3

Parker

The next week…

I crash into my apartment Thursday night just after nine armed with a quart of fury, three pounds of hopelessness, and a box of organic cheesecake. That’s the absolute last time I try online dating. Yes, yes, I said the same thing after the clown incident, but I mean it this time. The jackass is lucky a broken nose is all he has—if my brothers had been there, he’d be missing a few fingers and viewing the world through the slit in his butt cheeks.

And I left work early for this shit.

I’d psyched myself up into almost believing I could go to my reunion alone when my mother texted the news that Randy’s bringing his new wife. And because she’s my mother, she sent a picture. And because the universe hates me, Randy’s wife is smokin’ hot, he’s turned out not half-bad himself, and she’s probably an experimental physicist who volunteers with pet shelters and runs a charity providing medical supplies to war-ravaged third-world nations in her spare time.

Part of me hopes that he, too, is staging a date to look like he has his life together, but getting married?

No way.

Randy Pickle officially has a better life than me, and since he’s refused all formal requests from Crunchy for meetings about a partnership and expansion into organic beer with his Pickle Hops, I have to go to my reunion.

Apparently alone.

As it has every night this week, walking into my apartment reminds me that Tarzan hasn’t called.

I have a leopard-print throw decorating my simple ivory couch. Zebra art on the walls. Wooden elephant end tables.

I’ve seen The Lion King on Broadway every Christmas for the last eight years. It’s my annual present to myself. Since my promotion, I’ve started a little nest egg to go on a safari one day.

I didn’t even have to see Tarzan to know I was going to bid on him last weekend. The stupid ad on Facebook caught my eye—Superhero bachelor auction featuring Captain America, Spider-Man, and Tarzan!—and I was there. Yes, he was so hot the sun has to wear shades to look at him. His smile could steal a thousand virginities and his dancing suggested he actually knew how to get a woman off in bed.

Honestly? All that’s just the loincloth on the Tarzan cake, if you’ll pardon the horrible expression.

What really has me hooked is his blog.

I don’t read romance novels—I don’t have much time to read, period—but I’ve been following his blog and his Facebook page for the last two weeks, and there’s something about his passion for reading and love and happy-ever-after that’s intoxicating. Stimulating. Exciting.

And arousing.

I toss my bag by the door, flip the locks, shove the cheesecake in the fridge, and head to my postage-stamp bedroom, peeling off my blouse and jeans as I go. They join the scattered laundry on the skinny path between my double bed and the bathroom door, along with my shoes, bra, and panties.

I don’t need cheesecake.

I need something more.

I twist the antique porcelain handles over the ancient cast-iron tub, let my hair down, and step under the warm shower, and wish I could get a do-over.

That I’d bid higher at the auction. That Lila Valentine hadn’t shown up and won him. That, afterwards, I hadn’t blurted out all those horrible high school memories. That despite putting on a good show at work and with my best friends, I wasn’t still socially awkward.

That he hadn’t been both gorgeous and kind, or that there’d been some flare of attraction lingering in his olive-green eyes.

That I didn’t have to freaking buy a guy to go with me to my reunion.

The water cascades around me, and the memory of his smile when I stopped him in that lobby makes me sigh. Oh, that smile. That I see you smile. With that little bit of I know you want me, but not so much that he was insufferably arrogant.

How could he be? Any other Tarzan would’ve picked “Welcome to the Jungle” for dancing music, but he’d gone with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

A total goofball choice that he’d thrown himself completely into. Which matches his online presence, and which makes me want to know what else he thinks is funny.

I close my eyes while the water sluices over my skin, and I breathe in the soft milk-and-honey scent of my soap. The lather makes my hands slick as I rub bubbles over my breasts.

Not for the first time this week, I tell myself that if I ran the world, the reward for social awkwardness, horrible dates with the wrong men, and having to face exes would be hot, sweaty jungle sex. Which I assume would be earth-shattering.

No, scratch that.

