start to slip. He would flirt more and touch me more without seeming to realize it. And had we not been on a busy city street, I thought I probably could even have kissed him at those times without him pushing me away. But eventually he would realize that his walls were down, and in the blink of an eye he would be distant again, still talking but not making eye contact and certainly not allowing any physical contact between us. What confused me the most was that it seemed to make him sad to do it. I couldn’t understand why he felt the need to do it at all.
    It was after eating lunch that we wandered into another gallery. It was a private gallery of photographs, mostly taken outdoors but blown up huge, some as big as couches. We had moved fairly quickly through most of the other galleries, but he lingered longer in this one.
    The gallery was one large room filled with cubicle-style white walls, creating seemingly random corridors. It turned the entire space into a maze and us into mice. It was quiet as a tomb. I felt like I needed to whisper. I stood very close to him so I could speak softly and have him hear me. He was relaxed at the moment and actually leaned closer to me. “Are you going to buy one?” I asked him.
    He shook his head. “No. But they’re nice, aren’t they? I like the one that’s underwater. It’s very serene, don’t you think?”
    I knew which one he meant. It appeared to have been taken in fairly shallow, crystal-clear water. Sand and starfish filled the bottom of the frame, and the shimmering surface of the water could be seen at the top. “That’s not the word I would use.”
    “Oh?” he asked, looking up at me in amusement. “What word would you use?”
    “Claustrophobic. I feel like I have to hold my breath.” He laughed at that. Even his soft laugh seemed loud in the stillness of the gallery, but he didn’t seem as self-conscious about it as I was. “I like the ones with the snow better,” I told him. “Especially the one with the aspen.”
    He shivered a little. “If I were to buy anything, it would go in the bedroom up in the Hamptons, and I can’t have snow hanging in the bedroom. It will make me cold.”
    I laughed. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, although in truth, I was starting to imagine him in this bedroom I had never seen. He smiled back, and I had a feeling he knew my thoughts were wandering. He leaned a little bit closer to me—close enough that I could smell his hair. I put one hand on the small of his back and brushed my lips over his ear. “Would it be too predictable for me to offer to keep you warm?”
    He laughed again, but he didn’t pull away. “Yes, but you can offer anyway. I’m quite tempted to take you up on it.”
    I pulled him a little bit closer. “Are