Losing It

by Shay Violet

  But I had pried enough already.

  “I just realized, I have ice cream and meat in my trunk that aren’t going to last forever if I don’t get them home,” I said.

  I wanted to give him an opportunity to get off the hook, so to speak. Or maybe it was my own inevitable defense mechanism kicking in.

  I could watch Lucas’s delicious mouth move all night, look at the rippling of his forearms, listen to his engrossing tales. But some little part of me was trying to find a way out. Paris, the eternal virgin, couldn’t afford to let a man get too close.

  Especially a man like Lucas Tucker.

  “I have a freezer in my Airstream,” Lucas offered. “Unless I’m just boring you, in which case I apologize, and I take no offense in you needing to go.”

  “No, not at all,” I answered, too quickly, I feared. “I just didn’t want to pry into your personal life, didn’t want you to feel pressured to talk about stuff from the past that was none of my business.”

  Lucas looked at me a while, and I could almost see the scales in his mind weighing what he’d say next.

  “What the hell,” he muttered to himself. He leaned in a smidge closer to me, so he could speak softly enough that only I would hear him. “Paris, file this in the ‘socially awkward’ drawer, because I know that’s what I am, but I’m going to say it anyway and hope for the best. I’m sapiosexual. I’m guessing you know what that means, or else it probably wouldn’t apply in this scenario?”

  I did know. A sapiosexual was someone aroused by intelligence. Turned on by smart people, so to speak. I nodded my head.

  “Well, that’s me. I love brains. Smart girls are my thing. But I’m also a guy, slave to my eyes and my libido and everything that goes with it. So pretty girls also get my attention. But in the grand Venn diagram, the little crossover section of girls I’ve met who are both crazy smart, uproariously funny, and drop-dead gorgeous is tiny. Teensy tiny. Small.” He placed his thumb and index finger an eyelash apart.

  “And yet just today, this afternoon, right now, out of all the Starbucks in all the strip malls in the world, here you are.”

  This was starting to sound like to corniest come-on of all-time. But it was equally earnest and sincere, in a way only someone possessed of Lucas Tucker’s childlike vulnerability could be.

  “First of all, thank you for the flattery, deserved or otherwise,” I replied. “But if you’ve been going on a tour of schools, all over the country, you must have run into lots of smart people. And I’m on a college campus every day. There are pretty girls everywhere. I find it hard to believe that I’m some unicorn.”

  “Pretty girls,” he said, back to his regular conversational volume. “Big circle.” He held his arms up. “Smart girls. Just as big a circle. Funny girls? Significantly smaller circle. Where the three overlap?” He made a circle with his forefinger and thumb. “So, yeah, there are more than one of you out there, but not that many. Or maybe my idea of beautiful isn’t as generic as some guys. I don’t know. But you’re it, and, oh my God. I just realized, in all my insane rambling, I never even asked if you had a boyfriend. Or were married. What shade of red am I right now?”

  “Somewhere between fire engine and… the original cover of The Catcher in the Rye,” I joked. “But it’s cute. And I’m single.”

  He exhaled like a blowfish.

  “Whew. What a relief. Fantastic. I see three options. One, you move your food from the trunk into the fridge in my Airstream. Two, we go back to your place and you put it in your fridge. Three, you take your stuff home, then meet me elsewhere so we can have a drink or dinner or whatever it takes for me to spend more time with you.”

  I intentionally mulled it over for longer than I needed to, just to make him squirm. “There’s a fourth option. I thank you for the tea and go home and we call it a night.”

  He visibly deflated.

  “Kidding!” I reassured him. “A joke!”

  He wiped his brow.

  “I would love to see the inside of that spaceship you have parked outside. But how am I to know that you aren’t some sort of serial killer who’s trying to lure me to my doom? Or at the very least just get me in there to get my clothes off?”

  He looked genuinely surprised.

  “Paris, I promise, I would never…”

  I was kinda hoping you would, I wanted to say.

