The Promise of Lace (13 page)

I carefully wiped my hands clean with the paper towels and
spent a little bit of time hunting down a trashcan to toss them into. I hung
around in the general area of the bathrooms, trying to wait for Dieter to come
back out without it looking like I was just loitering outside the men’s room. I
saw the plucked eyebrows guy walk out after a few moments, but according to my
phone it was fully five minutes before Dieter finally left the bathroom.

He looked oddly well put together when he did finally come
out. I could still see that the hair at his temples was sweat slicked. His face
was clearly orgasm flush. He had way too healthy a glow. It stuck out in
Minnesota in April amongst the other faces, which were all either pale or fake-orange
from the long winter.

I waved at him and he made a beeline for me.

“You alright
?
“Umm, mostly,” he said. His voice was thick and husky. I wondered if it was
from just having come or just having gotten too close to coming and then not
gotten there. “Let’s go get some air.”

“Yeah.
Of course,” I said, starting to worry.

He grabbed my hand tighter than he had before and started
immediately for the door, with me behind him. It was sort of like being towed
behind a boat. His grip didn’t hurt and it wasn’t like he was dragging me
behind him or anything, but he was heading toward the door at a steady,
uninterrupted pace, ducking around skeptical business women and drunken middle
aged ladies until we finally got to the door and stepped out into the slightly chilly
night air and he was pulling me behind him.

“Are you sure that you’re alright?” I asked as I followed
him into a hidden corner on the front steps. We were behind one of the carved
pillars, tucked between a hip high stonewall and the building itself. We were
mostly blocked from the street, but still fully visible to anyone on the top of
the steps.

He pushed my hair back from my face and kissed me, another
hard, fast kiss, like the one he’d given me in the bathroom,
then
he pulled back, standing at arm’s length from me.

“Thanks for the skirt thing,” he said quickly.

My first instinct was to laugh, but he suddenly seemed a
little too on edge for that. This was a proceed-with-caution situation. I had a
feeling there were going to be a few of these with Dieter in this early dating
stage.

“Yeah.
Of course.
Sorry to… you know, leave you high and dry like that.”

His lips pulled up into a tight smile that didn’t make it
all the way up to his eyes. “Thanks. So… okay, I didn’t think I’d have to do
this so early, but…I think I do need to have it out there after all.” He blew
out a breath and scooped his hair back from his face. “I… I haven’t actually
dated
a girl since
Joselyn
the…
ummm
bad experience girl. I mean, a couple one
night stands, a few dinners here and there, but no one that I’ve seriously
liked has come along, and definitely no one that I would have…”

I reached out and set my palm to his bicep. He let me so I
brushed my hand over his arm, trying to soothe him. “It’s alright. What’s
wrong?”

“Okay, I should have mentioned this way before getting the
bright idea to do it in a public restroom…but umm… the one thing that I can’t…
I absolutely can’t do is humiliation.”

“Humiliation?”
“
Yeah…generally
being ragged out, being insulted in front of other people
… being
hard and helpless like that in front of someone else.”

“I didn’t mean t—”

“It’s fine.” He cut me off. “I know that. It wasn’t your
idea… and I didn’t… I didn’t think it would go like that. This is about me not…
thinking this through. It’s not your fault. I just… I need you to know this
particular thing about me.”

His voice was too high. He was straining to sound
reasonable, but his shoulders were hunched and he wasn’t looking at me, he was
looking at the ground a few feet to my left, not meeting my eyes.

“Okay. I’m listening. I wasn’t trying to humiliate you.”

“I know that. You covered me up. You made up that wine thing
to cover for both of us. It’s not even about you. You didn’t do anything wrong.
I just… I didn’t think getting caught would freak me out like this.”

“Right.
Yeah. That’s okay.” Still stroking his
arm, I moved a few steps closer. When he didn’t react, I wrapped my arms around
him. He sighed and sank down into me.

“I think I saw pretty much everything I needed to see,” I
said carefully. “Let’s say we head back to my place? Maybe get a nightcap?”

“We don’t have to leave yet. I just need some air.” He
sounded sincere, but he was still holding himself up so rigidly, every muscle
clenched. “I
hate
that she can still
do this to me, Roxanne. I
hate
it.”

I shushed him and ran my arm down his back, realizing as I
did that this was getting really, really heavy for me. How tight he squeezed me
was frightening. We were three dates in and chemistry was one thing, but this
was deep. This was definitely a commitment thing.

I was not good at the commitment thing, and I never had
been.

I shushed him again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is freaking pathetic. I just
wanted to do one stupid sexy thing and now I’m a wreck.”

“It’s fine,” I told him. “You don’t have to do things like
this for me you know. You don’t have to be some kind of sex-
bot
.
You get to be human. God knows I am.”

He cleared his throat and pulled back. “Maybe I should go
home.”

I grabbed his hand and twined our fingers. “No, you don’t
have to. Come on. I’m over squeezing through the crowd. Let’s just go back to
my place. Put on some music or a movie or something.”

Dieter brushed his longish bangs out of his eyes. He didn’t
look totally sold, but he agreed.

Chapter Ten

We had walked to the art institute from my place because it
had been sunny and gorgeous when we’d left. We had been planning to bus home
but neither of us
were
really in the mood to wait for
the bus to come by, then cram onto it. It was chillier than it had been, but
there was no wind. We walked back.

I spent the mile and a half back wondering if the was
anything I should say or if I should just wait for him to talk.

