Good Morning Heartache (10 page)

What made it worse was that
she could feel an ache building in her groin as she stared into his ice-blue
eyes. She was wickedly attracted to him, and she knew it, which was bad. Alexis
had gotten what she needed from him, but her dry spell was driving her crazy.
Okay, it had been less than a week, but it had been a really long time since
she had gone without for a period longer than two days.

Her sister impeded her sex
life when she was around, but this time Riley was so careful about avoiding
her, it was nearly impossible for her to get out. It was suspicious, and Alexis
didn’t trust that she wasn’t up to something, leaving her in the house to her
own devices seemed like a bad idea. Alexis missed the days of the full-service
staff taking care of her sister, while Alexis took care of herself.

She pulled a french fry out
of the paper sleeve and took a small bite off the end. Her insides moaned. She
shouldn't have come here. There were two things that she didn't need in her
life: fast food and this man.

They sat in awkward silence
for several moments while Alexis enjoyed a few more bites of her meal. They had
only been there for ten minutes, and it was starting to get painful. Alexis's
thoughts wavered from excuses to get out of there to taking him back to bed to
relieve some of the stress that Riley put on her life.

The absence of conversation
continued until Alexis finished half her meal and decided that she couldn't
justify eating any more. Ryan had finished long before her, and his blue eyes
were surveying her.

A tingle ran through her
body, causing the hairs on her arms to stand on end, but she tried to ignore
it. “What? Do I have secret sauce on my face?”

“No,” he said, unmoving.

She pushed her tray toward
the middle of the table, breaking his gaze. If she didn't get some distance
between her and that food, her resolve would soon be worn away. She looked up
again to find him still looking at her intently. “You’re staring. It’s rude.”

“Sorry.”

She shook her head in
disappointment. “You're doing a terrible job.”

“I was just letting you
finish your meal. It looked like it would be difficult to eat and converse. Are
you done?”

“Yeah, I’m done. And for the
record, I’m pretty good at doing two things at once. It may be something you’ll
want to work on.”

Ryan said nothing and
instead grabbed her tray from the middle of the table and slid his to where
hers once was.

“Are you kidding me?”

“It's a waste.” He stuffed
several fries into his mouth.

“How can you eat like this?
Look at you. You're as chiseled as Michelangelo's
David
, but you eat
like your goal in life is to have a heart attack by the time you’re forty.”

He finished her burger in a
couple of bites, and she nearly hissed at him with the anger that was boiling
in her.

“Well, I guess now that the
meal is over I'll be going.” Alexis stood up and jiggled a bit to get her long
black pants back to where they were supposed to be and smoothed her sleeveless
black, cream, and tan silk top.

When she came to the
restaurant, she knew that she should have worn something else, but she hadn’t
had much time after leaving her aunt’s office. Everyone else looked sloppy, but
normal, in their baggy jeans and t-shirts. She hadn't been in a McDonald's
since college in New York City, and she immediately felt out of place. That
feeling rarely stopped her though, and she was just glad to know that she
looked nice. Over the last week she’d been adorned with cotton shorts and
t-shirts all day every day because she didn’t have a reason to leave the house,
and if she did, it was to get take-out or groceries, which was hardly worth
putting on silk for, but she figured her aunt wouldn’t take her seriously in
her lay-about clothes. Plus, if she was going to meet someone for dinner,
regardless of the location, she might as well look hot. Especially when it meant
that he had to suffer because he knew that she was no longer an option for him.

Ryan also didn't get the
message about the casual atmosphere of McDonald’s. The only thing missing from
his expensive black business suit was a tie running through the collar of his
aqua, black, and white striped dress shirt. They looked like they should be at
a five-star restaurant. She didn't quite understand why he was dressed up, but
she had to admit he knew how to look good, and he didn’t know that she didn’t
get all dolled up for him. Despite the location, they both looked like they had
prepared for a date.

She had to get out of there.

