This one, he declared, would be normal. No perversions, no floggers and cuffs and dark corners in clubs where the screaming was louder than the music. Just a plain, sweet romance, man and woman and a bed with clean sheets (maybe a couch if they were feeling adventurous). Before the first date he gave himself a pep talk. "You can do this, Jack, you can romance her just like a normal man. Take it slow, hand on her back but not too far down, polite and not possessive."
That was his phrase for the evening. When the bangles on her delicate wrists rang against each other and he saw himself binding her, wrapping the rope through and around them until they left marks, he said, "polite, not possessive." When he saw the brown curls touching her neck, and had a flash fantasy of closing his hand around it, he muttered "polite, not possessive," and banished the image. When she decided to walk home, he politely (insistently, not possessively) took her elbow. "You'll drive home with me," he said, "these streets are not safe after dark."
She looked up at him through her lashes, a mocking tilt to her lips, and said, "Yes, sir."
The words hit him like a punch, and he had to pause a moment to rally all of his control. He was saying it like a mantra now, "polite, polite, polite" until it lost all meaning. He dropped her off at her apartment, spun around before they could start the confusing dance of the good night kiss, and raced home.
Once home, Jack kicked himself over a glass of Tennessee whiskey. "Jack, listen to me," he said (he had picked up a bad habit of arguing with himself in ten years of living alone, for want of anyone else to argue with). "She's not in your world, and you have no right fantasizing about her that way. For all you know, she would find it creepy. So that's the end of it."
On the second date the temptation was worse. Her blunt wit stoked a deep desire to seduce the words right out of her, and he wanted to suck and bite the mocking tilt from her lips. He acted on none of this, instead bantering with her and touching her only when she first touched him.
At the end of the evening he took her again to her apartment and hovered on the doorstep waiting for her to find her keys. He didn't like the neighborhood where she lived and wasn't about to leave until he'd seen the door lock behind her. After a moment Emily gave up on the keys and looked up at him, eyes bright with some scheme. "Jack," she whispered, out of lips as tempting as apples and red as poison, "why don't you kiss me?"
Jack touched her face, gently cupped her cheek, and leaned in for a soft, open-mouthed kiss. Everything he had read women wanted men to do in a kiss – one hand on her cheek, the other on her waist, and the slow, sweet caresses of her lips. He had told himself exactly how this would go, had studied up for this moment, and executed it perfectly.
When he was done, Emily's eyebrows came together and she touched her lips pensively. "Thank you, Jack," she said, and finally found her keys and slipped inside without looking him in the eyes.
