Nadine’s Morning After

“Good morning, sunshine.”

“Morning,” Nadine mumbled in return, abandoning any pretense of still being asleep. Her palms pressed against the headboard, her toes toward the foot of the bed, her back arched in a stretch. Her brain was throbbing, foggy, as if trying to flex its way out of the cobwebs it was wrapped in.

Who are you? Is it really morning? Who wakes up in the morning?

She rolled over, half draped herself over her bedmate and traced the contours of his face with her fingertips as she followed along with her eyes.

Mmm. Yes, I remember this face. This is the face of a cunning linguist. Named… hmm.

They’d met late in the night, when he’d given her shit for being in a bar that didn’t seem to suit her. Sexy banter had ensued – or perhaps it had only seemed sexy to her, half-drunk and antagonistic – until he’d given in and dragged her home. Nadine was very good at convincing people to take her home. Maybe it was that she seemed harmless and helpless, like a kitten. Maybe it was that she gave great head. Maybe it just wasn’t that difficult to convince someone to have sex.

Paul, as in Les, as in good lay.

“Got an extra toothbrush, Paul?” she asked, and she apparently remembered right, because he smiled an impossibly sexy smile. He’d chipped a front tooth at some point, his nose looked like it had been broken, his forehead was a touch too tall, but: sexy all the same.

“Bottom drawer, on the right,” he directed, gesturing to the bathroom; his voice was too deep for how thick his eyelashes were, but she thought that was cute, too. Nadine rolled out of bed, naked as she’d slept, padded on bare balls of her feet to the tile of his bathroom. She’d left her glasses on the counter last night, before she’d showered; her fingers found them, slipped them over her aquiline nose to search for a toothbrush. “You never explained the tattoo,” she heard him call from bed, and she glanced at the mirror, at the art on her side that she still didn’t quite recognize as her own.

“Which?” she teased, as her fingers ran over phallic snakes and a werewolf performing an unnatural act, sparrows carrying handcuffs and lubricant.

“The pizza,” he specified, his voice sounding closer. She smiled, unwrapped the cheap plastic toothbrush and stuck it in the side of her mouth as she hunted for the toothpaste.

“That gets me freebies at a food truck. And it looks cool.” Les Paul slid behind her, retrieved the toothpaste with a kiss to the side of her neck before hopping into the shower.

When he emerged from the bathroom she’d made herself at home in his closet, had stolen an old band tee to wear with a short denim skirt and trashy fishnets. “You’re going to give that back, right?” he asked, smoothing Journey’s logo with the back of his hand before getting clothes of his own.

“Of course,” she lied, fluttering her own thick lashes at him. Before he could put his shirt on, she hitched her fingers in his belt, tugged him closer to kiss the bare skin over his spine. He had a ragged scar over his right shoulderblade, and she ran her fingertips along it as she had the night before. He turned as he pulled on his shirt, slid a hand up her side to feel the scars beneath her ink. Touché. She began buttoning his shirt for him, a touch she felt was charmingly domestic. “You’re looking fancy,” she noted, because to her a man in anything better than jeans and a T-shirt was fancy.

“Some of us have to work today.”

“Mmm, fancy for work? I’m going to guess… action accountant.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He kissed her on the forehead, a dismissal as he moved into the kitchen.

Nice apartment, nice clothes, nice abs, and a job you don’t want to tell me about. That’s not a red flag at all.

She followed him into the kitchen anyway, because it seemed the thing to do until he deigned to kick her out. If he disapproved of her pilfered breakfast beer, he didn’t say, too engrossed in his laptop and his cereal.

“You got anywhere to be today?” he asked finally, as the pounding in her head began to wane.

“Haven’t decided yet.” She set the empty beer can upside down in the sink, because that seemed like the fancy thing to do. Her wrists felt bare, and she wondered if he had anything interesting she could repurpose into a bracelet. He interrupted her musings with fingers through her short mop of curls, tilting her head back so he could meet her mouth with his.

“You could watch the place for me while I’m gone,” he suggested.

“Your apartment needs supervision?”

His hands were on her hips, and his tongue traced the curvature of her ear. “You know what I mean.”

“I suppose.” She leaned back, pressed herself against his chest, wondered if they’d have time for a quickie before he had to go. There was something about a well-dressed man…

Then again, there was also something about a poorly dressed man. And an undressed man.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Did you ask a yes or no question?”

She felt him smile into her neck, his fingers tracing circles on her hips. “I want to see you again.”

“I had an inkling that might be it.”

“We could go to dinner when I get home.”

“We could.”

“Think about it, okay?”

“I will,” she assured him, and maybe she would, even though she probably wouldn’t. Perhaps he could tell the direction of her thoughts, because he pinned her to the counter then, whispered filthy promises in her ear until she was flushed and squirming, until the notion of playing pet almost appealed.

“I’ll see you after work, then?” he asked as he pulled away, and he was so very sure of himself that he took the decision right out of her hands.

“We’ll see,” was all she said, and perhaps he thought she was teasing, because he smiled as he grabbed his bag and kissed her goodbye.

She watched the door for a long moment after he left, reassuring herself that he hadn’t forgotten anything, that he wouldn’t come rushing back in. Then she wandered back into his bedroom, nabbed a suit jacket from the back of his closet that he probably wasn’t using anyway. It smelled like him – like sweat and knockoff cologne and smoke. She threw on her ballet flats, grabbed her bag and headed out the door with a cigarette in her mouth.

Cigarettes were convenient, for this sort of thing. I wasn’t leaving, one might say, I was only going for a smoke. There was ten dollars in the pocket of Paul’s coat, and so Nadine headed for a cafe up the street, the one with the purple-haired barista. The coat would be on someone else’s floor, before morning – Paul’s name would be forgotten before the end of the week. That didn’t mean she didn’t like them both.