Class Reunion (2 page)

Dana’s heart leaped.
Could it be that he still likes me? No, no. He’s just being polite. Just because we were so close once, and we’ve been e-mail buddies for years. And just because I want to be close again, just because I’ve fantasized about us being more than friends doesn’t mean...

She stopped herself from continuing her train of thought and said, “Okay. Should we go back upstairs and change?”

“Don’t see why. If they won’t let us in, we’ll go somewhere else.” That sounded like the Nicholas of old who hated dressing up.

Side by side they walked out of the hotel and across the street to Harvey’s. Dana wished he’d offer her his arm, but he didn’t.

Chapter Three

Nicholas couldn’t get over just how stunning Dana was.
She was always beautiful in my eyes, but she’s taller now, and she’s got a shape to die for. Probably has a string of men after her.
The thought of other men chasing Dana—
his
Dana—made his stomach churn.

If she were anyone else on the planet, Nicholas would know what to do
. But because it’s Dana I’ve turned into a kid with two left feet.

He was amazed that he could speak at all. Or hear, for that matter, because, along with it clogging his throat, his heart pounded loudly in his ears.

When they got to the restaurant, Nicholas glanced at the little sign that specifically said “no jeans” and shrugged as he led Dana past it. The maitre d’—who’d been a student at Aurelia High in the class ahead of theirs—came rushing up to them.

Is he going to throw us out?
Nicholas wondered for a second before the man cried, “My god, Mr. Barberis, it’s an honor to have you here.” He grabbed Nicholas’s hand and shook it violently. “Everyone will be so excited. The owner doesn’t come in until evening, but I’ll call him. I’m sure he’ll want to greet you in person.”

“Please don’t trouble him,” Nicholas said, struggling to smile and to sound pleasant. He hated being fussed over like this, and it was the last thing he would have expected in Aurelia.

Once they were seated and sipping wine while waiting for their dinner to arrive, Nicholas’s heart settled back where it belonged.

“Do you remember playing in my sandbox?” Dana asked. She leaned forward and picked up one of the little crab cakes they’d ordered as hors d’oeuvres. “You used your toy dump truck to build a house for my doll.”

Nicholas grinned. “It was really just a pile of sand.”

“We pretended it was a castle.” She smiled and slowly put the crab cake in her mouth. His breath caught and he was suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to kiss those full, luscious lips of hers. Never mind the wine, the plates of seared tuna, tiny egg rolls, and crab cakes; never mind the silverware—he wanted to lean across the table and taste those lips.

He managed to remain in his seat.

She went on, “...then my dad built the playhouse and you were nice enough to play there with me; I know the other kids teased you about that.”

“I didn’t care,” he lied. He had cared, but he’d wanted to play with her more than he cared about the put-downs.

“And you figured out how to bring electricity in there—you bought the electrical switch box and cord with your own money.”

“Used your dad’s tools.”

“Yeah,” she said, a hint of bitterness in her voice. “He left all kinds of things behind when he ran off with Mrs. Moffitt.”

“Including his game console and his computer. How lucky was that?”

She nodded and brought a little shrimp roll to her lips. Before taking a bite, she moved it away and smiled at him. “It’s good to see you.”

“Good to see you, too,” he croaked, unable to tear his gaze from her lips as she bit into the tiny appetizer. His cock stirred.

“You figured out how to use his computer and the Nintendo in no time,” she continued. “And soon we were escaping into our own online world that you’d built for us.” She put the rest of the roll in her mouth and licked her lower lip. Suddenly, outrageously, he imagined her licking his balls and then bringing that delectable mouth to his cock and—

She lowered her eyes, “Of course you had to teach me, but you never made me feel stupid.”

“You weren’t stupid.”
God, what’s happened to my voice? I’m croaking like a frog.

“Compared to you I was. You were so smart that you actually
designed
games for us to play!”

“Well you put up with all my failures and fumbles,” he said, relieved to finally hear his words come out in a normal voice.

She smiled and picked up another crab cake. “Here,” she said, “you have got to taste one of these.” They leaned across the table toward each other. His cock hardened as he carefully took the morsel from her, closing his lips for several seconds around her cool fingers. His blood ran thickly through his veins, pounded in his brain. She started. Her eyes widened and he thought he saw the gleam of desire in them.

