Page 36 of Play Dirty

I wave her into the foyer. We don’t even get three steps inside—we barely manage to close the front door—before we are tugging on each other’s clothes.

She wants to be fucked.

I want to forget this day ever happened.

Turns out fucking is a good way to do that.

She’s on her knees. I bend her over the couch. I press her back up against the window again. I fuck her on the stairs, and in the office bathroom, and then again in the bed.

I don’t make her leave this time. We fall asleep holding each other. Her dreaming about… I don’t know. Saving her marriage, I guess.

Me having a nightmare about what the world will look like without my father in it.

In the morning she’s already gone when I wake up. And the surprising thing about that moment, the one when I realize I’m in bed alone when I didn’t go to sleep that way… isn’t that I’m alone.

It’s that I slept at all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I spend the morning trying to convince myself everything is fine. I watch my father leave for his doctor’s appointment around ten-thirty, then take clients, then wait.

I’m just not sure what I’m waiting for.

My father? To come back from the doctor’s?

He won’t have any news. It’s just tests. They don’t tell you anything when you have tests.

But at noon—exactly noon—Eileen buzzes my phone. “Mr. Bartos is here to see you, Jordan.”

“Send him in,” I say, pressing the intercom button and then releasing it.

He knocks on the closed door, then enters, like he took a lesson from my father. He’s wearing a very nice charcoal-gray suit with a silver tie. His sandy blond hair is just the right amount of messy and his jaw is unshaven.

He looks like every bit the part he’s playing. Successful, handsome, deviant.

“Come on in,” I say, leaning back in my chair to appear casual. But the truth is… I have no interest in this game they’re playing right now.

Alexander leaves the door open, unbuttons his suit coat as he walks across my office, and takes a seat in the left-hand chair in front of my desk. He steeples his fingers under his chin, staring at me. Our eyes meet, hold there, then both of us look away at the same moment.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“Augustine didn’t come home last night.”

“No shit. She was at my house.”

“Ah,” he says, playing coy.

“You knew that,” I say. Irritated. Suddenly everything about him irritates me. And not in the usual way, either. “So just stop playing.”

“She wants me to invite you to dinner tonight.”

“I don’t think so, Alexander.” Then I sigh. “I’m tired, OK? I’m just gonna go home tonight and do nothing.”

“It’s at our house,” he adds. “She wants you to come to the house.”

I don’t even know where they live and the thought of fighting traffic tonight just annoys me further. Especially when I know how it’s gonna end. They’re gonna do something weird, I’m gonna decide I’ve had enough, and then I’m gonna walk out. And that’s probably all going to happen before we eat, so I won’t even make it to dinner. Then I’ll have to stop somewhere to pick up food, or order delivery, or go hungry—and honestly, I’m just not up to it.

“My answer is still no,” I say. “I’m just tired. Just tell her I’m tired.”