THREE

Bart texted Maisie exactly four times and, through his delicate texting, he managed to get invited to her house for tea.

Maisie had two outdoor areas attached to her house that overlooked her garden. The first was her front porch. A great winding staircase led up to it. She had plants there. The second was a tiny balcony with a table and two chairs that broke off from the dining room. That was where she served him tea from an adorable little tea set. The tea itself was an orange-flavored herbal tea that Bart found flavorless and bland, but the cookies she served with it were delicious and made the occasion truly noteworthy in his mind. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been somewhere so delightfully feminine. His whole house was a man cave that just kept going the further in you went.

“Maisie, I want to ask you on a date,” he said, unsure if he was doing what Klien recommended or the exact opposite.

She glanced at him and then at everything but him. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I mean, you’re amazing. From what I know about you right now, you’re amazing. The problem is…”

“That you just broke up with your fiance?” Bart finished for her.

“I guess that’s the simple way to put it. It doesn’t feel that simple. I feel angry. I feel misused. I feel… done,” she finished with an air of finality like she had thumped a gavel down in front of her.

Bart was very much aware that even though he had been invited over for tea, it was not a meeting that met the requirements of a date in his mind. The texts that he had written implied that he wanted to pop by to see if her bruise had gone down and to make sure she really was fine. He was meeting her in person to express his romantic interest in her. It all felt very formal to him, which he liked because those formal rules made it very clear what he could and couldn’t do.

“Can I ask, did he cheat on you?” he asked in a voice almost intended to mimic a therapist.

Maisie huffed. “Not to my knowledge, though at this point, I really don’t think I would get worked up if I found out he had. I got bored. Very bored.”

She pouted her bottom lip and Bart thought the shape of her lips was a perfect cupid’s bow. He should not be thinking about how attractive she was, but the problem was that she was far more attractive to him than she had been. It was a Sunday. It had been a week since their last encounter and she was dressed in a white print dress. The most subtle of jewelry hung from her throat and the engagement ring was gone from her finger.

“What was so boring about him?” Bart questioned, getting very interested.

“Oh… everything was just about him and what would make him happy. I wasn’t even married to him and I got bored with making him happy.”

“What would make you happy?”

“Nothing,” she hedged.

He sat back. “I don’t believe you. You must want something.”

“Fine. I do,” she relented. “I want to live in this house. It belonged to my aunt and she left it to me in her will. I love being here. I’ve made a lot of changes to the garden since I got here. The inside of the house is charming. It’s full of crafts and paintings and little touches that remind me of my childhood. I used to come here for Christmas when I was little and I lived here in my late teens. The best thing is that my aunt was not a pack rat. Only the best things are here. I love it. I never want to leave.”

Bart looked over the building and the garden. It was charming in the light of day as well. He could certainly understand the allure, but if she was so charmed by what she had at home, what could he offer her?

“What about you?” she asked. “What do you want?”

“I want to take you into your bedroom and kiss you until nightfall,” he answered with a steady tone and meaningful eye contact.

She made a sound that was almost a honk as she gaped at him in surprise. “That’s brave of you to admit. You must know I’ll refuse.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I don’t know that,” he replied. “I’m not expecting anything this minute, though I would like it. I’m just trying to stir you up. You might be able to feel something beyond boredom with a different man.”

She ran her hand under her nose as if to scratch it and a long line of red blood coated three-quarters of her index finger.

“You’re bleeding,” he observed, tugging a napkin free from the stand and wiping her hand.

She got a second one and blotted at her nose. “I’m sorry. How embarrassing! You’re not turned off by blood, are you?” She gave a dark little chuckle through the paper napkin.

He grimaced his answer as if to say it would take more than a bloody nose to get rid of him.

She swallowed. “Sorry… I’m just trying to think back to the days when I was dating before I was supposed to get married.” She turned away and treated her bloody nose. When she was sure she had stopped the bleeding, she turned back to him.

Examining his face like she had never seen him before, she stopped and sized him up.

