Not with Emily. This needed to end. No sex. She was off-limits. I wanted to preserve this. I didn’t want my angel sullied. She was perfection, and I wanted to be close to that. To breathe it in.
“If I order some food, will you stay and eat? We can watch a movie.” The words were foreign coming out of my mouth. Never in my life had I spoken them to a female.
At first, I thought she was going to say no again. But a small smile touched her lips instead. “OK,” she replied.
June 1992
Emily
This was my fourth date with Will Burton, and tonight he had kissed me. Finally. It hadn’t been earth-shattering, but it had been nice. He was a good guy. The kind who fit the white-picket-fence-with-two-kids-and-a-dog mold. I could see that life in his future, but I wasn’t yet seeing me in his future. I had tried several times. I just had to keep giving him time. Things could change.
I set my purse down on the kitchen counter and slipped off my heels before pouring myself a glass of juice. The popcorn at the theater had left me thirsty. Just as I started to take a drink, my phone rang. I stared at it a moment. If that was Sonya wanting to know the details with Will, I wasn’t in the mood. I moved over and checked the caller ID.
Private caller lit up the screen. Kiro.
Smiling, I picked it up. “Hello, you,” I said.
“Hey, angel. How has your week been?” he asked, making me feel warm all over. I walked over to the sofa and sank down on it, tucking my feet underneath me. Kiro called once a week. Some weeks, I got two calls. He liked to check in. He would tell me about the tour he was on, and I would tell him about life here.
“Busy. But I don’t work tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to being lazy all day. I may not leave my apartment. How has your week been?”
“Oh, you know. I sang, women screamed, threw panties at me, and begged me to have their kids. My regular night,” he replied.
I would have laughed, but he was serious. He always left out the details about those women, whom I knew he practiced child-making with afterward. That was something we never discussed.
Since I’d met him earlier this year, we had become friends. We’d found out that weekend that we shared the same love for Indiana Jones, so we had watched all the movies in his penthouse while the other band members stared at us like we were an alien species they didn’t understand.
When I left Chicago, I had thought I’d never hear from him again. But that night, he had called me, and our friendship had grown over the months. Now, when things happened that made me happy or upset me, I immediately thought of Kiro. He was the one I wanted to tell.
“Shame you’re sitting home on a Saturday. The guys in South Carolina are idiots,” he said, breaking me out of my thoughts.
I hadn’t told him about Will yet. He didn’t talk about his one-night stands, and I didn’t think he’d care about my dating life. But we were friends, and although I did fantasize about him at night, I also knew it was just that: a fantasy. Kiro made it clear he wanted nothing to do with an inexperienced virgin in the bedroom.
“I went on a date tonight. His name is Will. It was our fourth, actually.” I tried to sound casual, like this was no big thing. Talking about a guy with him.
He didn’t say anything at first, and I gripped the phone tightly, hoping I hadn’t done the wrong thing. I didn’t want these phone calls to end. Sadly, they had become the highlight of my week.
“Fourth, huh? Guess there’s a guy with eyes and a brain down there,” he said with a chuckle, but his voice seemed tight. “He got a last name?”
“Burton,” I replied.
Kiro was silent again, and then he cleared his throat. “How’s that bitch at work? She still giving you shit?” he asked.
I relaxed. This was what we normally talked about. The day-to-day easy stuff. “She got fired,” I said, still reeling over how that had happened. “Will heard her reaming me out about something that wasn’t my fault. She had threatened to have me fired. Then he walked in and told her she needed to pack her desk up and go home.”
“Will? As in the guy you’re dating?”
I had forgotten to mention that Will was my boss. I worked at a lumberyard, taking orders and dealing with contractor accounts. Will’s dad owned the company. “Yeah, he’s the manager,” I explained.
Kiro didn’t comment, so I decided it was time to shift the conversation away from me. This was awkward. “I bet you’re looking forward to going home. Last stop is tomorrow, right?” I had a poster of the band with the tour dates on it hanging in my bedroom. I liked to be able to see where he was each day.