Alexis reached down to grab
her purse hanging from the back of the plastic and aluminum chair and felt
Ryan's long fingers wrap around her wrist. She turned her head and looked into
his pleading light blue eyes.

“A little longer,” he said,
but she could barely hear him. Her skin had caught fire with his touch. It
radiated through her, and without any thought about what she was doing, she sat
back down. Alexis bit the inside of her bottom lip to try and regain control of
her body's sensations, but Ryan was still holding her wrist, and she could only
concentrate on the gentle, fairly insignificant touch.

After a few moments, she
shook his grasp away and was able to pull herself back together. She said the
only thing that was on her mind. “This is a bad idea.”

“What is?” he questioned
innocently.

“You and me. Getting to know
each other. It's a very bad idea.”

“Why?” His innocence was
driving her crazy.

“Because we had sex. I liked
having sex with you, and I can only imagine it would be great to go for another
round, but it was supposed to stop at sex last Saturday. I don't want a
relationship.” She managed to omit how much she wanted to drag him into the
bathroom, lock the door, and tear him out of his suit. She took a deep breath
and continued kindly. “I don't want to know who you are, and I don't want you
to know who I am. It's weird, and it feels like a relationship.”

“I don't want a relationship
either.”

“Then what the hell are we
doing here? Maybe we should just ignore one another while you're in town.” she
considered aloud.

Ryan sighed audibly and
leaned back against the hard plastic of his booth seat. He ran his fingers
through his messy hair, and it flopped back into its original position like
he’d never touched it.

“That was the plan, but you
have a nasty habit of popping up wherever I happen to be.”

“I live here. You're the one
who pops.” Alexis pointed at him accusingly and then dropped her tan hand on
the table, her bracelets making a loud
clunk
on the table as she did.

“I probably want to be here
less than you do, but I was dared. My plan was to never see you again.”

Embarrassingly, Alexis's
mouth had fallen open, and she clamped it shut as she cocked her head to the
side, giving him a suspicious glare. “Wait a second. What do you mean you were
dared?”

His low laughter startled
her. “Most women would care more about the fact that I never wanted to see them
again.”

“That feeling is mutual.
What I want to know is why we are here.”

“My friend Daniel, the guy
you met in the stairwell on Monday, dared me to ask you out if I saw you again.
He wouldn't let it go, so I agreed. Apparently, I need to get laid.”

Alexis crossed her arms
under her breasts again and said, “You got plenty laid. Why didn't you just
tell him that?”

“I don't kiss and tell.”

“You'd rather subject us
both to something we don't want to do than brag about something that was what I
consider excellent.”

He grinned at her comment. “You
don't hold back at all do you?”

Alexis took a deep breath
and let it out through her nose. This was him getting to know her, and she
hated it.

“I don't like to be led on,
so I provide the same courtesy to others. Speaking of which, I think we know
too much about each other already. I fear that if I don't leave soon we'll turn
into acquaintances.”

“But I am just getting good.”

“Good at what?”

“Talking to you.” He flashed
a gorgeous white smile that warmed her to the bone.

Damn it. He did it. He
reeled her in and now she kind of liked him as more than just a breathing
dildo. “You jerk.” Ryan looked taken aback by her comment and gave her a “what-did-I-do”
look. “Fine. I'll stay, but I can't have sex with you ever again.”

His smile returned. “Were
you planning on it? Because if you were…”

She interrupted him. “I
can't say I was planning anything, but I have an obvious sexual attraction to
you. If I'm going to respect you as a real person, then I can't have sex with
you. Those are the rules.” She crossed her legs, tucked them under the chair,
and swung her top foot back and forth while she watched him contemplate what
she had just said.

Ryan had charmed her with
his awkwardness, and while she liked him, she was not happy about it. It would
end the same as every other relationship she had with a man since Frank. They
would be friends, he would want sex, she would say no, he would get crazy, and
finally she would kick him to the curb. Why did men have to be such little
girls? The best thing she could do was tell him up front what she expected and
hope he would comply, but his next question proved to her that it wasn’t going
to be that easy.

