The Promise of Lace Read online

  I grabbed a couple of paper towels and went for the door, making sure to close it loudly behind me so that both Dieter and Random-Peeing-Guy knew I had left.

  I carefully wiped my hands clean with the paper towels and spent a little bit of time hunting down a trashcan to toss them into. I hung around in the general area of the bathrooms, trying to wait for Dieter to come back out without it looking like I was just loitering outside the men’s room. I saw the plucked eyebrows guy walk out after a few moments, but according to my phone it was fully five minutes before Dieter finally left the bathroom.

  He looked oddly well put together when he did finally come out. I could still see that the hair at his temples was sweat slicked. His face was clearly orgasm flush. He had way too healthy a glow. It stuck out in Minnesota in April amongst the other faces, which were all either pale or fake-orange from the long winter.

  I waved at him and he made a beeline for me.

  “You alright?

  “Umm, mostly,” he said. His voice was thick and husky. I wondered if it was from just having come or just having gotten too close to coming and then not gotten there. “Let’s go get some air.”

  “Yeah. Of course,” I said, starting to worry.

  He grabbed my hand tighter than he had before and started immediately for the door, with me behind him. It was sort of like being towed behind a boat. His grip didn’t hurt and it wasn’t like he was dragging me behind him or anything, but he was heading toward the door at a steady, uninterrupted pace, ducking around skeptical business women and drunken middle aged ladies until we finally got to the door and stepped out into the slightly chilly night air and he was pulling me behind him.

  “Are you sure that you’re alright?” I asked as I followed him into a hidden corner on the front steps. We were behind one of the carved pillars, tucked between a hip high stonewall and the building itself. We were mostly blocked from the street, but still fully visible to anyone on the top of the steps.

  He pushed my hair back from my face and kissed me, another hard, fast kiss, like the one he’d given me in the bathroom, then he pulled back, standing at arm’s length from me.

  “Thanks for the skirt thing,” he said quickly.

  My first instinct was to laugh, but he suddenly seemed a little too on edge for that. This was a proceed-with-caution situation. I had a feeling there were going to be a few of these with Dieter in this early dating stage.

  “Yeah. Of course. Sorry to… you know, leave you high and dry like that.”

  His lips pulled up into a tight smile that didn’t make it all the way up to his eyes. “Thanks. So… okay, I didn’t think I’d have to do this so early, but…I think I do need to have it out there after all.” He blew out a breath and scooped his hair back from his face. “I… I haven’t actually dated a girl since Joselyn the… ummm bad experience girl. I mean, a couple one night stands, a few dinners here and there, but no one that I’ve seriously liked has come along, and definitely no one that I would have…”

  I reached out and set my palm to his bicep. He let me so I brushed my hand over his arm, trying to soothe him. “It’s alright. What’s wrong?”

  “Okay, I should have mentioned this way before getting the bright idea to do it in a public restroom…but umm… the one thing that I can’t… I absolutely can’t do is humiliation.”

  “Humiliation?”

  “Yeah…generally being ragged out, being insulted in front of other people… being hard and helpless like that in front of someone else.”

  “I didn’t mean t—”

  “It’s fine.” He cut me off. “I know that. It wasn’t your idea… and I didn’t… I didn’t think it would go like that. This is about me not… thinking this through. It’s not your fault. I just… I need you to know this particular thing about me.”

  His voice was too high. He was straining to sound reasonable, but his shoulders were hunched and he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the ground a few feet to my left, not meeting my eyes.

  “Okay. I’m listening. I wasn’t trying to humiliate you.”

  “I know that. You covered me up. You made up that wine thing to cover for both of us. It’s not even about you. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just… I didn’t think getting caught would freak me out like this.”

  “Right. Yeah. That’s okay.” Still stroking his arm, I moved a few steps closer. When he didn’t react, I wrapped my arms around him. He sighed and sank down into me.