Which would be earth-shattering. No assumptions if I’m running the world.

And if I ran the world, sexy jungle studmuffins would fall madly, desperately in love with book-smart but sexually-insecure world rulers, and they’d prostrate themselves at my feet and beg for a chance to be the one to prove to me that their thick, hard, throbbing loins held the magic elixir of transcendent orgasms.

They’d line up in my jungle palace, groups of them, dozens of them, hundreds of them, all desperate to pleasure me until I’m a boneless, helpless jellyfish of ecstasy. But they can’t touch me until they dance for me.

I flick my thumbs over my nipples and imagine a thousand sculpted jungle men, short, tall, lean, stocky, dark, pale—all of them sporting eight-packs, all of them packing heat in their loincloths, all of them begging to touch me, thrusting their hips in seductive rhythms, making promises with their bulging loinfruit that every last one of them could fulfill.

Dancing and grinding and pleading for the chance to suckle my breasts. To slip their fingers between my legs. To feast on my pussy until they drown. To be the one man whose magic peen can cure me of my fatal case of personal ineptitude.

But there would only be one.

One whose piercing gaze would penetrate my soul so deep, I’d feel it in the pit of my womb.

His hips would sway, and my hips—two sizes smaller in this fantasy—would sway in rhythm. He’d run his strong jungle hands down my bare sides, skin on skin, to stroke my hips, down around to my ass, and we’d move as one, his eyes glazed over with lust as he takes in my skimpy leopard-print bra and matching loincloth.

While all the other jungle men watch.

My clit is aching, my breasts tight, my breath short and choppy in the hot shower. I should stop. No good is coming of this fantasy.

No lasting good.

But, god, in this fantasy, I’m bold and confident and sexy with me, not just when I’m with my friends or at work. He’s making me bold and confident and sexy. His hands on me, with those long fingers, his short, clean fingernails, his solid knuckles, the tendons stretching to his thick, bony wrist. The way he pinches my nipples and cups my breasts in his palms. The wet stroke of his tongue around my areola, which is also two sizes smaller in this fantasy. The sound of his aroused voice whispering all the naughty things he wants to do to me in the jungle, here in the shower, in my bed after, in the kitchen, up on the roof…

While I rub my nipple with my left hand, my right snakes down my belly and between my legs. I’ll bet his fingers are rough from all that swinging he does through the trees. I picture myself licking the ridges of his abs as I rub my fingers at the seam of my pussy, that persistent ache deep inside me coiling tighter, and oh, god, he thinks I’m beautiful. He thinks I’m sexy. He thinks I’m a fucking goddess.

I flick at my clit, imagine Tarzan kneeling between my legs, and I gasp out loud.

You’re delicious, my fantasy man tells me. You’re ruining me for other women. No one else will ever compare. I want you. I need you. I need to fuck you right now. I want you in my bed. I want to touch you and lick you and make you scream my name.

I slip two soapy fingers into my pussy and pinch my nipple harder. I’m wet and tight and slick, and I imagine Tarzan lifting me against the shower wall, spreading my legs, thrusting deep into me with his long, thick, solid cock while steam swirls around us and water sluices down his solid pecs, dribbling in the ridges of his eight-pack, his hips rocking and his cock pumping into me harder and faster and harder and yes yes YES, right there, I’m shattering and gasping and clenching around my own fingers, panting and gasping and arching into my release.

I slump against the shower wall and my small bathroom comes back into focus.

The plain white shower curtain liner. The old-fashioned ceramic knobs. The ding in the corner of the tub from that mishap I had with a wrench when the showerhead broke.

Hot water pours over my left boob, and not even the lingering satisfaction of a self-made orgasm can cover the disappointment and mortification of my dating life.

I know better than this.

Not the taking care of my own needs part—a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do—but the Tarzan part.

I need to forget he exists and go on to plan B. Which is really plan Q or R at this point.

Time to call in a favor from one of my friends.