She wants me. Oh my God, she wants me!

If she wanted him as badly as he wanted her, they’d never make it through this meal.

Speechless, they gazed at each other. The spell broke when the waiter placed their soup on the table. Nicholas shook his head, feeling the ferocious tide of lust subside into the more gentle sea of diffuse desire. Yeah, he could make it through dinner. And he could wait as long as need be afterward until she was ready. Until she wanted him as fiercely as he wanted her.

He glanced up and saw Sally McGee enter the restaurant with John Hoffman. The pair stopped when they caught sight of Dana and Nicholas, and Sally started whispering urgently into John’s ear.
Probably reminding him what a dweeb I am,
Nicholas thought. While John had never bothered him much in school, Sally had never actually acknowledged his existence, except to giggle loudly with her girlfriends when they walked past him in the halls. He half-expected her to burst into the same harsh giggles she used to. And he didn’t give a damn. Dana liked him. Dana wanted him. That’s all that mattered.

But Sally didn’t burst into vicious, snickering laughter. Instead, with John trailing behind her, she hurried over to their table, shouting, “Nick! What a nice surprise!” as everyone in the restaurant turned and stared. Nicholas came politely to his feet.

To his horror, Sally threw her arms around him, exclaiming loudly, “What a thrill it is to see you after all this time! I’ve missed you so much!” She tightened her embrace when he tried to back away. It seemed as though Sally wanted John—and everyone else in Harvey’s—to think she and Nicholas had been really good friends back in school. It was odd. And very unpleasant. He tried to step away again, but Sally held on even tighter.

Mercifully, John interrupted, “Hey give me a chance, Sal.” When she let go, John shook Nicholas’s hand enthusiastically.

“Good to see you. Glad you could make it for the reunion, we’ll have a blast right? Just like old times.”

Old times?
The old times seemed all too often to involve dumping on him. Was John actually sucking up to him? Disgusted at the thought, Nicholas barely restrained a groan.

He introduced Dana, in case they didn’t recognize her, but beyond a perfunctory “Hi, Dana,” from John and a patronizing, “My, but you’ve been on a diet at last,” from Sally, they clearly were not interested in her.

Sally, clutching his arm in a vice-like grip, began telling him about old classmates—dissing every one of them while Nicholas continued standing, aware that Dana shifted uncomfortably in her seat while their roasted three-onion soup grew cold.

Sally only stopped blabbering when Jay Bunting shouldered her aside. He clapped Nicholas on the back saying, “Barberis, my best bud.” Then he gave him a one-armed hug. “God it’s good to see you, Nick, been a long time.” He added something about Nicholas stealing his favorite girl as he gave Dana a wink. “Hey there, Dana. You’re looking good, you know?” Nicholas thought she winced.

Seemed like suddenly, horribly, he was Mr. Popularity among people who had despised him and whom he had despised in turn. Well, he did not want to spend time with these clowns; he wanted to be alone with Dana.

“Okay, you guys,” Jay said to Sally and John, “let a guy have a chance to talk with his best bud.” He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down announcing, “Me and my best bud, Nick, have a whole lot of catching up to do.”

Clearly it was time to cut and run.

“We were just leaving,” Nicholas said. Dana looked surprised but stood as he pulled back her chair. He was about to say a polite “Nice to see you” to everyone, but decided against it, seeing as it wasn’t true.

He steered Dana toward the door. They passed the waiter bringing their food and Nicholas told him they had to leave unexpectedly and stuck a few bills in the man’s pocket, asking him to take care of the bill and to keep the rest.

The man said something about the owner being on his way to which Nicholas said, “Tell him I’m real sorry I missed him.” Holding her elbow, he steered Dana out the door.

“How about we go back to the hotel and order room service, if that suits you? I don’t think the food will be as good, but at least we won’t be interrupted.”

That,” she said, smiling, “would be lovely.”

He offered her his arm, which she took. He remembered how their hands had touched back in school when they’d hung out at the Dairy Queen. Her touch as they passed the cone back and forth between them had thrilled him and caused strange, new sensations and desires to course through his adolescent body.

