Maelstrom

Chapter 48: Background Check

My eyes widened. Seriously? No, no, no. He was so perfect, I thought. I searched his fierce blue eyes for a twinkle, a twitch, a crinkling about the edges that would show he was kidding, but there was nothing like that. He looked totally serious. No, no, NO! Could he actually be one of those Capital "D"/small "s" people ...

"Are you?" I asked, round-eyed.

"No," his expression melted as he kissed me playfully on the nose. "I just wanted to see what you'd say if I asked."

I slapped his shoulder, and he got up with a grin to answer the kettle's whistling complaint. Damn, he was a good liar, I thought; maybe even as good as I was.

"There are a lot of things I want to do to you, Lex," he told me as he poured the water into my mug to steep. "But bruising you is not one of them." He turned off the coffee machine and poured himself a tiny cup of bitter pitch, then brought both drinks over to the sofa. He started to hand me the larger mug but drew back.

"Hmm. I should have asked ..."

"Plain, yes," I assured him. I wrapped my hands around the steaming beverage as he settled into the opposite corner of the sofa and extended his legs. I carefully set the mug on the coffee table and stretched my legs onto the sofa in the opposite direction.

Ivan leaned forward and grabbed one of my ankles to pull me down a little. He wrapped a hand warmed by his coffee cup around my cold foot and rubbed absently with his thumb. "Anything else verboten?" he asked.

I thought hard, though that was increasingly difficult with him touching me. "Let's see ... no meat, no dairy, no coffee, no smoking, no unscreened sun, no padlocked adult playrooms ..." Ivan grinned. "Other than that ... well, no religion or people trying to convert me to one, but I guess that's about it."

Ivan took a cautious sip of his espresso and set it down absently. He brought his other hand to my foot, pulled it into his lap, and began massaging in earnest. "That's not exactly shocking," he said. "You never believed, or this is a recent development?"

I shrugged, enjoying the feel of his capable hands kneading my flesh. "I guess for most of my life I was comfortably agnostic, but I stopped wondering if a god existed about halfway through college."

"Was that when your parents died?"

I stilled. I had forgotten again how dangerous this was, he was. Ivan was far too astute to play this emotional hide-and-seek with him. He could somehow bring a conversation around so naturally to where he wanted it, without me ever seeing it coming. Lying to him about anything more than I absolutely had to would not only make me feel violently queasy, it would probably be unfathomably stupid as well.

"Yes," I answered finally.

"Car accident?" he guessed. "Plane crash?"

"Home invasion," I corrected him. My face darkened as I remembered. Ivan said nothing, just kept rubbing my foot in his warm, sure hands.

"This isn't exactly a 'first date' story," I observed, shying away from such a deeply personal memory.

"This doesn't feel exactly like a first date," he responded. "At least, not one that I've ever had."

My smile appeared before I could think. This was like nothing I'd ever had. There was so much I was going to have to keep from him if I wanted this to continue – and I knew now that I wanted this to continue more than I'd ever wanted anything – so I should share with him every part of me that wasn't also a part of the NYPD. My parents, and their deaths, were too important, too formative, for me to hide that, too.