my body burned, my legs ached
but you never came to bed, you just left me there awake
you kept me wanting-wanting-wanting like the wanting in the movies & the hymns
i want the pharaohs, but there's only men.
-neko case
***
There was also one time, back when he was drinking, when they'd all had a late night and as the other three shuffled off to go home, tools gathered, their costumes and disguises left in a heap on the coffee table, it turned out that it was just the two of them there. She was a little tipsy too—the four of them had shared a celebratory bottle of nice red wine in the back of the van on the way home while Eliot drove.
So she had decided to just get changed right there in his living room as he sat in his armchair, having yet another drink.
At first he forced himself to watch her, like looking at the sun, figuring it might be too painful and he'd turn away for fear of being blinded. But he didn't. Instead he stared, transfixed, as she dropped a gold necklace from her fingertip on the floor, kicked off those nasty patent leather five-inch heels, and turned to face him, slowly unbuttoning her shirt. Was that also black LaPerla lace under there? Knowing her it probably was.
"Woman, are you trying to kill me?" he mumbled, his voice gravelly with a combination of fear and desire, and swiped a hand over his face. He may have actually licked his lips as she padded over to him in her barefeet.
"Nate," she said, and put a hand on his shoulder (torture, certainly under anyone's standards) "if I didn't know better, I'd think you found me ugly, the way you just seem to do nothing about it when I come onto you." He shook his head, mouth open.
"No, no, no, quite the opposite. But you're drunk, Sophie," he said, patiently, but still gazing at her steadily, "so I'd be taking advantage. Besides, don't you also think it wouldn't be worth it? A few nights of passion, sure. Then one big fight, or maybe we fuck up a job? It would change the whole relationship. It would tear apart the team, put them in danger." These were the things he told himself all the time, to avoid jumping her in elevators and kissing her on the mouth first thing in the morning and all the rest of it.
One of the reasons Nate had stopped drinking after that was the way alcohol eroded the barriers between his brain and his mouth. As he finished his declaration, her face fell, and he saw it, and immediately wished he had kept his mouth shut.
"Taking advantage? Really? A few nights, Nate? You really think that?" She arched an eyebrow with exceptional skepticism. "I detect an electricity that tells me otherwise." She moved toward him. He could feel the heat coming off her skin. His mouth went dry. He flashed on a vision of himself gripping her hips and licking her cleavage, from the vee of that open shirt up to her neck and up to her ear, easing his teeth and tongue around her earlobe, diamond stud and all, for a hot second.
He could almost hear the noises she'd make if he did man-up and do that.
"Christ, Sophie," he said, his voice low and rough. A warning. He held the arm of the chair to steady himself.
"Nate," she replied, frostily, "it truly breaks my heart that you think that being with me would ruin the team and ruin our jobs. And it hurts even more that you seem to think we'd only last a few nights. After ten years, how can you believe all that?" She said this all in such a calm, serious way that the real meaning of it only hit him when she had already gotten dressed and made her way out.
"I'm afraid," he said, just before he heard her close the front door.
But if she'd really meant it, that he was full of shit with his excuses, she would have jumped him right there. Bottom line was she was scared too, and no amount of seduction moves could distract from the sheer emotional liability suspended between them.
Nate stayed up late that night and thought about what he could do to remedy his idiocy, which didn't get him too far, since he could only strategize in the split-seconds that he could think past his desire.
***
Sophie knew she'd teased him beyond normal limits on that red-wine-in-the-van night, but she was only getting back at him for what he'd put her through over all the months. And she, too, was scared of upsetting their tenuous balance, composed roughly of a third professionalism and a third sexy repartee and a third solid gold friendship. But he'd managed to turn her the fuck on without even knowing it; so the least she could do was hatch a plan to pay him back intentionally and consciously.
Some of the things that Nate did not understand: that sometimes his voice in her ear was a turn on. That his friendly hugs and his warm palm on her lower back guiding her through open doors could also be turn-ons, given the right day and time. That she wanted to kiss his face whenever he fell asleep in her presence. That when she got drunk with him, and ended up home alone, she got naked in bed and got down to business thinking about what could have happened (in bed, on the dining room table, in the bathtub) if they led simpler, more honest lives.
He didn't understand that if he neglected to shave for a couple days, she'd have to spend those days concentrating on avoiding imagining him kissing her and the stubble scraping along her neck and collarbone. She'd sit in a briefing and touch her fingertips to her neck in a daydream and snatch them away guiltily when he asked her a question. He'd sidle past her on the way to get something out of a cupboard or examine something on the monitor and she'd get hit with a wave of his scent, a specific soap and human-musk and cologne and coffee Nate-smell that never failed to make her think of all things they could not have.
He knew what he was doing, though, sometimes. Once she was reaching into a top cabinet shelf to get some more sugar for the coffee kit and he snuck up behind her, slipped his hand under her shirt and over her hip, and pressed her against the counter for a second and stepped by her and whispered "excuse me," politely in her ear. His hand left a trail of hot flushed skin on her hip. For a moment she didn't move. There had been no reason for that, either, she thought; he could have walked around the other side of the island in the kitchen.
And some things that got her going were purely ideological: she heard the recording of him talking to Blackpoole, where he says, "So what business are you in now?" and Nate's reply, the insolent tone of it, never failed to put a smile on her face: "Uh, theft," he snaps back at Blackpoole, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. She felt kinship with him when she heard him say that. It leveled their playing fields. She liked that, being his equal, competing, speaking with the same practical vocabulary. It only attracted her more.
***