“See the Pacific Ocean,” he recites, working from the top of the list to the bottom. “Go sky-diving. Run a marathon. Sing karaoke in public. Swim with sharks.” He bursts out laughing. “This one just says roller skate at the zoo.”
“They’re not all winners.”
He keeps reading. “Learn to play the piano. Have something named after me. Kick Danny Jenkins in the shins. What the fuck did Danny Jenkins do?”
“He used to sit behind me in class, and one day he decided to cut my ponytail off with a pair of safety-scissors.”
“Want me to kick him in the shins too?”
“He’s a comedy-magician.” I shrug. “I think life kicked him in the shins.”
Jesse lays the list on the bed next to him, the soft crinkling of paper beneath his long fingers the only sign he’s stopped reading. “What are you going to do after?”
“After what?”
“After California. Which one are you going to do next?”
I make myself at home next to him on the bed. “Any suggestions?”
His cheeks split with a soft smile. “One or two.” He doesn’t go on and I’m left wondering — hoping, really — what those ideas might entail.
“You know, I was thinking,” I say with very little thought at all. “Maybe you don’t have to sleep in the chair tonight. Maybe we could, I don’t know… share the bed. I trust you.”
“I know you do.” He swings his legs up and around, crossing them at the ankles. “Despite your frequent complaints, you wouldn’t have followed me this far if you didn’t.”
“Well, technically,” I grin, “you followed me. And that’s not a complaint. If you hadn’t, you’d off on your own adventure and I’d be who knows where.”
I’m so close to him, I can smell the shampoo in his hair, the earthy scent of his skin. I take a deep breath, feeling a little heady from the aroma. “I’m glad you’re here,” I tell him. “And not just because you make me laugh and can throw a mean right hook.”
“Anyone would have done the same,” he says, gritting his teeth in Travis’s memory.
“I know,” I say. “But I didn’t get just anyone. I got you.” My hands shake with nervous energy. “I guess what I mean to say is… I’m lucky to have met you.”
I raise my eyes to his, wanting nothing more than to fall into them. He smiles at me from the corner of his mouth, his forehead crinkling in amusement, causing damp, dark strands of hair to fall across his brow.
In this moment, his face is all I know. It’s all I want to know. Any and all thoughts of my family and Andrew and the wedding are gone and the only thing left in my mind is a picture of his smile.
Tell him. Don’t tell him. Tell him. Don’t tell him. Tell him.
I don’t tell him. Instead, I do something completely unexpected.
I kiss him.
I don’t know where the idea comes from, but I can’t seem to stop myself from leaning forward and pressing my lips to his. I brush his cheek bones with tentative fingertips, until my hands are lost in a forest of his dark tresses. His mouth yields against mine, the perfect combination of want and urge, leaving a sweet, spicy taste on my lips.
A low moan echoes between us. Whether it comes from him or me, I don’t know, but I can’t seem to stop myself from throwing my legs over his hips, spurred on by little more than the sound of our desire. I straddle him, my thighs welcoming him, marveling at the feel of him hardening beneath me, his impressive length pressed against my core as I rock and writhe against him. I don’t know how my shirt ends up on the floor, or which of us pulled it over my head. I know only that his fingertips leave trails of fire as they travel the hills and valleys of my bare skin until they fist in my hair.
He cradles the back of my head in his hands, letting his lips roam freely across the horizon of my neck and shoulders, down, down, down, until they hover over my breasts, nipping lightly against the soft skin. His tongue pulses against the lace of my bra, a hungry almost feral growl rumbling in his throat as he lavishes desire on the swell of each breast like a man starved.
I tip my head back and let my hands wander blindly beneath his shirt, down the hard planes of his chest, over his stomach, memorizing each muscle and ridge until my fingers find his belt. A breath catches in my throat as they brush across buckle, the small piece of metal separating me from complete and utter bliss.
Until, suddenly, he stops.
“Don’t,” he says as his lips leaving their glorious work on my skin behind. His hands tremble as they fall to his sides.
