LOVE AT FIRST DATE

Chapter 2: Her Shock

After she finished brushing her teeth, Michelle devoted a couple of minutes to robotically tidying up the bathroom, just as she always did her own. She was impressed with the size of the room. It was twice, maybe three times, larger than the average rental's, even for a 3-bedroom/3-1/2-bath apartment.. She wondered what size the other bathrooms were, and how the bedrooms were being used.

She would snoop later.

The aroma of coffee and toast had snaked its way in from the kitchen, which meant that Tony would be calling out soon, no doubt melodramatically feigning starvation in the hopes of hurrying her up — despite his having already stuffed the equivalent of a full meal into his mouth while preparing things.

Michelle spied the battle-weary tampon box down at the end of the counter and remembered Tony's plaintiff plea to stash it somewhere safe from his view. She slid a few cabinet drawers open and closed, soon realizing she had no idea which drawers he frequently used, and which were the "safe" ones that he only rarely opened.

"Michelle!" his voice rang own from the kitchen, like clockwork. She quickly decided to stash the box, at least temporarily, in the medicine cabinet over the other sink: the one without his toothbrush hanging directly beneath it.

"Be right there!" she called, swinging open the cabinet door, then promptly taking a startled step backward. Sitting on the shelf amid all the usual products was a box of condoms staring directly at her. She felt the color drain from her face as it suddenly struck her, like a bolt of lightning, that of the several times they'd made love last night, never once had they used a condom. Stunningly enough, and even worse, the thought had never so much as crossed her mind. Nor, apparently, his.

A second bolt struck her even harder when she remembered that she herself had a couple of condoms right in her own purse, in fact. While dressing last night, she had purposely stopped everything and dug them out of her bureau drawer... just in case… because you never know… better safe than sorry… don't leave home without them… friends don't let friends—

"Michelle!"

Tony's voice rang out from the kitchen again, this time a little louder and with the assurance that she was going to find him dead on the floor from starvation (she knew him so well) if she didn't hurry it out there. Quickly jamming the tampon box inside the medicine cabinet, she decided to bring the matter up a little later on, certain that Tony wasn't going to want to engage in a serious discussion about their stunningly irresponsible, abject recklessness until after he'd had breakfast. Again.

Tony's expression transformed from feigned starvation to sincere horror upon laying eyes on Michelle's all too familiar ashen complexion. It was the same shade of ghostly white he had seen on her face last night, right before she'd commenced with her first up-chucking performance of the evening.

His first inclination was to waste no time in implementing Plan-A: rifle through her purse, take custody of her prescription pills, and run them through the garbage disposal, silver box and all, while questioning her sanity at the top of his lungs for having obviously taken another one before eating, for whatever unimaginable, inexplicable reason. It was the shoot-first-ask-questions-later protocol that Tony preferred and generally enacted, given how naturally it came to him and how well he always executed it.

But he decided to initiate Plan-B this time, instead, since Michelle, on the average, seemed to be more forthcoming with the truth when his own demeanor was calm and non-threatening; when his questions to her were courteous and professional; and when he resisted barking in her face, like a rotweiler, demanding that she come clean with him. Running himself through the process, just for his own sake, wouldn't kill him either, Tony had to admit. Patience had never been one of his finer virtues, after all, and he could always use the practice of conducting himself in a more rational, professional, cool-headed manner. Plus, the more he implemented this kinder-n-gentler approach, the better the chances were that Michelle would become used to it, and comfortable with it, and maybe even ultimately like it enough to begin responding truthfully the first time she was questioned, instead of something more like the fourteenth.

Granted, just last week his rotweiler approach had promptly and successfully elicited Jack's location out of her in a little under a minute, while Plan-B, on the other hand, had succeeded in producing nothing more than layer upon layer of lie after lie, hour after hour. But last week's circumstances had been unique and extraordinary, Tony concluded, so he wasn't convinced it was time to permanently retire his alternate, cool-headed approach just yet.

"You feeling okay?" he casually asked in an easy, quiet tone.

