Ally Blake - The Rules of Engagement

‘No-o-o!’ Not a date!

‘No?’ he repeated after several long beats.

Caitlyn bit her lip. Dax was a man she’d taken home from a bar. For sex. Not as some kind of Hail Mary that it might lead to something more. Her strident rejection of the word ‘date’ had given her an accidental out if that was what she wanted.

Was it what she wanted?

What she wanted was to see him again. So badly her whole body ached. The want throbbed in time with her pulse—whoomp, whoomp, whoomp—from the soles of her feet to the soft depression at the base of her throat.

Other people, people who weren’t relationship junkies, did that kind of thing all the time. Had dinner. Had sex. Didn’t get engaged to every guy they met. So long as expectations didn’t exceed reality, then nobody needed to get hurt.

‘Caitlyn?’

‘I meant no, I don’t need to call it anything.’

‘Okay.’ His voice slid deep and delicious down the phone. Her shoulders lifted in compensation for the sudden shivers running down her neck.

‘I’m working late,’ she said, ‘so how about we meet up for a drink around nine?’ There, a drink. Casual as could be. She named the bar, a fancy hole in the wall she’d glimpsed on occasion down one of Melbourne’s many cool quirky alleyways. The kind of place tourists missed, and city-workers flocked to.

‘Looking forward to it,’ Dax said, and then he was gone.

She took her phone away to find her ear hot and sore from having the phone pressed against it so hard.

‘That must have been some phone call.’

Caitlyn jumped, hand slapping against her heart. She turned to find Doug standing about three feet away.

‘I’ve never seen a woman’s ankles blush before,’ he said.

‘My ankles are doing no such thing.’

‘If you say so.’

Caitlyn couldn’t help it. She glanced at her ankles, bare between her fitted capris and her glossy high-heeled pumps, to find he wasn’t kidding. ‘Well,’ she spluttered, ‘then you clearly have a lot to learn about women.’

Doug smiled knowingly back as his eyes slid to the phone she had clasped hard in her sweaty little palm. ‘So it seems.’

‘Oh, go suck a squeegee.’

Doug’s laughter rang through the lofty room while Caitlyn spun away and headed back to the lift before she started laughing too, her high heels all but dancing on the concrete floor.

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