“Why?” I ask, breathless, my lips pressed to the hard line of his jaw. I lean in, eager for another kiss, hungry for it. For touch. For passion. Hungry for something I’m not even sure has a name.
“Don’t kid around,” I murmur into his ear.
“I’m not kidding, Frances,” he says, scooping my thighs into his hands and lifting them from his lap. He sets me down beside him, his fingers leaving scorch marks in their wake. “Don’t kiss me.”
I draw back and search his eyes, hoping for some sign of teasing, some measure of a badly timed joke. A punchline I can easily forgive so long as he keeps kissing me.
I find nothing but cold detachment in his gaze.
“Don’t… kiss… you?” I repeat his words slowly, like toddler learning to read. “Don’t kiss you? You’re telling me not to kiss you?” It sounds strange to my ear. “What does that mean?”
He doesn’t look at me. He clears his throat instead and adjusts himself with as much dignity as he can muster. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“A good idea?” I bite back. “A good idea? You clearly thought it was a good idea a few days ago! Remember Kansas City? Remember when you kissed me?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly, staring at his bare toes at the foot of the be. “I remember. And it was wrong of me to do it.”
“It wasn’t wrong!” How can he think that? True, I agreed with him then, but things are different now. I’m different. “I want this, Jesse. I want… you.”
He shudders out a breath, standing and putting much needed space between us. “Frances, you have to understand that kissing you wasn’t something I planned on doing. It wasn’t some elaborate scheme. It just happened. We were both alone, probably more than either of us would care to admit, but I’m not proud of that fact. And I know we joke around and flirt, but this can’t happen again. This… this isn’t what I want.”
The odds of that being true are as good as this place turning into a five-star resort overnight. That still doesn’t make it sting any less. I rear back as though I’ve been slapped. “What if it’s what I want?” I ask.
“It’s not what you want.”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
“No, Frances, it’s not. Not like this.”
“Not like what?”
He latches his fingers behind his neck as he paces, as if his head is too heavy to hold up without support. “I don’t know! Just not like this! I don’t even know you!”
“You know me,” I tell him, thinking it’s quite possible that he knows me better than anyone ever has.
“No, I don’t,” he says. “Not really. Because you won’t talk to me. You won’t tell me why you left home, or what you’re running from, or why you didn’t get m—”
He snaps his mouth shut over a stillborn word that never comes.
I stare at him in disbelief.
“Why I didn’t get what?” I whisper, horrified.
He turns to face the wall.
Coward.
“Why I didn’t get what, Jesse?” My eyes burn holes in the back of his head, trying in vain to see inside.
But instead of an answer, I get a sigh that seems to tear him in two. He walks over to where his shoes are laying in a pile on the floor and slides them on his feet without bothering to tie them.
“Where are you going?” Panic bubbles up in my throat. I’m embarrassed, of course, and furious, but for some reason the idea of Jesse abandoning
me leaves me nearly broken.
“For a walk.” His voice hits my ears lifeless and flat, emotionless in every sense of the word. “I’ll come back. I just need… I need to think.”
He flings the door open, letting it slam shut behind him, the sound of his retreat reverberating down to my bones.
12.
“How dare he!”
Over an hour has passed since Jesse left me high and dry, and I’ve spent the majority of that time pacing back and forth in front of the bed until I’ve worn a path into the carpet, tipping the bottle of gin between my lips with every turn.
“How dare he!” I exclaim, the words dripping from my lips. “How dare he say those things and just leave! Who does he think he is?”
“I’ll tell you who he is!” I answer my own question. “He’s a good-for-nothing, hypocritical, know-it-all who doesn’t know anything! That’s who he is!” I whip around the other way and pace back to the door.
“How could he know that stuff about me anyway? How?”
“Calm down, Frances,” a quiet, more sober voice answers in my mind. I spin around for the fifty-sixth time. “Just calm down. Maybe he doesn’t know anything. Maybe he was just guessing.”