Or at least it was quiet on the outside. Inside, he still reserved himself the right to scream like a banshee, and was presently vowing to fire up his laptop's DVD right there in the bathroom, if it came to that. He'd already gotten himself way too jazzed up for the Guns of Navarone tonight, and would be damned if some bizarre premenstrual-puking malady was going to come between Tony Quinn, Tony Quayle, and Tony Almeida.

"Yes. Sure. I'm fine. Everything's fine," Michelle heard herself answer him, with a slight babbling quality to her voice.

"Ya sure you're sure?" he wittily double-checked, covertly taking note of how little contrast seemed to exist between her pearly white teeth and ghostly white lips.

His hands were full, so he used his foot to pull her chair a couple of inches away from the table, gesticulating for her to sit down before she fell down. Michelle knew precisely what Tony was thinking, and fearing, but he wasn't buying "fine" any more than she had expected him to. And since the truth was out of the question, at least for now, there was little else she could do at that point but smile warmly, act casually, and wait for her color to eventually return.

"You would tell me, right?" he triple-checked.

"Of course I would..."

His head cocked itself to the side. He knew better, and wondered why he'd even bothered to ask. Michelle was more than capable of snow-jobbing him, dead to his face, if her better judgment told her that the means were necessary to justify whatever important end she harbored in her head.

Tony sat down across from her, stealing a clandestine glance from his new perch. Normally, he reminded himself, she was pretty pale-white to begin with, so maybe it was just the way the light was hitting her. But his gut said no, and he always listened to his gut, so he decided not to eliminate the possibility that she'd indeed taken another pill on an empty stomach; nor the possibility that he might murder her, if she had.

"If you're getting sick again, you can tell me, y'know," he bargained in a purely professional manner.

"Everything's fine. Really," she lied through her teeth with a warm, reassuring smile.

The truth was, she was far from fine; she felt downright traumatized, although not even precisely sure why. She knew that the chances were next to nil that a mini-Almeida was on the way. She also knew that Tony was "safe" — or at least he was a week ago, according to the lab results of his policy-mandated HIV test, taken every month by active-ready agents and operatives, for whom blood exposure in the field was a routine part of the job. Michelle had even seen his test result with her own eyes when she'd fished it out of his wastepaper basket and pieced it back together in the ladies room.

It was the sheer recklessness of their unprotected actions that had rattled Michelle to the core, she knew. It had been just so unlike her. She was far, far from the careless, irresponsible, throw-caution-to-the-wind type. If anything, she was much more inclined to be overly cautious when it came to such high-stakes matters. And Tony had always struck her, too, as someone who might be willing to take high risks out in the field, but never in the bedroom. Evidently she had misjudged them both and didn't even really know herself, much less him, half as well as she'd thought she had.

But that was a conversation for another time, not now.

Looking across the table, and intent upon removing the deer-in-the-headlights look from his eyes, Michelle held up a piece of toast.

"I have this magic trick I'd like to perform for you, dear. Notice..." She took an oversized bite from its corner and said, through a full mouth, "See? I wouldn't be able to do this if I'd just been sick a minute ago. I wouldn't be able to do this for hours."

She was right. Tony was convinced. Plus, her invocation of the word "dear," and how naturally and comfortably it seemed to breeze from her lips, had left him at a distinct disadvantage: His concentration level had promptly plummeted by approximately sixty percent, rendering him temporarily incapable of continuing his interrogation, even if he had felt the need. The precious remaining forty percent of his focus was now evenly divided between lightly buttering another piece of toast for Michelle, and that fabulous, albeit weird, sensation he got in his throat when she'd called him that word again. It was a feeling similar to the one he got when the woman at the hair-cutting place would wash his hair right before the other woman would cut it.

He returned to taste-testing a variety of things he'd found in the refrigerator. Peering up a minute later, he could see that her coloring was definitely beginning to come back. Maybe she hadn't taken another pill after all. Maybe she had actually decided to tell him the truth right off the bat this time. Maybe there was something more to the calm, rational, professional approach than he had originally realized when he hatched the concept.

The possibility of watching Gregory Peck and the boys from a warm couch instead of a cold tile floor was fast becoming more and more conceivable by the second. He suddenly felt hopeful and positive.

"Want some coffee?" he asked.