  “I think I saw pretty much everything I needed to see,” I said carefully. “Let’s say we head back to my place? Maybe get a nightcap?”

  “We don’t have to leave yet. I just need some air.” He sounded sincere, but he was still holding himself up so rigidly, every muscle clenched. “I hate that she can still do this to me, Roxanne. I hate it.”

  I shushed him and ran my arm down his back, realizing as I did that this was getting really, really heavy for me. How tight he squeezed me was frightening. We were three dates in and chemistry was one thing, but this was deep. This was definitely a commitment thing.

  I was not good at the commitment thing, and I never had been.

  I shushed him again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is freaking pathetic. I just wanted to do one stupid sexy thing and now I’m a wreck.”

  “It’s fine,” I told him. “You don’t have to do things like this for me you know. You don’t have to be some kind of sex-bot. You get to be human. God knows I am.”

  He cleared his throat and pulled back. “Maybe I should go home.”

  I grabbed his hand and twined our fingers. “No, you don’t have to. Come on. I’m over squeezing through the crowd. Let’s just go back to my place. Put on some music or a movie or something.”

  Dieter brushed his longish bangs out of his eyes. He didn’t look totally sold, but he agreed.

  Chapter Ten

  We had walked to the art institute from my place because it had been sunny and gorgeous when we’d left. We had been planning to bus home but neither of us were really in the mood to wait for the bus to come by, then cram onto it. It was chillier than it had been, but there was no wind. We walked back.

  I spent the mile and a half back wondering if the was anything I should say or if I should just wait for him to talk.

  I wasn’t great at emotions and subtlety and being careful. That’s why people stopped talking to me after their fiancés threw me into walls and why I gave up on people when they got too difficult.

  Dieter wasn’t my responsibility, but I hated that he felt bad as often as he did, and I didn’t want to make it even worse by defaulting to my go-to move of just never calling him again just because he’d hit some sort of roadblock over not even doing anything wrong. I cared about him. I didn’t want to see him hurt and I definitely didn’t want to be the one who hurt him.

  I dug my keys out when we reached my block. He kissed me at the door, then pulled away.

  “Hey,” I caught his arm. “Come up. Please.”

  He nodded.

  I settled him onto the couch and hit play on whatever was in the DVD player. It turned out to be Buffy, Season 2. He didn’t object.

  I left him to watch the opening credits while I went into the kitchen. I looked through my cupboards for a few moments, not entirely sure what to offer him. I finally settled on tea. My phone buzzed in my purse as I set the water to boil. I went over to the chair where I had thrown it and fished it out.

  Hailey was calling. I pressed “decline”, but tucked it into my dress pocket while I went back to the kitchen to set out mugs and grab tea bags. I texted Hailey to tell her that I was still on my date. She told me to call her when I got home. I quickly messaged back that I was home with Dieter and that she would have to wait until the morning. I turned off the vibrate so that when she kept texting, like I knew she would, the phone wouldn’t make any noise.

  We’d already had the conversation about Dieter and the cross dressing and the abuse thing and Hailey had
been kind of a bitch about it. We could discuss it again when she could be a little more sensitive about the whole thing.

  The teakettle whistled and I filled two mugs and dropped tea bags into them. Dieter gave me a weak smile when I handed him one. I dug my phone out of my pocket and put in on my end table/ nightstand next to where Dieter’s was already lying. I settled down next to him on the couch. After a moment of deliberation I lay down against him.

  He wrapped his arms around me, then tucked his chin against my neck. It was a little smothering, but it made his body relax against mine so I didn’t say anything.

  He was warm against me. The sound of his breathing was soothing. He took my hand in his tea-warmed one while vampires got dusted.

  By the time the credit music blasted I was starting to wonder if Dieter had fallen asleep, when he finally spoke.

  “Why do you like me?” he asked quietly.