“That’s one hell of a guess,” I slur, tilting the bottle against my lips.
The small alarm clock on the nightstand doesn’t work, so I bend to check the time on Jesse’s watch, left on the floor near his pile of clothes: 11:46. “Kind of late for a stroll,” I grumble.
“He’s probably not coming back,” the voice in my head says. “Not after you threw yourself at him like that. Could you have been any more desperate? It was pathetic!”
I fling myself onto the bed, landing with a brutal flop on my stomach. It’s one thing to hear a little voice in one’s head; a personal conscience doesn’t make anyone crazy. It’s responding to the little voice that classifies someone as completely batshit insane. And being labeled as mentally unstable is something I’m not prepared to deal with right now.
My hair falls in soft waves across my face but I’m too tired to brush it away. Any anger at being rejected or worry at being found out has quickly turned to blood-chilling panic at being left behind.
Jesse is dangerous. He’s like drug, one I’m seriously addicted to. I should be sent to rehab like some preteen child star. I’m hooked on his charm and charisma, his good heart and ability to laugh, his eyes, his smile…
Oh God. His smile is a crisis unto itself.
I take a deep breath. If he has left — I feel a twinge of pain deep in my chest — there’s nothing I can do now but move on without him. And if he comes back, I’ll be no worse off than I was before, albeit, slightly less prone to kissing complete strangers.
I reach for the bedside lamp and switch it off, closing my eyes against the soft, makeshift pillowcase of Jesse’s shirt.
The music was deafening, yet I could somehow still hear the celebratory squeals and “whoops” of my inebriated cohorts.
To say I was celebrating was perhaps a bit of an overstatement. I was… there. Not miserable, but perhaps not quite as invested in jello-shots and phallic shaped hats as my kidnappers would have hoped. At least the others were enjoying themselves, the thrill of abducting a bride-to-be from her apartment only fueling their need for dancing, drinking, and general merrymaking on my last night as a single woman.
But dance clubs, copious amounts of alcohol, and penis-shaped accessories were a steadfast tradition that could not be ignored.
The private party had gone on for hours and the sugary drinks, asinine conversation, and never-ending party games were starting to give me a headache, my temples in danger of caving in on either side of my skull. There were four of us inside the VIP room that evening: me, Katie, and Jen and Jan, Andrew’s twin cousins. The Jen stood for Jennifer; the Jan stood for nothing.
“Frances?”
I jerked my head around. I had drifted out of the discussion and into my own thoughts without realizing it. “Huh?”
“Keep up, Frances, will you?” Katie took another sip of her margarita before slamming it on the table, sloshing the bright green liquid over the salted rim of the glass. “Jan asked you a question.” She pointed to Andrew’s cousin across from the table.
“I’m Jen,” Jen said. “That’s Jan.” Jen pointed to her left at twin.
“Oh,” Katie slurred. It was blatantly obvious she didn’t care. “Sorry, Jan.”
“Jen.”
“Sure.”
Jen shook her blonde curls out of her face. “I was just wondering how you and Andrew met. We didn’t get to talk much at your engagement party, and I’ve been dying to hear the story! Was it romantic? Did he sweep you off your feet? I bet he did.” She turned to her sister who nodded in enthusiastic agreement.
I snorted into my hand. “Hardly. Andrew and I met the night of the Grand Carnegie’s annual Christmas gala.”
“At the Christmas gala?” Jen squealed in delight. “How perfect! Was he in a tux? Was it love at first sight? Did you kiss under the mistletoe?”
Where was Jen getting her ideas? It sounded like something out of a Lifetime movie, for fuck’s sake.
“Um, not quite.” I glanced helplessly at Katie who was busy tossing back the rest of Jan’s rum-based fruit drink. “There wasn’t any mistletoe,” I assured her. “There was, however, a Hummer.
Jan leaned forward. “Is that a euphemism?” she whispered from behind her hand.
