Slow Satisfaction by Cecilia Tan

Author:Cecilia Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

Thinking It Must Be Love

What do you want to know?” James had slipped on midnight blue satin pajamas and I nestled in the crook of his arm, both of us looking up at the mural painted on the ceiling. Soft music played in the background from speakers I could not see. Cellos.

“Lucinda. Tell me about her.” I draped my arm across his chest. “Stefan seems to think she was no good for you. Chandra, too.”

“When did you talk to Chandra about Lucinda?” He sounded curious but not upset.

“I didn’t. You talked to her where I could overhear.”

“Did I? I must have been careless.”

“It was at the doctor’s office that time. We did have a… sort of intense time. Maybe that made you less cautious than usual.”

“So we did. And it’s you, Karina, that makes me want to throw caution to the wind.”

“Me? What is it about me?”

“I told you that you’re special.” He kissed my temple. “Now about Lucinda. I suppose she should have been a cautionary tale, too. We met at a fetish night.”

“Fetish night?”

“At a nightclub. A night where everyone wears their leather and rubber and the kinky people can meet one another.”

“What were you doing at a place like that?”

“Slumming, of course.” He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “By far the best thing about no one knowing what Lord Lightning looks like is that I can move freely in a place like that. Not to mention the grocery store—”

“I can’t picture you in the grocery store. You don’t buy your own groceries.”

“I don’t employ a chef except for special occasions. I don’t have a butler or a live-in maid. Stefan lives in the so-called ‘maid’s room’ downstairs. I do not send Stefan to the grocery store.”

“I still can’t picture you shopping for produce.”

“I like the farmer’s market when it’s the season, actually. But are my domestic habits what you want to know about?”

“No! Well, yes, but you were telling me about Lucinda.”

“She walked into this place looking like a Swedish supermodel, and set every man drooling. I watched man after man strike out. I bided my time, waiting for her to come to me. She eventually did.”

“How did you know she would come to you?”

“I didn’t. But I knew if I was going to have any chance at all, she would have to come to me and not the other way around. There were only three things that could have kept us from getting together.” He held up his hand, counting off on his fingers. “One, she was a lesbian. Two, she met someone before me who interested her more than me. Three, I met someone before her who interested me more than her. Well, no one there interested me more than her, and she wasn’t a lesbian. So it was mostly a matter of hoping someone else didn’t rival me for her attention.”

“And no one did?”

He chuckled. “No.”

“Oh, come on. There could have been another man as charismatic and handsome as an internationally known rock star there.”

“But there wasn’t. She finally approached me to ask what I was drinking.

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