All the Things We Need Read online

  “You want to date.” I said it flatly. “Not just fuck?”

  He was silent for a moment or so. “What do you want, Elise?”

  “I told you what I wanted.” I shrugged.

  He took my hand again. We sat like that for another long minute, until finally I leaned to offer my mouth to him. He kissed me.

  “You can be soft with me,” he said.

  CHAPTER 28

  Niall did ask me out on a real, honest-to-goodness date, and I did agree to go. He picked me up at my house and everything. Brought a bouquet of flowers, daisies and some kind of purple blooms I didn’t recognize but loved at once. We had dinner and drinks and then saw a movie, and he took me home to drop me off with a kiss at the front door.

  And oh, what a kiss. Open mouths, tongues dancing, his hands in my hair, on my hips, his body pushing mine against the front door until I pushed him back a little.

  “People in this neighborhood are nosy. You want to come inside?” I asked, my mouth already filled with the memory of his flavor.

  Niall gave me a solemn look, then a sly grin as he surreptitiously adjusted the front of his pants. “Not on the first date.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I took a step back at his expression. “You’re serious!”

  “I took you on a date, a real date. The rest of it will happen when it happens.”

  He sounded so serene about it that I had to stop and think. Hard. There was something incredibly appealing about the idea, of letting go and going with the flow. Appealing and scary.

  “That’s very philosophical,” I said.

  He grinned. “What can I say, I’m a deep thinker.”

  “You’re really not going to come inside. For real.”

  He shook his head, the grin getting bigger. “Nope. Not unless you want to order me to.”

  He was testing me, and I knew it. Stubbornly, I put my hands on my hips and narrowed my eyes, trying to figure him out. “You do realize we’ve already seen each other like, almost naked.”

  Niall nodded. “Oh, yeah. I remember. Believe me. I couldn’t forget if I tried.”

  “Why would you want to try?”

  “Good point.” Niall took a step back, off my concrete front porch. “I’ll call you.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “Weirdo. Maybe I don’t want you to call me again. You didn’t even ask if I had a good time.”

  “You had a good time,” Niall told me, and with a grin and a wave, went back to his car.

  Damn him, he was right. The night had been fantastic. We’d discovered we liked the same television shows, music, books. We ordered the same dessert, until he decided at the last minute to go for what would’ve been my second choice also, so we could both share. As far as dates went, aside from not getting laid at the end of it, it had been the best I’d had in…well, honestly, maybe the best date I’d ever had.

  When I got out of the shower, I found a missed call from him. In bed, snuggled into my pillows, I clutched the phone to my chest for a moment before calling him back. “Hi.”

  “I wanted to say good-night,” Niall said. “What are you doing?”

  “I just got into bed. What are you doing?”

  “Same,” he said. “What are you wearing?”

  “A smile.”

  He groaned. “You’re killing me.”

  “Don’t ask if you don’t want to know the answer.”

  He was silent for a few seconds. “So…”

  “So,” I answered.

  “I had a really good time tonight,” Niall said.

  I smiled. “I know you did.”

  “We’ll have to do it again soon.” He paused. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Blissfully, I have no plans. How about you?”

  “I have to run some errands in the morning. Then I thought I’d hit the gym. But later, if you want, we could go bowling,” Niall said.

  “Bowling?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Bowling. What, you don’t bowl?”

  “I haven’t been bowling in…well. God. Since high school, maybe? Wow.” I tried to remember the last time I’d been to a bowling alley and had a vague memory of stinky shoes and loud music.

  “So, you wanna go?”

  I hmmm’d. “Yes. Okay.”

  “Great. I’ll pick you up at six,” Niall said.

  We disconnected, and I put my phone onto its charging dock. And though I lay awake for a long time, fighting my usual insomnia and counting backward from a hundred, I didn’t pick it up again. I wasn’t even tempted to send George a late-night text.

  For the first time in a long time, I had nothing I wanted to tell him.

  CHAPTER 29

  You know how it is when you first meet someone, and everything they do is amazing and wonderful, and you can’t get enough? But eventually, something annoys you. The way they chew, maybe. Or that they’re always late because they can’t make up their mind what to wear, or they don’t like your favorite perfume, or they tell you they don’t see the point of tattoos when they know very well you have several. Slowly, little hurts here and there, over and over, until eventually you can barely remember why you ever liked each other in the first place.

  I kept waiting for something like that to happen with Niall, but nothing did. Instead, the weeks passed, and we moved along as though we’d known each other forever, yet we were still brand-new to each other every time we talked. The butterflies didn’t go away. My heart leaped every time my phone rang and his name showed up on the screen.

  Being with him was easy. Talking to him was easy. I never had to repeat myself to explain what I meant. If he asked me a question, and he did, lots of them, he listened to the answer and actually retained the information for like, longer than a day. He took me out for dinner on my birthday and bought me a card, and I didn’t even have to hint around for the week beforehand that I would be turning thirty-four. I’d never known a man who did that. Even my brother had been known to forget to wish me a happy birthday, and we freaking shared it.

