“Close your eyes.”
Naomi’s eyes are beautiful. Big. Brown. Doe-like. Perfect eyebrows, which furrow now in excited puzzlement. “What?” she asks.
“Close. Your. Eyes. Love.”
At the pet name, she smiles and obeys.
I’m sure we look ridiculous right now—sitting across from each other at a rickety metal table outside of Citarella’s. The table legs have snow caked to them like white moss. It’s late December in Long Island, and we’re crazy people for sitting outside.
But Naomi and I are also creatures of habit, and this is routine. When she spends the night with me, I take her to get coffee while we wait on the Long Island Rail Road to zip her back to the city.
I’m a stay-at-home writer, so I have time to kill. Naomi works two jobs in the city—she’s a tattoo artist and a part-time barista. Put her crazy hours with our near long-distance relationship (forty-five minutes one way on the LIRR is no easy feat), we have to carve out time for each other, or else we’ll never find it.
We’ve been dating for almost six months now, but the shine hasn’t worn off. I take my time admiring her with her eyes closed. She’s a bundle of faux-fur-lined navy and anticipation.
Naomi is objectively beautiful. Thick black hair so long, it falls over her breasts. Golden-brown skin. A small, button nose with a septum piercing. Wide, feminine curves.
But what’s really beautiful about her—and I mean, breathtakingly stunning—is her smile. She’s spent the latter part of her twenties rebelling against her conservative upbringing from her Iranian-American parents, and it shows with tattoos, piercings, and a fuck you swagger. She’s a badass, and I can readily admit that I’d probably lose a fight with her.
But when she smiles…every wall and hard edge she’d built up over the years come crashing down. She has this sweet, innocent, Disney-princess smile that makes my heart do a barrel roll every time I see it.
I take a small box out of my coat pocket and pass it across the table to her. “Okay. Open them.”
She does. She blinks down at the box. “What is this?”
“Merry Christmas.”
“It’s not for another two days, psycho.”
“Merry early Christmas, then.”
She squints at me and then promptly tears the top open.
She shouts and immediately closes it.
“Otto!” she says, her voice shaking with laughter. “You can’t give this to me…in public.”
I shrug. “What do you give the woman who has everything? The one thing she asks for.”
She bites her plump lip. I can see the excitement dancing in her eyes.
Even in the frosty winter weather, my blood goes hot.
About two months ago, after shagging each other’s brains out, Naomi and I lay side by side in sweat-slicked sheets and pillow-talked.
“Tell me your kinkiest fantasy,” I said.
Even in the dark, I could see her blush. “You’re going to think it’s weird.”
“I promise, I won’t.”
“Okay. Well. I have this fantasy that I’m wearing a sex toy—like one of those remote-controlled vibrators? I’m in public, and my boyfriend keeps turning it on at inconvenient moments.”
“Hot.”
She’d scrunched her nose. “You think it’s weird.”
“No, I think it’s hot.”
“It’s…the lack of control, I think, that turns me on.” Naomi reached up and tugged her fingers through my hair. “And the thought of doing that with someone I trust.”
“Are you saying you trust me?”
“Eighty-nine percent of the time.”
“I’ll take those odds.”
That was then. This is now. Now, Naomi stares at me with the eyes of an uncaged cougar.
I want to give her everything she ever wanted.
If Naomi wants expensive earrings, I’ll get them for her.
If she wants matching tattoos, I’ll grin and bear it.
And if she wants to orgasm in a room full of people, then I’m damn well going to make it happen. It doesn’t hurt that the thought makes my pants tight.
“You know me way too fucking well,” she says.
“Wear it,” I tell her. “Tonight.”
The demand in my voice makes her eyes go wide. She draws her fingertips over the top of the box, teasing it.
“Otto Stratton,” she says, her voice low and coy, “you’re a fucking bastard.”
“I know.” I get up to lean over the table and press a kiss to her mouth. Her lips are warm and soft and urging against mine. “Do you love it?”
She smiles into my kiss. “I love it.”
I grin. “Wicked.”