"Nah," Michelle said with one side of her mouth filled, which forced her cheek outward, like a squirrel's, and complementing the ear on the other side of her head, which stuck out like an elf's from the weight of the curls parked behind it. "I don't think caffeine would be such a hot idea right now," she added, thinking about their upcoming sleep.

"Yeah," he agreed, getting up from the table and sauntering back from the kitchen a minute later with two glasses of milk. He laid one in front of her, not bothering to ask if she even liked milk, or was allergic to it. In his mind, it was probably the best thing for her stomach right now, after the beating it had taken last night. She understood what he was thinking and smiled up at him with another full mouth of toast, squishing her nose to thank him in lieu of speaking the words. He understood what she was saying, and petted her under her chin before returning to the other side of the table.

She watched him slather a ridiculously excessive amount of butter onto another piece of toast for himself.

"Do you know what that stuff can do to your arteries?" she quizzed him.

"If I die of a heart attack, it's not gonna be the butter that killed me, baby," he assured her in a low, seductive voice, bringing a smile to both their faces. "Do you remember your promise?" he quizzed her back.

His question caught her off-guard and she suddenly burst into laughter, quickly covering her mouth to keep the toast from falling out. Tony beamed with pride at his ability to incapacitate her like that, watching her struggle to swallow without choking and fully prepared to perform the Heimlich Maneuver, if need be.

"Hmmm?" he prompted her again, chuckling a little deeper at the sight of her eyes glistening and her nose beginning to run. Ah, the powers he possessed. He felt his chest expanding by another good inch or two.

"I know, I know," she coughed and convulsed. "If you die of a heart attack while we're making love — clean you up and dress you."

It was that image of cleaning up his corpse that Michelle couldn't quite get past without losing it; particularly since she could easily see herself doing it, not only to indulge his last wishes, but out of basic respect for his mother.

Tony's head tilted back to take in a long drink of milk, but his eyes maintained their smile and fixation on Michelle as she dabbed the dinner napkin under her eyes and nose. Her curls were everywhere, exploding from her head the way daisies exploded from the ground in the spring. He loved her curls. He was mesmerized by them. They always made him a little weak in the knees whenever he would take a moment to study them, which was often. He wished he had some daisies to give her right now, just so she'd have some semblance of an idea of how she made him feel.

Michelle hesitated before glancing over at him, fearing that the sight of his proud, testosterone-saturated smirk and puffed-up chest would set her directly off on another laughing jag. But she caught him staring fondly at her, instead, and her heart melted a little. He looked like he wanted to say something to her, but was still in the process of formulating the words. His eyes captivated her. They were deeper and darker than any she'd ever looked into before. They had the ability to assume so many different shapes and forms and levels of expressions, allowing her to read him like a book, with ease. It was true what they said about eyes: they were indeed the windows to the soul. And Tony's soul was good.

Things got quiet and they didn't speak for a couple of minutes, but that was fine. Neither felt the pressure nor need to say something just for the sake of talking. Sitting in silence felt warm and serene.

She watched his expression transform a few times, from studious, to curious, to analytical, to stumped, as he sat and chewed and contemplated. After a while, when it appeared that he had summarized his thoughts and was just about ready to share them, Michelle was surprised to see his brow suddenly knot up, and his face tighten around the edges.

"Listen, uhh… Do ya think I could ask you a personal question?" he said in a voice that was just as easy-going as before, but with a slightly pained look of confusion and uncertainty in his eyes now.

It made Michelle freeze for a moment, wondering if the whole condom conundrum had finally hit him, too, and was just about to come up for discussion. She knew that he wouldn't be any more worried about a mini-Almeida than she was. Granted, he was hopeless on the subject of feminine protection products — she had made him repeat "The blue box, not the green box" about a dozen times before letting him out of the apartment, and still he came back with the green box — but he certainly knew the fundamentals of anatomy and biology. And since he was the same guy who had just returned from his maiden tampon run, he also knew that at least their recklessness had occurred well within the safety zone.

No, it wasn't a fear of storks. Something far worse was at the root of his upcoming question. He was obviously hemming and hawing and gearing himself up to inquire into how "socially diseased" she may or may not be. And then she was going to have to endure the humiliation of informing him that he didn't have a thing in the world to worry about; that she was as safe as safe was ever going to get, since she hadn't had sex, or even so much as a second date, in eons.