  “I am going to take a picture of your truck, and your trailer, and you, and send them to a friend. Just in case. Deal?”

  He rubbed his head with both hands as if to fix his hair, which was too short to need brushing anyway.

  I snapped a picture of him and sent it to my friend Savannah, working as a nanny in California:

  In case I disappear, I was last seen with this man. Lucas Tucker. I’ll send you pictures of his truck in a minute. Love ya!

  She responded instantly. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, girl!”

  “That leaves things pretty wide open, don’t you think?” I replied.

  “The only thing wide open ought the be your thighs. He’s HOT!”

  I laughed and tucked my phone into my bag.

  “Has the cavalry been notified?” he asked.

  “The cavalry, the National Guard, and even a Texas Ranger,” I responded.

  I waved goodbye to the barista and we headed to the parking lot.

  We approached his truck and trailer and I took pictures of both, including Kansas license plates on both.

  “How does Kansas play into this?” I asked.

  “Location, location, location. It’s smack dab in the middle of the country, and this is home, so it makes sense to register it as centrally as possible. I pass through once or twice a year and keep everything current. Get my mail delivered to a service there, too, but you probably knew that.”

  I nodded. I walked over to my car and gathered my groceries. My pint of Ben & Jerry’s strawberry cheesecake was soft and covered with condensation, but it would refreeze. The ground beef seemed fine.

  He was waiting with the door to his trailer open when I returned.

  I stepped inside and gasped.

  5

  I’d never been inside an Airstream trailer, so I didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t what I found.

  It had a large flat-screen television, and everything else you might expect in a high-end luxury hotel room, all crammed inside a trailer. The kitchen was small but had every modern amenity. I was also half-expecting some sort of messy college student slash bachelor pad, but the entire place sparkled, and everything was organized, neat, and tidy. There was even a set of bookshelves, filled with hardcovers, that ran low to the floor extending down the opposite wall, below the television.

  “Wow,” I managed. “This is way nicer than I thought it would be. Than I thought it could be, I mean. It’s amazing. I’ve never been inside one of these before.”

  “Madam, this is the Flying Cloud model,” he said in a faux posh British accent. “It’s all pretty much top of the line, I got it decked out as well as I could. It’s home, so I wanted it to be comfortable, but this thing is going on being seventy years old, so it needed to be modernized a bit.”

  “It’s incredible,” I said. He took my bags and put everything cold where it needed to be to keep.

  “May I?” I stood next to the couch and pointed down at it.

  “Of course. Mui casa and all that.”

  “If you’re traveling, you could do a lot worse,” I observed.

  “I’d cook more if I had more space,” he said. “And the shower isn’t like a real shower. But when I want one or need one, I just treat myself to a hotel anyway.”

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked. Where do you fuck? Is what I meant.

  “Up there,” he pointed to a small loft toward the back. “I had it customized a bit. Probably killed the resale value, but whatever.”

  He climbed the ladder to the bed and moved and pressed some buttons. A section of the metal roof retracted, revealing a window. It had
small sections that slid open with screens to keep bugs out.

  “I like seeing the stars and I like a breeze,” he said. “It’s tempered glass, totally safe.”

  I stepped up onto the ladder for a look.

  “I want one!” I declared. “This is so cool!”

  “It wasn’t cheap,” he said. “First, I had to find one, which isn’t easy. I liked the look of this model, this year. Bought it from the original owners, in Oregon. Then I had to have it shipped to a company in Wisconsin to have all the work done. It turned out better than I hoped it would. But altogether from the time I started looking for one to the time they handed me the keys and it was done was over a year.”

  “Okay, totally none of my business, although it might become my business at some point if you still want to get into FAMU, but how do you pay for all this? Are you robbing banks in each city as you travel?” I hoped I was joking.

  “Money’s not a problem,” he answered, hopping down from his bed. He walked over to the fridge and pulled out a pear and a bottle of water, offering each to me, which I declined with a smile. He sat down at his dining table and took a big bite of the fruit and had a drink.

