Layover

She wouldn’t forget her first sight of his eyes, a hazy gray-blue, when he took off the blindfold. Or the sound of his name when he’d introduced himself, or the press of his palm in hers when they shook hands.

“You’re good at taking direction,” she’d said.

“You’re good at giving it,” had been his reply, and his smile had sent heat trickling all through her.

The session had continued, but if anything important happened, Julia didn’t remember it. All she thought of when she looked back to that day was Graham. She’d thought about him a lot over the past year.

Later that first day, they met in the hotel lobby at the elevator. They’d struck up a conversation on the ride up. He’d impressed her at once by referring to their transport as the Great Glass Elevator. The elevator opened into a short hall, open at either end. The rooms themselves formed a square around the lobby below. He’d gone one way, she the other, and found their rooms had been almost exactly opposite one another.

He’d waved. She’d waved back. Inside her room she’d leaned against the door and laughed to herself at how something so simple and small could feel so big so fast.

The attraction had been instant and undeniable, at least to her. Graham stood at least six-three, with long, long legs and long, long arms, and big, long-fingered hands. He alternated between well-cut suits with funky ties and casual, long-sleeved T-shirts and the type of jeans fondly known amongst Julia’s circle of girlfriends as “dirty denim.” Not that the jeans themselves weren’t clean—just that the cut and style and contents brought to mind dirty, dirty thoughts.

They’d been partnered in a trivia contest and wiped the floor with their competitors. They’d sat together at dinner. They’d talked long into the night about topics as diverse as comic-book superheroes and global warming and her love of snow, which he rarely saw in his native Texas. He had an easy sense of humor and laughed at all her jokes. They’d only known each other for five days.

A lot can happen in five days.

The after-hours events had been a bit more raucous than the daytime meetings. Casual flirtations that would never have gone further than the office seemed an entirely different animal going on away from home. Alcohol made people stupid, something Julia had determined never to be, particularly not in front of her boss’s bosses and around people with whom she had to work on a daily basis. Even with people she would never see again. Maybe especially with people she would never see again.

The conference had ended with an awards dinner on Friday night. Many of the attendees who weren’t heading out immediately for home had ended up in the hotel bar, where they drank and danced and generally let down their hair.

Julia and Graham had shared a booth with several people neither of them actually worked with. There had been drinking and music and flirtation she couldn’t ignore. His thigh had pressed hers beneath the table. She had reached to brush a nonexistent piece of lint from his collar. They hadn’t been alone but nobody else had mattered.

Last call came and with it a decision. They’d taken the Great Glass Elevator together, tension thick and sweet as honey between them, but when the doors opened and let them both out, Julia had mumbled something about it being late and turned. She’d walked away.

Would he have said yes if she had asked him to go with her back to her room? She would never know, because she hadn’t asked. She’d wanted it desperately, fiercely, the need of it a physical force that had dried her throat as it moistened her palms and dampened between her thighs—but she hadn’t asked.

Their flirtation had begun casually and grown exponentially each day, until that last night there should have been no doubt of her intentions or his. But despite the fact he had looked into her eyes and she could almost feel the heat his gaze was giving off as if it was an actual flame—despite all of that, Julia, in that last moment, had faltered. Chickened out. Because he might have said no. More frightening, he might have said yes.

And then what would she have done? Taken him to her room, used his tie to bind his hands or to cover his eyes. Ordered him to service her with his tongue until she came. Ridden him like a motherfucking pony until he screamed her name. The possibilities had been as endless as her fantasies, but they all came back to one single theme. Graham Tremaine on his knees in front of her, doing whatever she pleased.

It was what she wanted, but not what she allowed herself to take. After five days she liked him too much to risk disappointment. She hadn’t even held out a hand for him to shake, afraid that simple touch would give away the sheer force of her desire and embarrass her. She had simply wished him good-night and turned on her heel to walk away without daring to even look back. She hadn’t dared look across to see him going into his own room, either. She’d swiped her key through the lock and gone inside, closing the door tight and leaning against it again, her heart pounding as if she’d run a mile with wolves chasing her.

She’d never seen him again.

She had his business card and his company email address, but had been unable to manufacture a business-related reason to use it. A couple weeks after the conference, though, he’d friended her online at Connex. No message, just the friend request in her inbox.

She hadn’t accepted it right away. For four days she’d looked at his user picture and thought about his smile and the feeling of his hand in hers. She’d hovered her cursor over the “accept” button and pushed it aside, until finally she clicked on it. Nothing amazing had happened. Her computer didn’t catch on fire. Neither did her pussy. A few days later he sent her an e-mail and she answered, bland messages fraught with unspoken emotion—at least on her part, every word agonized over to make sure she said neither too much nor too little.

Unlike most of the users on the network, Julia was careful to keep her Connex blog bland and impersonal. She had no illusions about the anonymity of the Internet, and she didn’t fancy the idea of just anyone being privy to her particular kinks. Yet every once in a while when writing about what she’d done over the weekend, the places she’d gone and the people she’d been with, something managed to slip through. Subtle, or at least she hoped, but there for anyone who might understand it to interpret it.

Sometimes he commented on what she had to say. Sometimes he didn’t. Julia checked his page often, reading his infrequent but always dryly humorous blog entries and unashamedly looking at the photos he posted of trips and holidays. Sometimes she didn’t comment to him and sometimes she did, but eventually their semi-occasional-casual blog replies had turned into a semi-occasional-casual instant message.

And then, more than that.

They chatted online more days than they didn’t, though it was all still mostly bland and friendly and eventually, Julia began to think the heat between them had been in her imagination. It had to be, didn’t it? Because Graham, for all his following her on Twitter and forwarding her LOLcats, never said anything that could possibly be considered flirtatious.

At least until they’d talked about cake.

She’d written about diets and self-discipline and the seduction of chocolate cake. She’d been thinking about sex when she wrote it, about how it seemed she always wanted what was bad for her the way she always wanted chocolate cake rather than a piece of fruit. She wanted long nights and red flags instead of fields of flowers and poetry, and what kind of woman wanted that?

There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you want and having it, Graham had replied.

As in having my cake and eating it too?

As in a woman who knows what she wants and takes it instead of worrying about whether it’s good for her or not is sexy.

The conversation had veered away after that, but Julia had thought a lot about Graham’s words over the past few months. She’d known what she wanted for a long time, but taking it was something else entirely. She’d tried, in the past, but it was hard finding men who weren’t intimidated by a strong woman.

And now here she was in a Texas airport, her flight cancelled and an undetermined layover trapping her here, and who was the only person in the entire world she knew who lived in Texas?

Graham Tremaine.

Who was, she saw, with a jolt of anticipation, online right now.

Maybe it was the extra-large cup of coffee she’d consumed while waiting to find out if she’d make the next leg of her trip home. Maybe it was the devil-may-care attitude that seemed to have taken over many of the travelers whose flights were being canceled due to the horrible weather back East and were looking at spending the night camped out on the airport floor. Or maybe it was something as simple as the long, lonely passage of time and the anonymity of the Internet that made it possible for her to take the step she’d been unable to make when faced with it in person.