I wasn’t great at emotions and subtlety and being careful.
That’s why people stopped talking to me after their fianc
é
s threw me into walls and why I gave up on people
when they got too difficult.

Dieter wasn’t my responsibility, but I hated that he felt
bad as often as he did, and I didn’t want to make it even worse by defaulting
to my go-to move of just never calling him again just because he’d hit some
sort of roadblock over not even doing anything wrong. I cared about him. I
didn’t want to see him hurt and I definitely didn’t want to be the one who hurt
him.

I dug my keys out when we reached my block. He kissed me at
the door,
then
pulled away.

“Hey,” I caught his arm. “Come up. Please.”

He nodded.

I settled him onto the couch and hit play on whatever was in
the DVD player. It turned out to be
Buffy,
Season 2. He didn’t object.

I left him to watch the opening credits while I went into
the kitchen. I looked through my cupboards for a few moments, not entirely sure
what to offer him. I finally settled on tea. My phone buzzed in my purse as I
set the water to boil.
 
I went over to
the chair where I had thrown it and fished it out.

Hailey was calling. I pressed “decline”, but tucked it into
my dress pocket while I went back to the kitchen to set out mugs and grab tea
bags.
I texted Hailey to tell her that I was still on my
date.
She told me to call her when I got home. I quickly messaged back
that I was home with Dieter and that she would have to wait until the morning.
I turned off
the vibrate
so that when she kept
texting, like I knew she would, the phone wouldn’t make any noise.

We’d already had the conversation about Dieter and the cross
dressing and the abuse thing and Hailey had been kind of a bitch about it. We
could discuss it again when she could be a little more sensitive about the
whole thing.

The teakettle whistled and I filled two mugs and dropped tea
bags into them. Dieter gave me a weak smile when I handed him one. I dug my
phone out of my pocket and put in on my end table/ nightstand next to where
Dieter’s was already lying. I settled down next to him on the couch. After a
moment of deliberation I lay down against him.

He wrapped his arms around me,
then
tucked his chin against my neck. It was a little smothering, but it made his
body relax against mine so I didn’t say anything.

He was warm against me. The sound of his breathing was
soothing. He took my hand in his tea-warmed one while vampires got dusted.

By the time the credit music blasted I was starting to
wonder if Dieter had fallen asleep, when he finally spoke.

“Why do you like me?” he asked quietly.

Normally that kind of question would have been an instant
alarm—this one’s too needy, time to start moving him toward the door and
screening my calls, but Dieter’s tone wasn’t self-deprecating or whiny. He
asked me the question like a child trying to put off bedtime might ask for a
story.

I almost turned around,
then
decided against it. “You’re sweet,” I answered. “You’re smart. You’re
confident.”

He scoffed.

“Really.
When you came up to Hailey and me at
that store, throwing out descriptions and five-dollar words? That was hot as
Hell
. You have an artist’s eye. Look at
the stuff you picked out. Hailey still can’t get over how she looked in it.
Even your underwear, it fits you just right, accentuates everything.”

He pulled my hands up to his mouth and kissed my knuckles.
“It’s self-defense,” he whispered.

“What is?”

“Going overboard at work.
Girls think I’m gay so they
don’t approach me. And then…if there is a girl who maybe doesn’t fall for
that,
or a girl that maybe I want to go after…the panties
scare off anyone just looking for some chest-beating he-man, ’cause I just
can’t
do that anymore. Girls who demand
that I have to be a certain way? I can’t really deal with it. So they see the
underwear, and they laugh, and they go away. Or they see it and they ask why
and then they’re… I don’t know. Scared or freaked out or something because real
men don’t do that. And they go away. Jocelyn was always, always on me about
what a
real
man would do. Well.
That’s not what I’m shooting for. It’s better to get shot down for a preference
I have than for something… you know,
inherent
.”

“And what’s inherent that a girl would shoot you down for?”

“I don’t know,” he said.
“Whatever Jocelyn
saw in me that made me prey.”

I squeezed my hands around his. “You’re not prey. Some
insecure bitch who hated herself decided to take it out on you.”

“And I let her,” he said quietly.

I pulled his hands down around my waist. “Wanting to help
isn’t a crime. Naiveté isn’t an invitation.”

He kissed my temple.

“What about me?” I asked.

“Mhmmm?”

“You said you try to scare girls off at the store, but then
you came up to me at the bar. Why didn’t you want to scare me off?”

“Umm, because of Hailey,” he said. “Wait… that doesn’t sound
quite right. I wasn’t… Hailey’s really not my type. But it was the way you two
were together.”

“Hailey is the thing about me that scares most people off,”
I told him, incredulous.

Dieter kissed my neck. “I was listening in on you two
talking. Not in like, a creepy way, I was just seeing what you were shopping
for. You were really honest with each other. Most of the women who come into
that store… they keep their voices down, they never ask for help. And then
there are a couple people, like the just-out-of-college girls, or the
first-boyfriend-in-high-school girls who are talking way too loud and faking
everything because they’re just trying to be shocking. But you guys were just…
I don’t know.
Chatting.
Little bit loud.
Totally open.
She… she made me assume that you were
trustworthy. And… trustworthy on top of being as beautiful as you are… how do
you resist that?”

 
He pulled my hands
back up and kissed my fingers again.
 
The
screaming electric guitar had passed and the Scoobies were back on the screen.

Hailey and I used to watch this show religiously. She’d,
unsurprisingly, been into Angel. Big handsome guy built like a battering ram.
Very much her type.