  Normally that kind of question would have been an instant alarm—this one’s too needy, time to start moving him toward the door and screening my calls, but Dieter’s tone wasn’t self-deprecating or whiny. He asked me the question like a child trying to put off bedtime might ask for a story.

  I almost turned around, then decided against it. “You’re sweet,” I answered. “You’re smart. You’re confident.”

  He scoffed.

  “Really. When you came up to Hailey and me at that store, throwing out descriptions and five-dollar words? That was hot as Hell. You have an artist’s eye. Look at the stuff you picked out. Hailey still can’t get over how she looked in it. Even your underwear, it fits you just right, accentuates everything.”

  He pulled my hands up to his mouth and kissed my knuckles. “It’s self-defense,” he whispered.

  “What is?”

  “Going overboard at work. Girls think I’m gay so they don’t approach me. And then…if there is a girl who maybe doesn’t fall for that, or a girl that maybe I want to go after…the panties scare off anyone just looking for some chest-beating he-man, ’cause I just can’t do that anymore. Girls who demand that I have to be a certain way? I can’t really deal with it. So they see the underwear, and they laugh, and they go away. Or they see it and they ask why and then they’re… I don’t know. Scared or freaked out or something because real men don’t do that. And they go away. Jocelyn was always, always on me about what a real man would do. Well. That’s not what I’m shooting for. It’s better to get shot down for a preference I have than for something… you know, inherent.”

  “And what’s inherent that a girl would shoot you down for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Whatever Jocelyn saw in me that made me prey.”

  I squeezed my hands around his. “You’re not prey. Some insecure bitch who hated herself decided to take it out on you.”

  “And I let her,” he said quietly.

  I pulled his hands down around my waist. “Wanting to help isn’t a crime. Naiveté isn’t an invitation.”

  He kissed my temple.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “Mhmmm?”

  “You said you try to scare girls off at the store, but then you came up to me at the bar. Why didn’t you want to scare me off?”

  “Umm, because of Hailey,” he said. “Wait… that doesn’t sound quite right. I wasn’t… Hailey’s really not my type. But it was the way you two were together.”

  “Hailey is the thing about me that scares most people off,” I told him, incredulous.

  Dieter kissed my neck. “I was listening in on you two talking. Not in like, a creepy way, I was just seeing what you were shopping for. You were really honest with each other. Most of the women who come into that store… they keep their voices down, they never ask for help. And then there are a couple people, like the just-out-of-college girls, or the first-boyfriend-in-high-school girls who are talking way too loud and faking everything because they’re just trying to be shocking. But you guys were just… I don’t know. Chatting. Little bit loud. Totally open. She… she made me assume that you were trustworthy. And… trustworthy on top of being as beautiful as you are… how do you resist that?”

  He pulled my hands back up and kissed my fingers again. The screaming electric guitar had passed and the Scoobies were back on the screen.

  Hailey and I used to watch this show religiously. She’d, unsurprisingly, been into Angel. Big handsome guy built like a battering ram. Very much her type.

  I had always loved Oz. Sweet and intelligent and quiet, but strong underneath it all. Never posturing. I’d always found him charming. Always liked that slightly softer guy. Not effeminate. Not weak. Just… strong in a quiet way.

  I saw that in Dieter. He was open about who he was, which I respected, and he was fun to be around… he was just a little…rough around the edges.

  I pulled my fingers away from his lips and turned around carefully in his arms so that we were face to face.

  “Hey there,” I said to him.

  “Hey yourself.” He pulled a strand of hair away from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “You know, I’ve never actually seen this show.”

  “Well… you’re a little young for it, really.”

  He chuckled and kissed me. It had been a weird day, what with the confessional previous night, the sappy morning, the conversation with Hailey and then the small on-date freak out. I should have pulled back, maybe grabbed the blanket at the foot of the bed and thrown it over the two of us, and then gone on to explain to him everything that he had been missing by being a little too young for a 90’s classic. Made it a peaceful, recovering sort of night.

