Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(67)

It’s this deprivation that accounts for making-out thoughts, for belly-licking thoughts, for pink-T-shirt-removal thoughts.

I’m positive.

“I don’t usually make house calls, no.”

His talking reminds me to look at the face part, not the tiny-bit-nude part. He has a nice face.

Nice arms, too, honestly. I mean, sure they’re still ridiculously long, he’s nearly a gibbon, but the shoulder part is rounded in this really good sort of way, and he has biceps, of course he does, because that’s just an arm part, but his are kind of strong-looking without looking like all he thinks about are his biceps.

And there’s that part, a part I’ve always loved on guys, that hairless dipping-in place between his biceps and triceps that looks sort of vulnerable but also like a good place to put your mouth.

He has that place, and it is a very nice version of that place if my compulsion to bite it is any indication.

I somehow find my way to his face again though it is almost impossible, the way he is boneless and practically naked in my office chair with his obscene T-shirt and scandalous jeans and titillating Asics running shoes with green paint splattered on them.

I am worried for myself and this crush so obviously sourced from transference and deprivation that has my imagination straddling Evan the occupational therapist and sucking into my greedy mouth the skin resting over the hollow of his throat while his gibbon arms are wrapped all the way around me and I’m running my fingers through his messy hair.

He is almost smiling at me and I worry a little about his freaky mind-reading ability.

“So if you don’t make house calls, I’m kind of back to wondering why you’re here?”

“I’m actually off work for a few days and to be honest, bringing you lunch was a little impulsive.”

Okay. That makes me blush. I have no choice but to ignore my blushing. “I have this effect on people, they eat with me once and then can never eat without me again. Also, they tend to pay for my meals.”

“Noted.”

With that, we just looked at each other in a way that was starting to become a habit, and then I can’t ignore the blushing. I can’t ignore his teeny tiny T-shirt. I can’t ignore his one-sided almost smile or his methylene blue eyes. I can’t ignore his pretty shoulders or his arms. I can’t ignore his big hands, his shoulder-blade-spanning hands, the way the tendons in them lock to every knuckle and speculate on things like capability and dexterity and, of course, the scar over those knuckles on his left hand that I’ve noticed before, and its reminder that he has a life and has been hurt in it.

“Evan?” Why is he so comfortable with these moments between us?

Have I really gotten so depressed that I don’t understand the meaning of these long looks, of how his hand wrapped around the nape of my neck?

Not understanding why a man like this touches and looks at me the way he does seems like a loss approaching the loss of my vision.

I mean this, and vision is my whole world.

“Evan?” I ask again, and I think it sounds different, I think he must know that I am asking him to explain to me where this shift has occurred, what we’ve drifted toward. “I think we should talk, too.” His voice is rough, and he looks down briefly at his hands.

I close my eyes, because okay, yes. What I know about Evan is that he will put his shoulder against the hard conversation. “About my goals for therapy?”

His eyebrows steeple together, and he sighs. Actually sighs, and it sounds frustrated. “No. Is that what you want to talk about? What you think we should talk about?”

I can’t believe it, but suddenly I am overcome with an impulse a little bigger than the one that would have my hands under Evan’s T-shirt.

“Yeah.” I look at him, and I think about all the stuff he tried to get me to do before the exercise in the lobby and how I refused to do it and about those three blocks between me and the corner store and the gross turkey in my fridge and the bus route without transfers.

If I could ever get this guy to kiss me, is the thing, who would he be kissing? I’ve never doubted myself before.

I knew who I was, and everyone else did, too. I looked for the world around me in everything that I saw.

I looked for the world even as a young woman. I looked and I fought for the world one fucking cell at a time, and just when I thought I’d learned everything I wanted to, the whole world would change again.

When I just didn’t know, when no matter how I looked I was left in the dark, it would be Christmas again.

The lights shining and as high up as we could hang them.

I don’t want him to kiss a sad-sack microbiologist who takes one bus and has given up vegetarianism because she’s afraid to go to the good grocery store and sits in the dark at night passing notes with a stranger and needs her mom to talk her asleep.