I can’t talk at all. Right this second Malcolm has officially taken my power of speech. Will there be anything left that I don’t willingly give him?

“I want to be that guy you can’t ever take out of your head, Rachel. The one you’ve been waiting for. I want you to have eyes just for me and smile just for me and a tone of voice only I will ever hear.”

I’m nodding in the dark and then I whisper, “Yes. I’ve been your girlfriend for a long time, title or no.”

He nuzzles the side of my jaw. “Does a piece of your soul belong to me?”

Oh god. My article.

I really and truly can’t speak, now, when I’m supposed to be screaming my answer. I’m a thief. If he never touches me again, I’ll have stolen the way he smells and feels right now.

He pulls me closer. “Say it,” he coaxes. “I liked your article very much. I was mad, but I know you, Rachel. I know you wrote that to me. You challenged me to come after you. I’m meeting your challenge now. You wanted to know if I’d catch you? I will. I’ve got you.

“Say it,” he demands. “Does a piece of your soul belong to me?”

His eyes are not green ice, they’re green lava.

I duck my head, and I think he can see my blush in the dark. “Yes,” I say. And somehow, that’s enough. Just one word.

He ducks his head too, in search of my lips, and now he’s the thief, stealing a kiss from me.

“Dibs,” he whispers.

TOTALLY DIBS

Cloud nine isn’t enough; there’s no number for the cloud I’m on.

At drinks on Wednesday, Gina declares, “You still have girlfriends, you know. You can’t spend all your evenings with your new boyfriend without some sort of punishment for neglecting us.”

“Fine! The drinks are on me,” I assure them.

So my friends drink and talk and try to force some information out of me. But I’m not talking. There are no words to explain what’s happening between us. No number for this cloud, no words, just him and me, and his dibs on me.

At night—if he works late, or I’m stuck on deadline and can’t come over—we talk on the phone for about two hours.

Sometimes it’s just a text, like our latest ones.

Thinking of you

Is there even a cure?

Come over

It’s 1 a.m.

Unlock your door

I’m in my first official relationship, and the girls want more details. I meet up with them on Monday. Then on Tuesday, Saint flies to New York for a day on business, and I have one more interview at the Tribune. It’s nerve-racking. When I come out, I’m close to defeated.

That Tuesday after work, I realize I’ve lost my little R necklace. I scour my room like mad, I scour Gina’s room; I even empty the vacuum cleaner. I got it from my mother for my fifteenth birthday, the only real gold item that I have.

“Oh god, I can’t even bear to tell my mother I lost my R,” I tell Gina. It’s not in my cubicle either. In any of my bags.

The next day I get a delivery.

Inside is a box, and a note.

The crew found this in The Toy. She looked pretty lonely.

M

I open the box and pull out my R necklace, and beneath it, identical to the R, is an M.

I call his cell phone.

My heart is a melted ol’ mess by the time he answers. “My necklace has a tagalong,” I tell him somberly.

“That’s right,” he chuckles.

“What’s the M for?” Though my smile hurts on my face, I make myself sound genuinely confused as I stroke my fingertips over the M’s smooth lines. “Millionaire? Motherfucker? Manwhore?”

His laugh.

I get high listening to the deep rare sound. “Little one,” he chides with mocking disappointment. “The M stands for Malcolm.”

“Oh! You. Malcolm,” I tease. “I’m glad that’s been cleared up then.”

“That’s right,” he fairly purrs, and after a moment, he sounds deathly serious too. “It also stands for mine.”

I’m not sure if he can hear the way my breath catches in my throat as it gets caught in my windpipe, but I hope to god he doesn’t. This man is cocky enough as it is. So, like it’s no big deal, like I get a thousand gifts every day, I say, “Okay. I guess I’ll try not to lose it in my boyfriend’s yacht.”

“Lose it all you want; it’ll be just as quickly replaced.”

Though he issues it as a warning, I can hear the smile in his voice too. Noticing that Sandy, in the cubicle next to mine, is staring at me with a big dopey smile, I cup the speaker a little bit and swivel my chair around, giving her my back.

“Thank you . . . Malcolm.” There’s a peaceful silence between us. The kind that’s comfortable, not the kind that you need to fill with anything at all. I stroke the M again quietly, closing my eyes when he speaks.

“I’m thinking of you, Rachel.”

My voice softens when I admit, “I’m thinking of you too.”

I’m not sure what it is about him. If his effect on me is due to his rare ability to turn me inside out with just a glance, a word, an act, or if it’s because I never lived this, not in my teens, not until now.

I just never thought you could feel such delicious intimacy while miles apart, with nothing but each other’s voices as we each hold the receiver to our ears. I imagine him at his desk, leaning back all cocky, with one of his smiles on his face—the one where his lips are curled so lightly it can barely be a smile but yet it is. I’m warm inside as I tuck the phone closer to me as we talk a little. I ask about New York and tell him how frantic I was to find my necklace. I also notice the R is perfectly polished and realized he must’ve sent it to the jewelers who made the M so that the R looks just as new.

As new as we are. Him and me.

When we hang up, I go to the bathroom and slip them out of the box, then I brush my hair aside to expose my throat. I put on the R first, and then I take the M gently out of the box and latch it around the back of my neck. The letters nestle perfectly together near that crook between my collarbones. Strange, how breathless I feel when the M falls into place. I feel like he’s kissing that spot again. Permanently.

Letting my hair fall down my back again, I stare at the girl in the mirror—she’s not lost. She looks confident and a little flushed, a little breathless and a lot happy. The necklaces—sparkly, shiny-new and double—rest at her throat, and you can see in her gray eyes—gray eyes that almost look silver, because they’re gleaming to compete with the gold at her throat—that she happens to think that R + M have never looked so damn good together.