Uncommon Pleasure by Anne Calhoun Page A

making him feel all the things that he didn’t want to feel.
    He pulled into the parking lot of his hotel, cut the engine, and took the stairs to his room. Once inside he let the door close behind him, but just stood there, hands on hips, surveying the room. Even the light muted by the crooked lampshade didn’t hide the circular stain under the window, the scratched veneer on the dresser, the television secured to the wall with a cable, or the cigarette burns on the counter in the bathroom, but this was enough. He didn’t need anything more than fast food, a cheap place to sleep, whiskey, and sex. He didn’t need a house, or a dog, or a partnership with John, reminding him of who he used to be. He especially didn’t need a woman like Lauren liking him, beginning to depend on him, thinking about him as anything other than a great lay.
    He tossed his keys on the tiny table. The momentum carried the keys to the floor between the chair and the dresser. “Fuck,” he muttered, but let them lie there as he twisted the cap off the bottle of Jim Beam and poured two inches of liquid into a thin paper cup. This should have been simple. Most guys seemed to alienate women with very little effort. A forgotten date, a missed birthday, the suggestion that
Yes, your ass does look fat in those jeans
and they were out. The divorce rate in the military was around 80 percent, and the breakup rate before the marriage happened even higher. Most posts had a wall of shame plastered with pictures of girls back home too weak to last the deployment.
    Thinking of deployments brought Sean to mind. As far as he knew, Sean didn’t have a girlfriend waiting for him, or maybe there was a girl, but it ended early in the deployment? Either way it was over. He could do something for him, something memorable. Takehim to a strip club, get him drunk, get him laid. Women were easy to find, easy to fuck.
    But while Lauren had practically fallen in his lap, she wasn’t easy to categorize. The sex…He couldn’t just close his eyes and get lost in the sensation until the itch was scratched. He’d been thinking, aware, into it on so many levels, and the aftermath genuinely sucked. She wasn’t forgettable. The way he missed her when he walked away, when his shift didn’t coincide with her lunch hour. He didn’t want to miss her. He didn’t want to feel anything for her other than the overwhelming desire to roll her onto her back and fuck her until her legs wound tight around his hips, until she was utterly helpless under him.
    So he’d gotten in his truck with the intention of making it as clear as possible that he saw her as a sex partner, nothing else. Giving her a good reason to dismiss him, ignore him, avoid him. Thanks to the most useless, troublesome dog he’d ever know, the plan backfired.
    Sure. Blame the dog.
    He swallowed the rest of the whiskey, refilled the cup, and thought about the two people he spent the most time with these days. Sean, too reserved to hit the bar scene and find a girl for the night, and Lauren, with her storm-blue, all-seeing eyes, the bold, twenty-first-century woman so thoroughly engaged with her life.
    He could do this. He could make her walk away. She was a woman, emotional, getting attached, half blind because she kept seeing a man who didn’t exist anymore, and she was curious. That was the key, her stubborn curiosity. The next time they met on the bench, he’d turn that inquisitive curiosity against her, so she’d get gone and leave him alone. He looked around the room, at the jeans and T-shirts stuffed haphazardly in his duffel, at the travel toiletries in the bathroom, at the bottle of whiskey, and in that moment, he knew how to make her walk.

Chapter Eight
    Lauren knew an hour-long search for Gretchen hadn’t satisfied whatever need, physical or emotional, that drove Ty to her house. He’d come looking for her, for whatever reason he admitted to himself, and ended up elbow deep in garbage while he looked