  A month isn’t such a long time unless you’re falling in love, and then it can feel like four years instead of four weeks. I wasn’t sure what I felt for Niall was love. It wasn’t the same as I’d felt for anyone before, I knew that much. The more I learned about him, the more I wanted to know. Being with Niall was easy, but it was also strange because it was so effortless. It scared me shitless, you know, how simple it was to be with him. It was good, enjoying his company.

  That terrified me.

  I couldn’t ignore how casually he took my hand when we walked, his fingers stroking the inside of my palm every now and then to send shivers up and down and all through me. How he let his toes nudge mine beneath the table, or his fingers trail along my shoulder blades and the back of my neck when he got up to use the restroom and came back. And how he kissed me, all the time. Hello, goodbye, randomly at any time I found myself tucked up against him, his mouth on mine. Sometimes quick, sometimes lingering, his kisses never failed to make my heart beat faster. We spent hours on his couch making out, like in high school, before I’d started having sex, only not like in high school, I knew exactly what I was missing out on. Hands roaming, hair getting mussed, he’d kiss me until my mouth felt puffy, my lips a little chapped. I kept my hands on the outside of his clothes, waiting for him to beg me to touch him, but he didn’t. And I let him drift his fingers beneath my clothes without ever urging him to go farther. Waiting, waiting to see what Niall would do all on his own, to see which one of us could hold out the longest. There were nights I left his house on legs so shaky it was a trick getting upright to the car, my panties soaked with my arousal. I hadn’t been so turned on without getting release in…well, ever.

  I couldn’t stand it, and I couldn’t get enough, delirious with anti
cipation. Tease and denial, only which one of us was doing the teasing and which the denying? Four weeks of that and nothing more.

  No wonder I was losing my mind, just a little.

  I’d become accustomed to negotiation. Laying it all out—expectations, desires, safe words, hard lines. I’d forgotten what it was like to simply allow a relationship to grow naturally, without intervention or force or struggle.

  I should’ve just taken him, right? Because that’s what dommes do. They take what they want. Demand and command. Maybe that was what he was waiting for. Well, that can be fun, for sure, and I wouldn’t even try to pretend I don’t like getting what I want, how I want it and when. But I’d also meant what I’d said to Niall. That maybe in porn or for other people it was all about the sharp edges or being fierce. I wanted to be able to be soft.

  And because he didn’t beg me, because he didn’t force, Niall was giving me that.

  We’d spent the day wandering the farmers’ markets and quilt shops of Southern Lancaster County. Amish Country. Why? Because I’d mentioned earlier in the week that although I’d lived in the area my entire life and that my mother still lived in Lancaster, I’d never done any of the touristy stuff.

  Niall took me on a buggy ride driven by a young Amish man without a beard, who wore an awesome, flat-brimmed straw hat that Niall tried to buy off him. The kid laughed and shook his head at the foolishness of us “English” and directed us to his aunt’s shop. She sold quilts and canned jars of pickles as well as hats. Niall bought me a bonnet, and because the sun was bright, I wore it. I took a picture of us in our hats and made it the background of my phone.

  This was…maybe not love, but something close to it, all right. Ooey-gooey, mushy, gooshy more-than-like. And I was all up in it.

  “Hey, you want a whoopie pie?” Niall was already plucking up a few of the local treats and putting them into the quaint straw shopping basket.

  They looked homemade, which was great, except that I couldn’t find any ingredients. I shook my head. “I’d better not.”

  He looked confused. “No? How come? They’re delicious.”

  “Probably made with lard.” At his even more confused look, I laughed and said, “I don’t eat anything made from a pig.”

  “Oh. Right. Right?” He looked at the whoopie pies. “These have pig in them?”

  “They might.” I took a jar of pickled red beet eggs from the shelf and put that in his basket, instead. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t have one.”

  “Nah. Not if it has pig in it.” Niall shook his head and kissed me right there in the middle of the aisle. Two little Amish girls in matching dresses, their hair in braids, giggled.

  It was a great day, and I didn’t want to ruin it, but I was ten minutes from my mother’s house by the time we’d done everything Niall had planned for the day. When I asked him if he’d mind stopping by, he laughed and shook his head. I laughed, too, but without much humor.

  “You’re taking me home to meet Mom?” he asked.

  “You’ve met her already. You know what you’re getting into. I just thought it would be nice of me.” I made a face. “She’s kind of a pain in the ass, but…she’s alone.”

  Niall reached across the center console to take my hand. “Yeah. I get it. My mom’s alone, too, which is why I feel like I have to spend so much time doing stuff for her. I keep trying to get her to move closer, but she says she’s been in her house for forty years, and she’s not about to leave it. I know she’d be fine, she’s capable of doing stuff for herself, but since I’m an only child and she lost my dad…”

  “You like to make sure she’s taken care of.” He was talking about his mother. I was thinking of how he acted with me. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I like that about you.”

  He looked pleased. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I leaned to kiss him. “You’re a good man.”

