“Don’t know if you have any hobbies.”
She nodded. “I do. I may have to take a break from it for a bit while I’m out here, but normally when I have a light day on campus, I go to a class . . .”
I waited.
“It’s . . . pole dancing.”
I stopped breathing, but at least I didn’t choke.
Nodding, I took a sip of my wine to block my face, which I was pretty sure had turned the shade of a beet.
“So, like Flashdance? Welder by day, dancer by night?” I barked out, feeling a stirring in my pants that was wholly inappropriate for my roomie, who’d been talking about diode lasers a minute earlier.
She’s a goddamn pole dancer.
She chuckled and crossed her arms over her chest as though trying to keep me from picturing her dancing. “Excellent movie reference. But no, that’s not even close to what I do.”
It hardly mattered. My brain was stuck.
Like a white-hot strobe had blinded me to everything except Sarah wearing lingerie and grinding on a pole under hot lights. For me.
Stop picturing it. Fuck!“Cool,” I finally managed to say with a straight face. Like it meant nothing.
She nodded. Like it meant nothing.
Then she spread some brie cheese on a cracker and took a bite. I choked out an excuse and went to the bathroom to get a grip.
This will be okay. It will. It has to be.In the bathroom, I splashed some cold water on my face and took a hard look at myself in the mirror. What was happening? I hadn’t been this jacked up over a woman anytime in the past two years. My emotions had been buried in caverns so deep I felt confident they were gone for good. I was fine with that.
It made no sense. Or . . . maybe it did. I’ve always been competitive as fuck. If I’m told I can’t have something, I want it all the more and do anything in my power to make it mine.
That had to be what was happening here.
It was all in my head. I knew she was off limits, so the competitive motherfucker in me started bucking against that. I just needed to get my head together and think of her like any other human who happened to be using my second bedroom.
When I got back to the table, Sarah looked up at me with a thin slice of Parma ham twirled around her fork and put the bit into her mouth. I had no defensible reason to focus on her lips or the soft contour of her jaw while she chewed.
She swallowed and smiled at me. “I figured I should get a head start on eating while you were gone. In case you had more questions.”
“Good plan. Maybe we should focus on the food for a few minutes, or we could be here all night.”
I bit into a slider and closed my eyes at how delicious the slow-roasted meat tasted on the brioche bun. Who needed to cook when someone else could make food that tasted like this? It was how I’d become addicted to takeout and why I rarely ate at home anymore. That, and I spent a lot of time at work.
Sarah finished the last of the cheesy bread and wiped her lips gingerly on a napkin before looking right at me with those gorgeous eyes. “This is weird, right? It’s not just me?”
I tilted my head, trying to read her expression and decipher her meaning. “Could you be specific?
She waved her hands between us. “This. Us. We’re in our thirties and we’re roommates. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had a roommate for about ten years. Does it freak you out a little bit?”
Yes, but not for the reasons she meant.”
―
Stacy Travis,
The Spark Between Us