  But I didn’t do any of those things. I slid up his body and kissed him back. It was a little pilot light of a kiss. It didn’t suddenly become a fire like the other ones had, like a match tossed into brush. It just grew warmer bit by bit, like a carefully constructed bonfire started from scratch. Dry grass to twigs to sticks, still far from roaring. I moved a little further up his chest. His arms moved a little further down my back. We kissed and pressed together, not in any hurry. I toyed with the button at the top of his shirt and he undid the hook and eye at the back of my dress.

  His hands were warm against my back, his tongue tangled against mine gently. We started peeling each other’s clothes off. My dress went over the back of the couch.

  I undid his shirt from the top this time and laughed when I realized that the purple I’d seen in the mirror at the art institute went all the way up. He had a thin, soft, lace trimmed purple camisole on under his dark dress shirt. I unbuttoned the rest of his dress shirt and tossed it over the back of the couch with my clothes.

  “This is nice,” I told him, running my hand up the silk cotton blend of the camisole. It was like clouds under my fingers and I made a mental note to ask where he’d gotten it. My Ragstock camisoles had been through the dryer one too many times and now the lace was shredded and the fabric was pilled. Plus they had never been this nice.

  He smiled warmly at me. I liked the way that little compliments made him light up so much.

  “You would look gorgeous in this,” he replied. “Purple’s the perfect color on your skin.”

  “I will keep that in mind,” I responded, before realizing that it might have been a subtle hint to go get the nightie that I had bought.

  Dressing up for sex was very much not my thing. I’d only really bought the nightie as an excuse to go hit on him and as much as I liked being with him, I still wasn’t sold on how much he seemed to be into the lingerie. If it was just his thing, that was fine. I liked it on him, if he liked it on himself too that was a fortunate confluence of circumstance, but I wasn’t ready to dress up for him. That was one of those commitment lines I found it hard to cross. I didn’t like to bend or change or surrender for people, especially guys I had just started dating. This wasn’t exactly in the same league as Isaiah asking me to move to Mississippi with him, but it was in the same general category. It had been three dates. I wasn’t there yet.

  But I knew whe
re I was.

  I peeled him out of his jeans and they joined my dress over the back of the couch. Now he was pressing into me, all soft fabric and hard muscle and warm skin and clean scent. There was a slight awkward pause in the slow warm build of our arousal when we did have to shuffle off the couch in our underwear to fold it back down into a bed. I pulled the levers and kicked the mattress down. Dieter hit a couple of lights, leaving just the wall sconces on so that we could see each other, but in almost and old-movie sort of glow.

  We piled back onto the bed, his hands in my hair, body tight to mine, his cock growing hard against my hip as we moved slowly against each other, like lake water lapping against the shore after the wind has calmed and the water is stilling. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, my breathing becoming heavier and heavier as the speed of his hips increased against mine. He rolled me up on top of him and undid my bra, tossing it over the side of the bed along with the rest of our clothes.

  The slow, steady heat building between us turned sharp. I dropped my knees down to either side of his body and pressed down. He hissed when his turgid cock pressed against my crux where I was wet and warm and so, so ready to move past groping and grinding.

  I rolled off of him, making him follow, dug my hands under the smooth air-light camisole and pulled it over his head, barely stopping the kiss long enough to pull it off of him. I slipped my hands under the purple lace of his panties and grabbed handfuls of his muscular ass, squeezing until he gasped. I slipped the panties down his hips as far as I could reach and then he pushed up, flipping me onto my back. I landed hard. Dieter was kneeling between my knees, sitting up and looking at me.

  The pinking of his cheeks was exaggerated into a much more red color by the ambient light. The flush of color went all the way down his carved chest. He was watching me with soft, lust-clouded eyes. I reached out and tucked my fingers into the waistband of his panties, now far past his hipbones, the ruddy and wet tip of his cockhead straining against the fabric, and pulled down.