  So we went to see my mother, who opened the door and scolded me for not calling her first so she could put on something other than her housedress. Never mind that my mother’s housedress came complete with matching earrings, bracelet and shoes, or that she was expertly made up even for an afternoon alone at home. She offered us both coffee cake, though, which meant she wasn’t too pissed off. When my mother is really mad, she withholds food.

  “So, he’s very nice,” she said in a low voice when Niall excused himself to use the restroom. “He works with Evan, no?”

  “Yep. He was at the Bar Mitzvah. You met him there.”

  “I thought he looked familiar. I knew it. He’s the one who forgot to wear a yarmulke.”

  I had no idea if that were true, but I sighed. “Could be.”

  “He’s not Jewish,” my mother said.

  “No, Ma. He’s not.”

  “Well,” she said with a sigh and a wave of her hand as she lit a cigarette. “I tried to set you up with Myra Goldberg’s son who’s a doctor, but you’re going to do what you do.”

  “You just said he was very nice!” I reached for one of her cigarettes, but she slapped my hand. I didn’t really want one. I was just seeing what she’d do.

  “He can be very nice all he wants.”

  I rolled my eyes. “We’re just dating. We’re not even serious.”

  “You brought him over to meet me,” my mother said. “That’s pretty serious.”

  “He’s already met you. I figured you couldn’t scare him off.” I used my fingertip to press a few moist crumbs into my mouth then glanced at my mother, who had a weird expression. “What?”

  “So, he’s into…?”

  I blinked. “Oh, Ma. Jesus. When are you going to just not ask me that stuff? You don’t really want to know, and it’s not your business, and it’s really awkward!”

  “Your father had a foot thing,” she said suddenly, sitting up straight in her chair as if someone had shoved a broomstick up the back of her dress. “Painted toes. Peep-toe pumps.”

  “Ma. No. Please don’t.” I shook my head, laughing in horror, praying that Niall would not walk back into the kitchen and overhear any of this mess.

  “I’m just saying that I think you get it from his side of the family.”

  “I didn’t get anything. God.” I face palmed. “Sexual preferences are not a disease. If you want to know, it started watching Wonder Woman, okay? She had those really cool lassos, and she always tied up the cute boys.”

  “So it’s not something I did?”

  I thought she was kidding. She had to be, right? But when I looked at her, I could see that my mother was totally serious.

  “No, Ma,” I said gently. “You screwed me up in a lot of other ways, but not that way.”

  “Thank God!”

  Niall appeared in the doorway, pausing at the sound of my mother’s heartfelt prayer. He gave me a look. I shook my head a little.

  “But you’re still taking those pictures,” my mother began.

  “That’s our cue to get out of here,” I told her and stood. “Thanks for the cake. We’re going to get going.”

  “It was nice to see you again, Mrs. Klein. The cake was great.”

  My mother sniffed, but I could see his compliment made her happy. At the front door she suffered a hug from me and said into my ear, “If he likes cake, maybe he’d like being Jewish, no?”

  “That has nothing to do with anything,” I said through a clench-jawed smile into her ear so he wouldn’t overhear.

  “You could mention it to him.”

  I didn’t answer that, and when we got into Niall’s car, I groaned and buried my face in my hands for a moment while he laughed and squeezed my shoulder. I looked at him. He shrugged.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It could’ve been worse, I guess.”

  Niall turned on the radio and didn’t say much after that. I tried a fe
w times to start a conversation, but he seemed distracted. I contented myself with scrolling through my phone. I don’t like it when I want to be quiet and someone tries to talk to me, so I let him be silent. The weather was so great I put the windows down, and it only took me two horrible sing-alongs with current pop tunes for me to understand something I hadn’t before.

  I was happy.

  Really, for the first time since things ended with George, I was well and truly content. I had a good job. Good friends. And there was Niall, who’d come out of nowhere and made me laugh, made me think and who always, always seemed to know exactly what I needed.

  I sent Alicia a quick text, just a hey, girl. She replied quickly, and we texted back and forth for a few minutes. She was with Jay, she said. They’d been picking out throw pillows for their new couch.

  My fingers flew over the phone’s touch pad, getting all the news from her about their new apartment. Things were getting serious. I shot a glance toward Niall, wondering if I should tell her about him.

  Were things with us getting serious, too?

  In my driveway, still sitting in the car, he kissed me. Gently at first, but like a match on dry leaves, within seconds we were both openmouthed. Tongues sliding. Our teeth clashed, and he sat back.

  “I should get going,” he said.

  I licked my lips, tasting him. “Yeah. If you want to.”

  “This is insane.” He leaned to breathe against my lips. His other hand went behind my neck to cup the back of my skull. His fingers dug into me there. “You make me crazy. You know that?”

  I opened my mouth, inviting him back in. I took his hand and slid it between my thighs, under the hem of my summer dress. His fingertips stroked my bare skin as I kissed him. Light touches. The scratch of his fingernails. I shifted, pressing his hand higher, higher.

  “Touch me, Niall.”

  He kissed me hard enough to take my breath away. Then he pulled away enough to look into my eyes. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but he didn’t seem to find it because he sat back again in his seat.