Bart knew what he looked like. He had good lines that made up his body, particularly through his collarbone and side. More than anything, he knew he was better looking than the fiance she had dumped. He felt like a star.

Too bad for him, she still looked bored. She took a sip of her tea and coldly asked, “So, would I see you tomorrow if I let you throw me down on my bedspread?”

“I would never leave,” he replied with an easy confidence. Every motion of hers, every move, every word was getting him more and more excited. She wasn’t going to be easy, which made his interest peak.

Unfortunately for him, he didn’t know that he had actually replied the worst way he could have. The question had been a trap. There hadn’t been a right way to answer it, but the way he had chosen to answer it had obviously rubbed Maisie particularly wrong.

He expected her to offer him a scathing reply, except that her nose started bleeding again, dripping in a line down her lips to her chin in one second flat.

“This isn’t a good day for this,” she said, dabbing at her nose again. “Please allow me to speak for myself. I am not interested in a one-night stand. If that’s your regular entertainment…”

“It’s not,” he insisted.

“If something like that is your regular amusement,” she continued like he hadn’t spoken, “then please, do not contact me again. I’m not interested in being anyone’s entertainment. I thought I had already explained to you that I left my last relationship because I hadn’t enjoyed satisfying someone else’s desires continuously. I certainly do not exist to satisfy yours.”

“Relax,” he interjected with a casual shrug. “All romantic relationships eventually lead to sex. You are an adult, after all. It’s perfectly fine if you don’t want to begin that way.”

“You mentioned a date? You want to begin that way?”

“Yes, but I also wanted to let you know the nature of my interest in you. I do not want to be mistaken as a friend.”

“That’s too bad. I’d like to have a friend,” she said, holding the tissue to her nose. “Sorry. I can’t get the blood to stop.” She removed herself from her seat and hurried to the bathroom where Bart could hear her blow her nose violently.

When she returned, he asked her, “Does that help?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you bleeding because of last week’s head injury?”

She shrugged noncommittally and left the air between them empty of words.

“I’m sorry. Was what you said earlier a no for a date?”

She nodded. “I really don’t want to date anyone right now.”

“I see… you’re tired of dating. What part of it is tiring you out? Dressing up? It can’t be that. You’re dressed up right now.”

The sigh that escaped Maisie’s lips showed inner exhaustion to the bone. “Expectations! If I go on a date with you, what will you expect? A kiss on the doorstep? An invitation inside? I am absolutely not having sex with you. It is ridiculous and obscene to risk having a child for the fun of casual dating. If you date me for weeks or months… one day you’ll just be like, ‘Enough games, Maisie. I told you what I came for, now give it to me.' I’d rather you walked out right now.”

Any excitement that had been brewing inside Bart abruptly died. A vision of Maisie getting knocked up suddenly entered his mind and he didn’t like it one bit. Though he would have died rather than admit it to his driver, Klein, Bart did not sleep with the two-week girls. That was generally the reason they were so upset when Klein drove them home. They had never expected a life-long love affair with Bart. They had expected a one-night-stand or, as icing on the cake, a two-week seduction, ending with a weekend of sex. When Bart admitted he didn’t like them well enough to go to bed with them, they were more humiliated than they would have been if he had slept with them on the first night.

He had foolishly thought he could treat Maisie the same way he treated them, which was to say, he often dropped a sexual innuendo of the same calibur on the two-week girls. It heightened the excitement… until he casually dropped that he had changed his mind on the last day. Maisie wasn’t like those girls and he had been a fool to treat her like one.

“Okay. I see I made a grave error in saying that all relationships lead to sex. Obviously, the ones that end don’t. It was not meant to put any pressure on you. It’s my habit to say things like that around women I like in order to establish myself and stay out of the friend zone. You haven’t dated in a while, but I’m sure you remember how the game normally works?”

She took a doubtful sip of tea. “That seems like a harder way of playing than I remember.”

“May I begin again? Just this once?” he asked tactfully.

Maisie nodded hesitantly.