  “Nobody knows this,” he began. “And I mean nobody, okay?”

  I feared what he was about to confess. It seemed like Mr. Perfect might be on the verge of unraveling before my very eyes.

  I nodded my head that I understood.

  “Totally on a lark, sheer luck, I got in early on Bitcoin. And I mean early. When it was less than a penny a coin. I was working construction in Juneau, trying to save up for a car. I was riding a bike back and forth to work. Sometimes clear across town. Like getting up in the middle of the night and riding two hours in the dark to a job site. And you can probably guess it gets pretty cold there.

  “I was at the library on a Sunday just surfing around on the internet, doing nothing in particular, and I stumbled on some reference to this new thing called Bitcoin. I read what I could on it, which at the time was almost nothing, and I decided to put my nest egg into it. Dumb, right? Like what kind of an idiot puts all his money into something like that?

  “Turns out it wasn’t quite so stupid after all. I cashed out a bit after a couple years, then a little more, but for the most part I left it alone and it just grew and grew and grew. I pretended it wasn’t there and just worked whatever overtime I could and saved money, ‘real’ money, while I had this ‘imaginary’ fortune sitting there. It was like having a winning lottery ticket in a frame on the wall and biding my time, but the one I had, the prize just kept getting bigger all the time.”

  I tried to do the math in my head. I didn’t know how much he started with, or even exactly what Bitcoin was worth now, but I recalled it going over $10,000 per coin, and figured if somebody had bought $300 worth when it was a third of a penny it would now be worth… yikes.

  Nine hundred million dollars? A billion? More?

  “Are you trying to figure it in your head?” he asked with a chuckle. “It’s a lot. Way more than makes any sense or than I ever deserved, but it’s a big number. Really big.”

  “Most guys would buy an island, stock it with supermodels in bikinis, and never come back,” I observed.

  “Ha. Yeah, I guess if I walked around with an ‘I’m a secret billionaire’ t-shirt on, I’d attract lots of attention.”

  My jaw wanted to drop but I fought to keep it in place.

  “But I’m picky, I guess. The stuff I told you in Starbucks? About the kind of girls I’m attracted to? All true. But now you can figure out how I bypass so many admissions offices and clerks and such. Offer to fund a scholarship or four, and you can sign up for PhD level classes if you want to. Even at a Native American college or a historically black university. May not work at PWC, though.”

  “My alma mater is always begging for money,” I said. “I’m sure they’d be happy to take your donation, even if they wouldn’t let you enroll. Besides, if a hot guy was waltzing around campus, the girls couldn’t go to class in their pajamas anymore. That’s one of the huge draws of a women’s college.”

  “Tell me one of your secrets, Paris,” Lucas said, getting up to toss the remains of his pear in the trash and slide next to me on the couch. “Since you know my best one now.”

  He had demonstrated the value of taking big risks, both with the Bitcoin story and by bringing up his sapiosexuality. The one secret germane to whatever our potential relationship might become was easy.

  “I’m a virgin.” I confessed.

  I didn’t know what to expect, as I’d never told somebody I’d known for so short a time such a personal secret (everybody who knew me well knew, but that didn’t extend to hot guys I had only met an hour ago).

  “Really?” he asked. I nodded.

  “Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that. Would you have guessed that I am, too?”

  This time my jaw really did fall open.

  6

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “You aren’t patronizing me?”

  He reached over and took my hands in his. “Paris, I grew up in a group home. I grew up with my nose buried in books, trying to avoid the world. I worked construction for years, with no car, renting a little cabin out on the edge of town with no running water.

  “Where do you think a woman, or a relationship would have fit into that picture?”

  “Yeah, but you’ve been on your college tour now for years. You’ve got tons of money. You’re… I’ll just say it, you’re hot. Why in the world wouldn’t you have been banging coeds at every stop?”

