The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [56]
“How did you sleep?” His eyes were eager, lips tight from effort it took to suppress whatever happy emotion he was feeling.
“Very well, thank you,” she said, mimicking his formal tone.
“Excellent. I’m pleased to hear that.”
“How was your run?” Fallon asked politely, playing along with his charade of uncomfortable, morning-after small talk.
“Oh, just delightful. Such beautiful weather we’re having, yes?”
She looked out the front windows at the gloom. “Just gorgeous. Especially for so late in the season.”
“You would not believe what happened to me last night,” Max said conversationally, brushing his fingernails over the collar of his shirt.
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes…I gave the most extraordinary woman her very first orgasm, right up there, in my bed.” He pointed to the loft. “What did you do last night?”
She grinned and looked away, shaking her head, done with the game. “Thanks.”
“Still happy with your present, then?”
“Yes, very. And thank you for the note, although technically we didn’t have coitus.”
“You biologists…”
“Are you going to take a bath?”
He nodded.
“I’ll make the coffee, then.”
“What a pretty little picture of domesticity we make,” Max teased. He stood and kissed the crown of her head and scratched the cat’s ears before retiring to the rear of the house.
As Fallon prepared the coffee, she went on a mental search for reasons to feel distrustful about all this sudden coziness. She couldn’t pinpoint any, which was nearly as disturbing as the misgivings she’d expected to find. She’d have to call Rachel tonight to get sisterly permission to stop overthinking everything.
Across the studio, Max shut the taps off. “Do you know what I think would be a very good idea?” he called from the tub.
“What’s that?” Fallon poured beans into the coffee grinder.
“I think that at four, when your sitting is done, you should go home and get a change of clothes.”
“Okay.”
“And then you come back here,” he shouted, “and along the way you pick up some good bread from the market, and some condoms, and I will make us supper and then we will have sex all night. How about that?”
Fallon pushed the grinder down and made Max wait for her reply. She dumped the grounds into the French press and turned to him.
“What kind of bread?”
Just as the weak sun was fading and Max began dinner preparations, Fallon excused herself to go outside and sit on the picnic table. She opened her phone and held down the three key.
Rachel picked up almost immediately. “Heya, stranger! How was your birthday?” Fallon heard a television droning in the background, the applause and whistles of a sports broadcast.
“Hey. It was good…” She trailed off, smiling. “I got your card and the bracelet—it’s beautiful.”
“Awesome. Did old Maxie give you anything special?”
“Actually,” Fallon said in a hushed voice, in case Max could hear through the screen door. “He gave me an orgasm.”
“YOU CAME?”
Fallon heard a male whoop in the background. “Oh my God, was that Josh? Does Josh know about my defective junk?”
“He’s my fiancé,” Rachel said defensively. “We talk about everything. And your junk ain’t defective anymore, sweetie—”
“Go in a different room!” She lowered her voice. “I don’t want Josh hearing about this.”
She listened to the television grow faint as Rachel relocated. “Okay, I’m safely sequestered. An orgasm? He gave you an orgasm? How?”
Fallon recounted the previous evening’s events in best-friend-level detail. “So, you know, it wasn’t like he did anything spectacularly complicated. I think it’s…I think it’s just him.”
“How so?”
“I feel like… I feel like a person who was into something really specific, without knowing it, like…”
“Gerbil sex?” Rachel offered.
“Gross. But okay. So I’m some dude and I’m hardwired for gerbil sex. It’s the only thing that can get me going. But I don’t know it until I’m like thirty and I see a video of it online or something—”
“An accident in a nudist pet