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“Unless you can think of something else.”
“Sleep,” she says, “I can think of that.”
“It’s so overrated. I’d have pictured you the Gilda type.”
“I’m not pigeonhole material, Ryder.”
She knows the old film I’m talking about, it’s in her voice and somehow, it heartens me.
“I didn’t say you were. But you’ve got this edge of another time.” Her furniture in the living room, even the frame of the bed and the pieces in the bedroom, they’re all art deco, and they’re real. I’d bet money on it.
All lovingly restored. All respected. It’s like her plants. I don’t know what they are, not the ones in here, but they’re beautiful pieces of living art, tactile and…things she cares for, things she makes the center of attention, not herself.
It’s another piece to the Elliot Perry puzzle.
Her fingers slip against my arm a moment before she pulls her hand away, but I take it and rest it on my bare chest, where she curls her fingers into a ball. She sighs. “Do you always get your way and are you calling me old fashioned?”
“Sometimes, and maybe, but not the way you think. You’re something different, and I like it. I can talk to you.”
“Well, at least I’m good for something.”
I ignore the ice in her voice and pull her further against me, so I’m comfortable and from her little sigh, she is, too. I toy with her hair. “You are.” The old ladies talk on the TV, and canned laughter follows and I close my eyes, breathing her in, letting the warmth and softness of her meld into me. “Why did you choose to live above your damn office?”
Startled, she shifts, and almost hits a very important part of me, one I’m very fond of. “I love this building. I actually had this converted to an apartment. Or back to an apartment. It was empty office space when I got it.”
“Just get an apartment.”
“Of course you’d say that. Out with the old, up with the new, that it?”
I smile against her hair, and rest my other arm over her middle, buried in the soft white quilt. “You have to step up your insult game, Perry. You know that’s not how I operate, unless, of course, you didn’t do your homework.”
“How dare you.” But she doesn’t sound that mad. She shifts again and goes still and that something—my cock—she almost hit, this time she does, but just a soft brushing against it and that sweet, electric buzz of arousal shoots through me even harder. The arousal I’ve so far been ignoring. “You have an erection.”
She says this like it’s an insult.
“I’m aware. Don’t worry, I won’t molest you.”
Elliot sniffs like some outraged Victorian spinster. “I know. You don’t want me.”
All the evidence right now points way in the other direction, but I like her and I’m not about to fuck up this friendship by a quick grope when nothing’s gonna come from it.
“Look,” I say. “You’re female, you’re soft and you fit. I want. That’s how I’m built. But I like you, Elliot. A lot. So I’m not going to do anything about it. Okay? Rest easy. You can save your smelling salts for another time.”
“Where on Earth did you learn all your references? You’re so weird.”
I laugh at her slightly mollified, slightly annoyed tone. “Would you believe I was a lonely child?”
She doesn’t answer for a long moment. “Yeah, I’d believe that. Like you don’t fit.”
“Boarding school will do that to you. And, well, you get it, growing up rich.”
“We have money,” she corrects, “but we’re old name more than Sinclair rich. You’re in a different stratosphere.”
“Our father was a slave driver. It instilled us with a great work ethic but little else, and I was the dreamer.”
“That why you got the tattoo?”
“I forget about it, which is weird. I think because I wasn’t even twenty when I got it, or started it. The thing’s part of me.”
