Page 114 of Tell Me Something

He smiled.

I was undone because Josh Singer smiling made me one very happy girl.

“Come on. I have another surprise.”

He walked me downstairs and into the sunken living room, which looked like a romantic movie set. In front of the large gas fireplace aglow with flames was a makeshift mattress with satin sheets and beautiful cashmere blankets. There was champagne on ice and white roses on both the coffee and end tables.

“I’ve never seen your house before; does it always look like this?”

He laughed. “Uh, no, it had a bit of a makeover in honor of our weekend. I’ll give you a tour of the rest of the house later. But for now…”

I turned, tipping my face up for a kiss. He didn’t disappoint, tasting me leisurely, savoring my lips and mouth, and then making love to me slowly and thoroughly.

LATER THAT EVENING while Josh was toying with my breasts, he asked, “Have you thought about your school choices?”

I lay in post-coital bliss in front of the fireplace, still completely naked. It was difficult to concentrate on his question. “Hmm, not really. I’ve been otherwise occupied.”

“Gloriously so, but you still have a big decision to make. Here, this should help.” He laid the cashmere blanket over me, and I giggled.

“There’s still a matter of you being naked, which is far more distracting,” I teased.

Smiling, he reached over and grabbed his discarded flannel PJ bottoms and slipped them on.

“Do you have any guidance for a decision-making strategy?”

He seemed surprised. “You want my advice on this?”

“Not on my actual school choice. But considering you make big decisions every day, I would welcome a strategy.”

He looked pleased that I was asking him. “All right, you have six choices, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So first thing today is to eliminate two of them off the bat. The two that don’t make sense based on rankings or the fact that the other four are better schools.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Okay. I’d eliminate NYU and Cornell. They were safety schools.”

“And now you have four. So you can put together pros and cons along with the costs.”

I smiled and got up from where we had been the last few hours to cross over to my laptop. Booting it up, I put on the screen the Excel spreadsheet I’d already made regarding the various law schools. “So, since I eliminated those two, let me hide those columns.”

He took the laptop from me and scrolled down. “Impressive. So Yale and Harvard are the two top-ranked schools?”

“Actually, Stanford is tied with Harvard for number two.”

“And Columbia?”

“Is number four.”

“You have here that Columbia is your most expensive.”

“It is when you factor in housing in New York City.” I didn’t want to entertain the idea of staying in Josh’s apartment.

“And Stanford is your cheapest?”

“Of those four, yes—especially with the break on housing my father’s old partner can get me.”

“Mark told me he thinks he’d have a line on housing in New Haven for Yale.”