Now his heart beat fast and loud. When he gathered his courage and laid his hand over hers, the feel of her hand beneath his own ignited a flame in his belly. Made his cock begin to stiffen. Made him want desperately to stop right there and take her in his arms, to kiss her—

She sighed softly and he wondered—no, hoped—that perhaps she felt something too.

He was speechless all the way back to the hotel. They’d been talking so easily before, but now he was overwhelmed with all his pent-up yearning for her. He longed to explore her beautiful body, to see, to caress, to kiss and lick and—but he was determined not to show it. For an instant he’d been certain that he’d seen desire flash in her brown eyes at the restaurant, but then it had passed. Perhaps she regarded him only as an old friend, her pen pal in the flesh. He didn’t want to scare her with the ferocity of his desire for her.

We’re just going to share a meal in peace, that’s all that’s going to happen,
he told himself.

He led her to the door to his suite, fumbled with the key card though he’d used others exactly like it a hundred times, and clumsily opened the door.

Not in complete control of himself, he let go of her arm, strode over to the desk, and picked up the menu. Dana came and stood beside him. He could smell the slight fragrance of freshly washed hair and the delectable, indescribable scent that was hers—something like mown grass on a summer morning. That scent had sent him reeling when he was four years old and in the sandbox with her. It did the same thing now.

He managed to say, “How about...” and he put his finger on the menu, without having read a word of it. “This.”

“Sure,” she said, looking at the menu. “That sounds great. I love scallops.”

Uh-oh. He despised scallops. Trying to recover as quickly as possible, he moved his finger down the menu and pointed again at something. “How about...” He forced his eyes to focus. “The beef stroganoff?”

“Sounds great.” He wondered for an instant if she cared as little as he did about the food. Wondered if she was feeling...
something
for him, something like the urgent desire he felt for her. He wanted—no, he
needed
—to take her in his arms, to hold her close, to feel her breasts against his chest, to nuzzle that fair hair, to feel that beautiful body beneath his hands.

In spite of his resistance, his cock had taken control of most of his mind. He imagined Dana pulling that sweater over her head, revealing her breasts—he couldn’t quite imagine what they would look like, yet he knew when he put his hands on them they would be cool, yielding to his touch. Somehow, dazed as he was, he managed to call room service and order the food and the best champagne they had.

When he put the phone down, he tried to brush away images of Dana, face serious, stepping close to him and unbuttoning his shirt. He must stop these fantasies. He’d have a fine case of blue balls by morning.

“Let’s raid the minibar,” he managed to say, walking over to the kitchenette to open it up. “I’ll start with bourbon.” Maybe that would dull his desire.

“Same here,” she said.

“All ready for tomorrow night?” he asked, trying to keep his tone light, trying to sound normal as he emptied a small bottle into each of two glasses that stood on a small tray on the desk beside the minibar.

“Yes, I am, though I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I never made any close friends at Aurelia. Besides you.”

He stopped himself from stepping toward her and taking her in his arms although he wanted like hell to do that.

“Me neither. Except you.” He rubbed his eyes, willing himself to stop imagining Dana beneath him, smiling up at him as he plunged into her.

She considered him with those big, heavily lashed brown eyes of hers. “I did consider you my best friend.”

“And I thought you were my best friend.”

He wanted desperately to tell her that he still considered her his best friend, and that he wished that they could be much more than friends, but he held back, not wanting to risk ruining the moment. If he told her what he felt and she didn’t share his feelings, it would be too awkward, too painful.

“Did you ever take those dance lessons you were considering?” she asked, her voice light, casual.

“Just one lesson and I felt like a total klutz. Then I got so busy...”

“Well,” she said, “Let’s fix that right now. Can you get music in here somehow?”

Chapter Four

A few hours later, after they’d done serious damage to the contents of the minibar along with a good bit of the beef stroganoff and most of a bottle of Dom Perignon Rosé, Nicholas could slow-dance and execute some passable moves with fast music. For those few hours his yearning for Dana seemed manageable, though the flame of desire for her burned unabated in his belly. As they slow-danced, Dana nestled closer and closer to him, convincing him that she really did consider him to be more than a friend. Then again, he warned himself, that could just be the booze.