“Why would we deny ourselves
if we have great sex and like each other?”

“Because that is a relationship,
and neither of us wants a relationship. Remember?” She wanted to call the whole
thing off right then. This was a bad idea, and she knew it. She couldn't. There
was something about this strong, handsome, socially-inept man that drew her
closer. It was scary, but she realized it wouldn’t be easy to just pull herself
away.

“Right, but I'm leaving
soon. So, why not?”

“It's a bad idea. Think back
to all of the things that I have told you before. Since the night we met.”

He considered her for a moment,
so she considered him right back.

“Have you ever been married?”
he asked flatly.

“Just because I like you
doesn't mean I'm going to tell you my life story,” she answered, annoyed. She
didn't really care if people knew about Frank, but she didn't like talking
about it. She was also annoyed because she could feel her carefully constructed
wall being hit with a sledge hammer and crumbling in the middle.

Alexis liked to keep people
at arm's length. She wasn't sure why, but he wanted to get closer, and she
wanted to let him. “I thought you didn't want to be here either. Maybe we
should just call it a night.”

“I didn't, but you’re very
interesting. I don’t like most women, but you're different. Honest. I want to
know why.”

She hesitated only for a
moment with a deep breath. She had to take the leap at some point—he was
insistent—so it might as well be in a McDonald’s with cheeseburger breath. That
was probably the least intimate it could get.

 “Once upon a time I was
like other women. I believed in relationships, love and marriage, but I learned
the hard way that that’s not how life actually works. That it’s all an illusion
created by society so it can feel better about life sucking. It was especially
engrained in me because I grew up like a princess. I got whatever I wanted when
I wanted it. It was kind of awesome.” And in many ways it was terrible. “But
that’s not how life actually works.

“As a princess, I believed
what the movies said about love. I went to college believing in a fairy tale,
and within the first semester I was dating Francis Carello. Frank was working
his way through college in the student union. He wasn’t like me or my family,
and I liked that about him. He was the Cinderella and I was Prince Charming. I
fell in love.” Alexis lifted her hands and made air quotes when she said the
last word.

“We dated all through my
time at Columbia. In the fall of my senior year, he asked me to marry him, and
I—way too enthusiastically—said yes. I planned the wedding in Weston at my parent’s
house. The wedding planner told me it was going to be magical; a wedding people
would talk about for years.

“We were going to get
married a week after graduation. Two weeks before the wedding Frank got an
offer to work in Rome for some defense company. It was the chance he’d been
working for his whole life, and I was excited to go with him.

“Frank finished his finals
before me, so he went to stay with his parents to get ready for the wedding, at
least that’s what he told me. While I was working on my last final, I got an email
from Frank calling off the engagement. Some crap about not being able to live
his life to the fullest being tied down. I don’t remember the exact words. I
read the email once and deleted it. It wasn’t important enough to keep.” She
didn’t have the heart to read it more than once. It had crushed her completely.

“So, I don’t lie, not much
anyway. I am straightforward with men because that’s what I want. I don’t want
anyone to have false hope for something I can’t give him.” Alexis thought of
Richard for a moment and shook her head. “It doesn’t always work, but no one
can actually blame me. In many ways I’m grateful to Frank. Without him I’d be another
sucker with unrealistic expectations. I’m just trying to give as many people
that reality check as I can. It’s my calling in life.”

She wasn’t sure she wanted
to continue. He had listened to every word carefully, and she hoped that she
wasn’t giving him any wild fantasies of commitment because she was telling him
the details of her life. Despite how many times she told a man that she didn’t
want love and marriage, he always thought he was the one that could change her
mind. She doubted Ryan would be different, but he didn’t show any reaction one
way or the other, and she found it comforting.