"Sure. You can ask me anything," Michelle said.

Now was probably as good a time as any to get the conversation on the table and over with, since they'd probably be unconscious the entire afternoon. And she certainly wasn't going to be able to bring it up during The Guns of Navarone; of that much she was certain.

"I… uhh..." he said, pausing to claw at his cheek for a moment. "I was just thinking about something..."

"Uh-huh?" she croaked, completely forgetting to sound carefree this time.

"I was wondering, huh… Do you have to, y'know, comb your hair, or brush it, or anything, to get it all curly like that? Or does it just sort of — turn into curls? Y'know, after you wash it?"

Michelle stared at him.

"I mean... while it's drying off," he elaborated, in all earnestness, since her blank expression suggested to him that he might not have explained the wet-to-curls segment of the question sufficiently the first time around.

She felt as though the Governor had just called and granted her a temporary stay. She really hadn't been prepared to talk about last night's reckless behavior just quite yet. She felt like she wanted a little time to think about things first. The quantum mechanics of curls was much more her speed right now. My hero, she thought to herself.

"I'll tell you what..." she said, getting onto her feet and circling around the table. Tony turned sidesaddle in his chair and opened his legs so she could stand between them. His cheek gravitated to its newfound favorite position against her t-shirt as his arms wrapped themselves snuggly around her legs.

"If you'll get the shower going while I throw these things in the dishwasher, I'll assign you to shampoo detail," Michelle continued, gently scratching him behind the ear as one would a household pet, "and that way you can see for yourself how the whole thing works."

He seemed to like that plan. He certainly wasn't objecting. But he wasn't getting up to turn the shower on, either.

"In a minute," he said with a long exhale, simultaneously increasing his embrace around her legs. He wanted to hold onto her just a minute longer. "It's weird," he quietly explained to her t-shirt, "but I keep feeling like I have to touch you sometimes… to make sure."

Her t-shirt likely didn't have a clue what in the world he was talking about, but Michelle did. All morning she'd been feeling the need to touch him, too, just to make sure she was really there with him. Even while he had been out at the pharmacy, carefully selecting the wrong box of tampons, she'd found herself touching the back of his couch, to double-check that it was really his and not her own.

She gently dragged her nails around his expansive shoulders with one hand while continuing to scratch him behind his ear with her other. He seemed to love it. It reminded her of the other savage beast in her life: Fluff-Fluff, her cat, whom she soothed into a comatose state every night while reading for an hour before falling asleep.

Oh, my God! Fluff-Fluff!

It was Saturday. Michelle's housekeeper would be there by now, and had likely already checked his bowl and fed him. But Michelle made a mental note to call her anyway, just to be on the safe side. She would also ask her to drop by and feed him again in the morning, as she was sure Tony had no intention of releasing his hostage before late tomorrow night, if not Monday morning. An image suddenly entered Michelle's mind of herself seated at her workstation in a faded grey t-shirt and bare feet, but she swiftly pushed it back out.

Tony didn't seem interested in moving a muscle anytime soon. He also had a sensitive question that he apparently felt more comfortable asking her t-shirt than her.

"Are you okay to… y'know, take a shower with — those things?"

Michelle stared down at him, shaking her head in disbelief. She slowly and gently scooped a handful of his hair and tilted his head back until she saw the browns of his eyes.

"Uhh... yes, the FDA finally made them fix that feature, dear. Women no longer melt, now, when someone throws water on them."

"I think I remember reading about that," he smirked.

"Oh, by the way, that reminds me," she added wryly, tilting his head back a little further for emphasis sake. "Shower Rule. No laughing at the white string." Tony was laughing already.

"No laughing at the way water tends to shrink a man's ego," he quickly countered, reluctantly allowing Michelle to rustle him onto his feet. "Even well-endowed egos," he confidently added with a proud, exaggerated smirk and a full body stretch. Michelle shook her head again. She thought she was the one who got to decide how well endowed he was or wasn't, but he, evidently, thought otherwise.

"I'd like to meet the water that can diminish your ego for very long," she seductively one-lined him back, with a shyness in her giggle but a wickedness in her grin.

