“Well, yeah.” Saxon flicked ash out the window. “I told you, he’s had his fun. He’s not worried about screwing anyone else…”
“I’m not thinking about that!” I interrupted, feeling the burn of a lie, even though I really wasn’t thinking about that. Was I?
He chuckled. “You may not admit it, but I can see you salivating when we’re in a room together. Your pheromones are practically choking me.”
“I’m not thinking about sex with anyone,” I repeated. “Like I need any more complications in my life right now.”
“Your life has been one big complication since you came back from your Danish romp,” he scoffed. “And you’ve loved every damn minute, so stop lying to yourself.”
Then the car stopped. We were in front of an enormous, white, modern house. “This is your house?”
“Nope.” He pushed his door open with his shoulder. “We’re breaking in.”
I was about to talk him out of it, calmly, to hide my panic, but then he shook his keys at me with a smirk and waved me to the door. We entered the cavernous house legally, and I hid my sigh of relief.
The front foyer had a fountain. A real fountain like they have in Chinese food restaurants. It was tiled in something dark and incredibly shiny with little lichen-like fossils in it.
The living room had whatever would be beyond a cathedral ceiling. Hanging from the middle was a colossal chandelier made of swirling metal and colored glass. There was a big furry carpet over super shiny dark wood floors and several weird-shaped red sofas and chairs. Outside the enormous windows, there was an in-ground pool, covered for the winter.
“Holy shit.” I gaped and my voice echoed off the walls. “Saxon, your house is…”
“Incredibly ugly.” He looked around with cold eyes. “Yeah, I know. Notice there’s no Christmas tree? Lylee finds them ‘too quaint.’ It’s like living in a really pretentious museum.”
It was weird to see someone look so ill at ease in his own home, especially one as incredible as this one. Saxon led me to a huge white-tiled kitchen with stainless steel counters and cabinets. He opened the fridge, which was the kind that had two full doors.
“Hungry?”
“I am.” I peeked over his shoulder. “Wow.”
“I’ll make us sandwiches.”
The interior of his fridge was so enormous that someone could have easily lived in it. Maybe even an entire small family.
Saxon got out plates and condiments and meats and cheese and bread, like a normal human who was about to make some food to eat. This felt so unlike Saxon, it was a little disconcerting to watch.
“So.” I pulled up a stool. “Where’s Lylee?”
Saxon put mayo on both sandwiches without asking me if I wanted it. I did.
“She is in Greece.” He spun the cap back on the mayo jar.
“What? We just got back!”
“From France. She wanted to go to Greece. I think she has some man-whore on Crete.” He shrugged. “Whatever makes her happy.” His voice was flat and bland.
“I’m sorry.” I took the meat-stuffed sandwich he held out.
“Don’t be.” He bundled up all the food and stuffed it back in the fridge. “Life is a lot easier when she’s not around. Lylee is hard to live with when she’s totally happy, and that’s not often. C’mon, we’ll eat in my room.” He got up and grabbed two sodas, and I followed him down a hallway lined with modern art in thick metal frames.
His room was the one place that looked like what I’d expected. It looked like a dirty teenage boy’s room was supposed to look like, just bigger. And possibly messier. He popped a window open. “Sorry. It smells like gym socks, right?”
He looked so handsome and boyish, and that was at odds with the way I typically thought of him. Saxon always struck me as something wild, like some feral creature that slept in a tree at night. When we had talked about him as a pet in Paris, the image of him as a huge, coiling snake or ravenous wolf made sense.
“It does. You could clean it,” I suggested.
He looked around without much interest. “No point. It would look like this again in no time. I have to try to be here when Carmella comes over, or she cleans it even though I say not to. She doesn’t make nearly enough to deal with this crap.”
“You have a maid?” I asked.
“You think Lylee does housework?” he returned.
“I guess she doesn’t seem that domestic.” His room was so unlike Jake’s it was crazy. We were sitting on small couches, set up on one side like a little sitting room with a chipped but expensive-looking coffee table between them. There were thick rugs over the hardwood, littered with Dorito crumbs and spilled who-knows-what. The bed was at least a queen, maybe bigger. It had gray sheets, and you could just tell from the way they bunched and piled so beautifully that they were something expensive. Maybe silk? The walls had framed art, mostly post-modern stuff, nothing I really knew. And there were band posters, the kind they use to advertise shows. I didn’t know many of them either. There was a desk with enough computer equipment to fill a NASA control room. Clothes were everywhere, and there were old plates, empty soda cans and, on the floor, what looked like a condom wrapper. What was it with the boys I cared about and suggestively placed condom wrappers? “Maybe you should just give Carmella a bonus and let her in here.”
“It’s freaking you out, isn’t it?” He looked around, and I imagined he was trying to see it through my eyes.
“It is.” I squirmed a little, equally fascinated and horrified. “Your dirtiest private dirt is crawling over everything in here. I can smell you. I can see evidence of you. It’s like looking at you under a microscope.”
“So this room is like my nasty little personal Petri dish?” He seemed unaccountably happy with the idea.
“Yes. You are one huge, gross science experiment.”
“You crack me up.” He laughed and his eyes got a glint I didn’t completely trust. “I don’t have many people in my life who make me laugh. I guess I don’t have that many friends in general. I’ve fucked it up with a lot of my guy friends, and no girl wants me for anything but what I can give her in bed.”
I rolled my eyes, but it was mostly to stay my panic. “If I have to hear about how good you are in bed one more time, I’m going to scream,” I joked. Though the delivery would have been smoother if my voice hadn’t wobbled. My attempts at levity were lost on Saxon. His black eyes were honed on me, and I knew for a fact I was trapped.
He moved across the space between us with all the feline grace of a jungle cat and then he was next to me. His body was warm and his skin emitted that amazing smell that was only Saxon’s and made me crazy. I tried breathing through my mouth, but I was no good at denying myself things. It just went against my nature.
“You think I’m exaggerating about how good I am?” His voice dripped with sex. “I’m not. I want to show you. I’ve thought about what I would do to you if I got you in my bed from the first minute I saw you.”
It felt like there was something crushing my lungs. I knew what he was saying wasn’t even just cheesy romance talk. I could see sometimes, when he looked over at me, that he was thinking things no normal human would entertain in public, even in his head.
“I kissed Jake when I saw him,” I confessed, desperate to derail this before it started, whatever it was. “Or I kissed him back. He kissed me first.”
“I don’t like it.” Saxon shrugged. “But you aren’t mine. Oh, wait. You’re nobody’s girl, right, Blix?” His eyes were bright with mockery. “You’re your own girl.”
“I am,” I insisted.
“Then stop pussyfooting around. Come to bed with me,” he lured.
“No.” I shook my head. Jake hadn’t wanted sex. Every time we were together, I knew he was going to talk me out of it. And that was a good thing. I wasn’t good at talking other people out of things. Especially things I could potentially like.