I jolted back in my seat. “No! I was working valet at the hotel. Andrew just happened to be a guest at the party. We got to talking outside and—”
“You worked valet?” Her laugh of uncertainty rang out over the house music. “But… why?”
I circled the rim of my hardly touched 7&7. “Because I needed a job and we don’t all feel comfortable asking daddy for it.”
It was below the belt and I knew it. No doubt my little comment would make it back to Andrew by tomorrow morning. We were about to hold the record for Quickest Newlywed Fight.
I wasn’t worried about Andrew; I could handle him. I was just so tired of being judged by people I didn’t even like; it was becoming progressively more difficult to keep even a remotely cheery attitude in place.
Katie whirled around, nearly toppling into Jan. “You’re only saying that because Dad wouldn’t give you money even if you did ask for it, Frances!”
“Why would I ask either of our parents for money?”
Katie leaned over Jan to slur in Jen’s ear. “You know, she used to tear the heads off all of my Barbie dolls when we were kids.” She dug a finger into my chest, her long nails poking through my sheer top. “Murderer!”
I groaned, shoving her hand away from me. “You’re drunk.” It was the only reason I hadn’t killed her yet. “And maybe don’t yell ‘murderer’ in the middle of a crowded room.”
Jen grinned. It wasn’t a friendly smile. It was calculating and hard. She looked cold despite her damp curls and the glimmer of sweat across her forehead. “Go on, Katherine. Exactly what was Frances like growing up?”
I was stunned. She was digging for information! It was no secret that neither Jen nor Jan particularly liked me. Their participation in my wedding was more obligation than actual love.
“She was a biter,” Katie hissed before taking another long drink. “Almost bit through a classmate’s finger when he chopped through her ponytail with a pair of safety scissors. She’s the only person I know who got suspended from preschool!”
Jan’s jaw dropped. “Preschool?”
I took the moment to throw daggers at my sister before slumping back into my seat. Nothing could stop Katie once she started in on one of her drunken rants. “And it didn’t stop there. The only reason she had any friends when she graduated was because she started a fake I.D. business her junior year.”
Jen’s eyes were practically glowing with whatever sort of sick pleasure she was deriving from hearing about my adolescence. Gossip was better than sex to these people. “What else?
”
“She hotwired her history’s teacher Mustang when he called her paper on the Spanish Civil War adequate. Drove it out to our neighborhood park and left the top down the night we had the heaviest rain fall in a decade.”
Jan wasted no time in recovering from a fit of giggles. “Didn’t you get in trouble, Frances?”
Katie answered for me. “Not like it had ever stopped her before! They added a new superlative in the yearbook her senior year. Can you guess who was voted Most Likely to Be Incarcerated Before Thirty?”
No one responded. Why would they bother when they already knew the answer?
Satisfied with their silence, Katie began swaying to the music of Leo Sayer’s ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’, gyrating and throwing her arms over her head like a deranged Stevie Nicks.
“When she was sixteen, she got our gardener fired when our mother walked in on them making out in the potting shed!”
The girls howled with laughter. I was teetering on the brink. “Okay!” I called to the circle. “I think that’s about enough.”
“She and her ex-boyfriend Pete were the new Bonnie and Clyde. They even got arrested once! No, twice! I forgot about that incident in our family ski-lodge. Do you remember him, Frances? Remember Pete?”
“I vaguely recall him, yes.”
At least Pete had been fun. One minute we would be eating lunch at some quaint bistro. The next, we were stealing road signs and running from the local deputy. It was, needless to say, a very strange relationship.
I rubbed at my temples with my fingertips, feeling my headache push into a full-blown migraine as Katie went on and on.
“She spray-painted our city sign so it read ‘Welcome to Lancaster Shitty’.”
“She stole our high school theatre department’s curtain right off the stage the night before their opening night of Grease.”
“She stole fifty or so lawn gnomes from around town and put them all in erotic positions on our lawn.”
One More For The Road Page 12
