“Not really,” I say as I shift to kneel between his knees. “After all, you’re still here, aren’t you? I figure that’s all the performance review I need.”
“Yeah.” He turns serious fast. “I’m still here.”
“In case I didn’t say it earlier, I’m really glad you are.” I tug his pants down below his knees. “And since you are …” I deliver a long, lingering lick to his very aroused cock, then suck it deep into my mouth.
He doesn’t say anything else for a while, but then again, neither do I.
“I’m not doing it.”
“Come on, Ophelia. Just try.”
“I don’t need to try.” I cross my arms over my chest and look anywhere but at Z. “It’s not going to happen.”
“Yes, it is.”
I make a frustrated sound deep in my throat. “Just because we had sex a few times doesn’t mean you have the right to tell me what to do.”
“No,” he agrees. “But the fact that I beat the hell out of an asshole who was trying to rape you in the woods yesterday does. It’s not safe for you to keep doing that walk between the lodge and your room. Especially not at night.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
“That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?” He leans back against the car, shoves his hands in his pockets even as he crosses his long legs in front of him. “You don’t know how to ask for help.”
“I ask when I need it.”
“You need it now.” He pulls his right hand from his pocket, and clutched in his fingers is the key to his Range Rover. He presses it into my hand. “Get in the driver’s seat, Ophelia.”
“No.”
“It looks like we’re going to be here awhile, then.”
“No, you’re going to be here awhile. I’m walking to the bus. I want to go shopping.” I talk big, but I don’t move. It’s like I’m frozen in place, the key he gave me burning my palm as surely as if he’d handed me a live flame.
“I told you I’d take you shopping. But I want to give you a driving lesson first.”
“I know how to drive. In fact, I’m probably a better driver than you are.” Remi spent months, years, making sure I could handle a car in any eventuality. It was his big condition before he ever let me behind the wheel to drag-race.
“Of course you know how to drive. But you’re from New Orleans. When’s the last time you drove on ice or snow?” When I don’t answer, he continues. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. But you can’t hide from it forever. You live in one of the biggest snow towns in the freakin’ country. You need to know how to deal with the weather.”
“I am dealing with it.”
“No, you’re running away from it. But that stops now.”
Our eyes lock and I glare at him, pissed that he sees through my smokescreen and even more pissed that he’s forcing the issue. Who knew that Z, who spends most of his life coasting from one party to the next, could dig his heels in so adamantly? But he has, and I have a feeling we’ll be here all day if I don’t give in to him.
I’m almost willing to do it, to just stand here and wait for hell to freeze over or Z to give up. But at the same time, there’s a part of me that knows he’s right. That I can’t spend my whole life avoiding driving. The snow and ice have given me an excuse so far, but at some point … at some point I’m just going to have to do it.
That point might as well be now, especially since Z is currently doing his impression of the immovable-object-meets-unstoppable-force paradox. Either way, I’m smart enough to know I’m screwed.
“Fine,” I tell him, stomping around the car to the driver’s side. “I’ll do it.” But if he starts to crow about getting me do to what he wants or if he acts arrogant in any other way, I am so out of here.
However, Z is surprisingly low-key when he slides into the passenger side, almost as if he knows how ready to bolt I am. And maybe he does. He figured out about the driving thing when no one else has yet, not even my mom or friends back home. Which means he’s looking a lot closer than I thought he was, seeing so much more of me than I thought I was revealing.
“Driving on snow is not that much different from driving in rain,” he tells me after we’ve both put our seat belts on. “In rain you worry about hydroplaning. In snow you worry about the same thing, especially since there actually is that layer of water between the car and the road. So, to compensate for it, you have to learn to use the car’s own forward momentum instead of pressing on the gas all the time.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, confused already.
“Put the car in second instead of drive,” he tells me. He parked the Range Rover near the front curb earlier so that I wouldn’t have to worry about backing out of a spot yet. “And just let it creep forward. Don’t touch the gas or the brake; just let the car move forward on its own.”
I do as he says and we start moving at about one mile an hour. After a minute, I glance at him from the corner of my eye. “We aren’t going to get very far at this speed.”
He rolls his eyes at me. “Bored already?”
“No. Just …” Impatient. Impatient to get started, impatient to finish. Impatient to get my life back. Or at least this small corner of it.
“I get it,” he tells me, dropping a hand on my knee, and I think maybe he does. God knows he seems to understand everything else. Strange, when a few days ago I would have said he didn’t understand anything.
As we get toward the end of the parking lot, he continues, “Now, you can ease it into third gear. But don’t turn out into the street yet. I want you to drive a couple of circles in here before we go out onto the road.”
It’s my turn to roll my eyes at him. “You sound like Remi during my very first driving lesson.”
“Remi?” he asks. “Is that your brother?”
I swallow, annoyed at myself for slipping up. I never talk about Remi. Never. But Z doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know anything about me other than what he’s seen here in Park City. And while there’s something really appealing about that fact, there’s also something not quite fair about it, too. Not when there are so many sources around where I pick up stuff about his life.
“He was my boyfriend. We started dating when I was fifteen, so he’s the one who taught me how to drive.”
“He taught you? So he was older than you?”
“By a couple of years, yeah.”
He nods, and though he doesn’t say anything, I know that the parallels between him and Remi aren’t lost on Z. And he doesn’t know the half of it.
But I do, and still I’m here, in this car with him.
Still I slept with him.
I told myself it wouldn’t matter. That I was doing it because I wanted to get over the pain that came with Remi being my one and only. But being here, now, with Z … trusting him to give me this driving lesson … laughing with him in my room a little while ago … It makes me think that there’s more here than I want to admit, even to myself. Especially to myself.
The thought boggles my mind, especially considering who Z is. What he does. In its own way, snowboarding is as dangerous as drag racing, and Z isn’t exactly known for his caution on the slopes or in the half-pipe. I’ve never seen him board, so I don’t know, but the stories I’ve heard around the resort make it sound like he takes more risks than he has to. The payout’s bigger, but so is the chance of something going wrong.
I can’t help wondering if there’s something pathologically wrong with me that the only two guys I’ve ever been interested in have been like that. Remi always felt like he had something to prove, and very often went to crazy lengths to do so. And though I don’t know him nearly as well, yet, it seems to me like Z is exactly the same.