  “That’s just it,” he explained. “I’m never in one place for more than a few months. Maybe if I’d been sexually active before, it would be no big deal. But I haven’t been, and I don’t want it to be... meaningless. I want it to be special. I don’t mean bed of roses, romantic movie special, I know that’s not realistic, but I don’t want to be somebody’s one-night stand, not at this point. I’m not saying I need to wait for marriage, just that if I waited this long, into my thirties, well, I didn’t wait for nothing, you know?”

  Although the roads we’d taken were different, we’d arrived at virtually an identical place. His stance on his own virginity and potential first time was almost exactly the same as mine.

  “Makes perfect sense to me,” I said. “That’s just how I feel. Most people assume I’m super-religious and waiting for marriage or that I’m asexual or lesbian or a million other things than what I really am, which is just Paris. Paris the virgin. But not necessarily because I want to be, I’ve just built this thing up in my head by now, and it seems to have value. Like your Bitcoin. If you dumped it when it hit ten dollars, what’s the point? Quick thrill, nice little pile of cash, but then what. You waited, and now it’s a fortune.”

  “I like the way you put that,” he replied. “Perfect analogy.”

  He still held my hands in his, and his fingertips were tracing little patterns on my palms. He’d scooted closer, to where I could smell him, just a hint of whatever manly deodorant he wore and that faint musk that made him a man. His touch was making me tingle, and I pressed my thighs hard together to make it stop. Or to make it feel better. I wasn’t sure which.

  Suddenly, I needed to get home and get my little friend out of the nightstand drawer. Like, immediately.

  No, you don’t.

  My self-talk took a wicked turn.

  You need to climb on top of this magnificent man’s big dick and ride it until your first time is worth that same billion dollars as his Bitcoin.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said, lifting his left hand from its grip on mine and the back of his hand caressed my cheek like a butterfly’s wings. “But if fate or the universe or whatever you want to call it didn’t put us both in this parking lot earlier, what else would you call it?”

  “Serendipity,” I said breathlessly, my heart pounding in my chest.

  The next thing I knew, we were kissing.

  I’d been kissed before, but not like this. H
is hand slid around to the back of my head, holding me where he could have me, taste me, consume me. I clutched at his biceps and his forearms and kissed him back. The passion of the moment was overwhelming. I moaned and mewed softly into his mouth and tried to keep from trembling, which was useless.

  I could feel him shaking as well, the muscles in his arms not only rippling, but shaking. The kiss broke and we were both panting.

  We made eye contact and gasped “Wow” simultaneously.

  “That was…” we both said in unison, then we dissolved into giggling.

  We leaned into one another, half hugging and half collapsing, laughing for lack of knowing how else to express our mutual joy. And desire. Or so I hoped.

  I wiped a tear from my cheek and coughed, taking a deep breath and sitting up tall to refocus.

  He did likewise, and we sat just like that, staring into each other’s eyes intently.

  Our hands joined in front of us, our knees touching only just as we sat on the couch. I edged forward as he did, and our mouths met again, this time deeper and more slowly. It was a soulful kiss, and our hands released and moved to each other’s faces.

  There was no urgency, the kissing was wandering, meandering, exploratory. I captured his bottom lip gently between my teeth and pulled him back to me when he tried to ease back to catch his breath. His tongue darted into my mouth. We made out like teenagers, but with a passion and confidence in our bodies that only adults could muster. When one of us got going too quickly, or became too heated, the other would pull back and bring things off the boil. The control let everything build slowly and build it did.

  The temperature in the Airstream seemed to climb twenty degrees, then thirty, and I felt reason abandon me and a primal, animal side rattling its cage, demanded to be set free. A great pressure inside me threatened to burst at any moment.

  “Paris,” Lucas struggled between gasps. “I want-”

  I couldn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. Another heartbeat would be too long.

  “I do, too,” I replied as our foreheads touched gently and our eyes met again.