CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT YOUR....

We left the club in a stretch limo, Tony driving, and headed up the West Side Highway. No, maybe it was the east side. I don't know. I was too busy kissing Ziggy.

I know. Sarah was sitting there, looking smug and watching. But I had reached some limit on my patience or my sanity or something. Do you think I had been able to keep my eyes off him while he was dancing? When every twitch of his hips and curve of his hands was so obviously aimed at driving me out of my mind?

So I was out of my mind, kissing him in front of someone he'd just met, in the back of a car with blackout windows, with no idea what I was thinking.

Well, I wasn't thinking.

I will tell you what I expected. Somehow I expected I was going to kiss him until we got wherever we were going and then he was going to leave and I was going to go and have a vicious wank in the shower.

He eventually freed his mouth from mine. "You could come upstairs, you know."

"Hm?" Words were not sinking in.

"At the hotel. Sarah, do you mind if I borrow him for tonight? I'll send him back in the morning."

"Bring him to the meeting at two o'clock," she suggested.

"Mm, that's a good idea. Earth to Daron, you all right with that?"

I absorbed that they had conspired to send me to Ziggy's bed. I made an affirmative noise against Ziggy's throat, where his sweat was salty. I'd try to remember to say thank you later.

When we got upstairs, I pressed him against the wall behind the door. Because the two minutes of acting nonchalant that the lobby and elevator had required had been almost impossible to get through. I shed my leather jacket. My palms found his hips; my lips found his ear.

"You need me," he whispered while I worked on his belt buckle with my hands.

I looked up sharply. "Don't make me regret it."

His eyes went round and he pulled my face close with an urgent hand. "That's not what I meant. It... It was just something to say. Not a threat." His thumb stroked my cheek, placating. "Don't be hard, Daron."

"Hard." My hands were in the small of his back now, against his bare skin, where they had wanted to be all night. "What do you mean?"

His voice was soft. "I can't take you angry right now."

I made myself take a breath. "I'm not angry. Just..." I didn't have a word for it. Needy, maybe, but that was what he said, and I didn't want to echo it when that was what might have made me border on angry in the first place.

"Come on." He pulled me by the hand into the room. It was different from the one he stayed in last time I was here. This one had french doors separating the bedroom from the parlor.

Don't be hard, he had said. I guess he meant except in one important sexual way. He lay me back on the bed and crawled over me. And gave himself to me like a gift.

Like a gift.

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(Another song from the parade of over-produced, bland chart-toppers of the year 1990. Sorry folks but there are going to be a whole bunch of these. I'm on a roll now. -d)