She turned away to begin gathering things from the table, but he caught her by the wrist and reeled her back in, surprising her with a deep, hard, frenzied kiss that left her feeling a little flushed and out of breath. Before releasing her, he bumped himself firmly against her, as if dotting an exclamation point that he'd just decided to add to the end of his kiss, to punctuate how exhilarated and masculine she made him feel.

"Don't be long. There's this magic trick I wanna perform for you, but it requires the aid of a lovely assistant," he zinged her back, whispering low and sinisterly into her ear.

Not that old snake-charmer line, Michelle thought to herself, watching the rookie confidentally smirk, as though he were already midway through his self-awarded victory lap. She confidently flipped through the Rolodex in her head for a one-up line with just enough juice to shut him down.

"I'll be happy to give you a hand," she buried him, with a sultriness in her voice and without missing a beat.

She wondered if he would even catch the double-entendre, rookie that he was. It had almost made her own cheeks pinken when she heard herself say it. But this was one-liner warfare, after all, and a girl had to do what a girl had to do to defend her undefeated title.

He caught it. It caused his jaw to drop open a little. After-Work-Michelle was a little friskier and naughtier than the Work-Michelle he knew. He had noticed that when she took him by surprise a couple of times the night before. He loved it, and couldn't get enough of it, but also appreciated that it would take some time before he had honed himself, like a Jedi, to anticipate it, to await it, to instinctually feel it coming, and to be better braced to protect himself from the punch to the groin it landed.

Okay, she had won that round, he conceded to her with his eyes. But also with a smirk, warning her that he'd return someday to pulverize her.

Good luck, rookie, she thought to herself, recalling the countless victories she's enjoyed over the years, popping off one-liners with her older brother, Danny, who had previously held the title until Michelle came along and learned how to talk.

Tony tried to kiss her again, but she playfully motioned him away with a head nod in the direction of the hallway, eager to get the dishes cleared and a call placed to her housekeeper.

"Hit the showers, Almeida," she dismissed him, as an exasperated high school coach would a hopeless newcomer to the team.

She briefly wondered how Fluff-Fluff and Tony would ultimately take to each other, or whether they even would. Between Fluff-Fluff's unceasing demands for her undivided attention, and the lockdown Tony had taken upon himself to place her under, Michelle decided not to hold out too much hope of an instant brotherhood formulating between them.

As she watched Tony obligingly stroll away, she wondered what devilishly attractive t-shirt he would select for her tomorrow.

"Hey, you — rookie," she called out to him, quickly reaching under her t-shirt and shimmying out of her panties. As he turned to her, she tossed them and his hand reflexively snapped them out of the air, as a lizard's tongue would do to a fly.

"Stick those in a sink with some warm soapy water, please, dear?" she smiled sweetly, sucker-punching him one final time, just in case he had any doubt as to whom the champ was, and always would be, around these parts. "If I'd known the wait at the restaurant was going to be this long, I would've packed a bag."

Tony wanted to speak, but couldn't. Nor could he breathe without reminding himself first. Nor could he barely walk at this point. And not because of his recent ankle injury, either.

He knew in his heart that he had already fallen in love with Work-Michelle, but it stunned him to find that it seemed to be happening all over again with After-Work-Michelle: this extraordinarily sensual, mischievously sexual creature whom he had only just met for the first time last night. Both women's silky ringlets were identical, but one was a kitten and the other was a lioness; one shyly blushed as the other shamelessly seduced; one was soft, girlish and gigglish, the other fiery, confident, and fearlessly forward. And both were ganging up on him to unhand him of his heart for good.

He shook his head in defeat as he hobbled down the hallway, unconsciously dabbing the sweat from his brow with the balled-up panties in his hand. The oddest image suddenly flashed in his head: He saw himself opening the tray of the DVD player and placing Michelle's movie in first. He didn't know quite what to make of it, or why he'd even had such a thought. It was pretty bizarre, and didn't even any make sense. So he swiftly pushed it out and focused on more important matters. Like, how pretty Michelle's reddish curls would probably look against his white long-sleeved Cubs t-shirt. The new one in the top right-hand drawer. The one he hadn't even had a chance to wear himself, yet.