When he returned twenty minutes later with some take-out from Applebee’s and the bottle of wine from last night, which he’d stashed in the trunk, she was sprawled out on the bed in those goddamned tiny-ass pajamas.
Her eyes remained closed as she spoke. “Shower’s all yours. The bathroom door’s busted so it doesn’t close all the way, but I’m so tired, I’m not opening my eyes until morning.” She smiled to herself but kept her eyes closed. “Just pretend I’m not here.”
“You can go ahead and open your eyes if you like. I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay.”
Because that was the rational thing to say.
Rationally, there was no problem here.
But in truth, the idea of taking a shower on the other side of that flimsy, half-closed door from her was…kind of a problem. It was one thing to beat off in the adjoining room, another with her right there. But he didn’t see how he was going to survive this night without taking the edge off. He’d had to do that each of the last two nights.
She opened her eyes but her body remained still. “Oh, good. I mean, I had the best orgasm of my life last night thanks to you, so, really, there’s no reason to go all Victorian modesty overkill at this point.”
Wait. What? His cheeks heated. Jesus fucking Christ, that bomb she casually dropped went straight to his already susceptible dick. Or his ego. Or maybe the two were, at this moment, one and the same.
She sat up. “Sorry. Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“No.” He opened the takeout containers and set plastic cutlery and napkins out on the desk. Not in the way you mean, at least. “But the best orgasm you ever had? I just find it hard to believe that someone of your, ah…”
“Degree of sluttiness?” she suggested perkily.
“That was not what I was going to say.”
She shrugged. “Well, what can I say? You’re a talented man, Bennett.” Then she sighed, a little wistfully, he thought, and dammit, that made his dick even harder.
She extended a hand. “Hand me that bottle.”
He twisted off the cap and did as she asked. He was about to fetch her a glass, but she lifted the bottle to her lips, tipped her head back, and took a deep drink. Helpless to look away, he watched her throat undulate as she swallowed.
After several moments, she lifted her head, popped the bottle out of her lips, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Anyway.” She settled herself back against the headboard with her legs stretched out on the bed in front of her. “You don’t have to worry about me. I got your message loud and clear.”
“What message?”
She rolled her eyes. “The ‘I don’t want to sleep with you, Gia’ message.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to.”
She raised her eyebrows playfully. He wanted to lick them.
Jesus Christ, he wanted to lick her eyebrows.
They were just so…perfect. Full and symmetrical and the color of molasses.
He was so fucking screwed.
She scrambled off the bed and went in search of the remote. “I’m teasing you, but I get it. You know I would never force myself on you, right?”
“Uh, right.” He tried not to laugh. The image of Gia physically accosting him was too funny. He might be a little out of step with the times in terms of his moral code, but he wasn’t a trembling virgin.
“I don’t really do repeat performances, anyway.” She switched on the TV.
He rolled his eyes. “Right. God forbid you should actually get to know someone or, I don’t know, have two of the best orgasms you’ve ever had in your life.”
“Are you offering?”
Was he? Shit.
She waggled her eyebrows. “If it makes a difference, I’ll tell you that two times is my max with the same guy. It’s kind of a rule I have.”
“A rule?” Jesus Christ, she was a complicated woman.
She shrugged. “Keeps me honest.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend. I also don’t want to mislead anyone. So I make sure I don’t.”
“So when you said before that the fastest way to get rid of you was a declaration of love, you weren’t kidding.”
She laughed. “Exactly. And it doesn’t even take love. Mild devotion is enough to make me run for the hills. So I just cut things off before that can happen. It’s better for everyone.”
“That sounds awfully lonely.” Jesus, it sounded terrible. He might not have found “the one,” but sex aside, he couldn’t imagine having gone his entire life without a real romantic relationship.
She looked at him a long time before speaking. Then, after a lengthy, uncomfortable assessment he feared he’d failed, she dismissed him by picking up the remote. “I’m awake now. I’m gonna try to find a Food Network show that you’ll hate.”
He shook his head, trying to dislodge thoughts of her “rule”—and her claim that he was responsible for the best orgasm of her life. He grabbed one of the takeout boxes and sat next to her on the bed rather than going to the other one. He had the absurd impulse to demonstrate that he wasn’t afraid of her. He could shower later. “You want some dinner?”
“No thanks,” she said as the TV switched to Rachael Ray, whom, yes, Bennett hated. “Aha! Victory!”
Then the lights went out.
Everything went out: lights, TV, the hum of the air conditioner.
“Fuck me,” Gia said.
I’m trying not to.
* * *
“The power went out,” Bennett said.
“Yes, thank you. I got that.” Gia was being kind of a bitch, but she didn’t care. She was tired, hungry, and sexually frustrated. Which all would have been okay, or at least endurable, but she was also a bunch of other confusing things, the most disconcerting of which was sad. Sad that she was never going to fool around with Bennett again. Also strangely disappointed that their epic journey would be over by this time tomorrow. The idea of being around Bennett in the bigger group of her friends was…weird. It felt like sharing something she didn’t want to share. As had been the case with Reese. Which, speaking of, in addition to tired, hungry, and sexually frustrated, she was also jealous of a hotel receptionist she was never going to see again and what. The. Hell. Was wrong with her?
“I’ll pop downstairs and see if it’s just us or if it’s the whole hotel.”
“I’ll come, too,” she said automatically, her body having propelled itself out of bed before she finished the sentence, because God forbid Bennett should encounter Reese unchaperoned.
It was pitch-black in the room, so she held her hands out in front of her and started shuffling in the direction of the door.
She stopped when she hit him.
She expected him to argue, to tell her to stay put while he investigated, or at least to insist that she shouldn’t come down to the lobby in her pajamas because that wouldn’t be proper, but he didn’t. He just wrapped her hand in his—which was starting to feel downright normal—and led them out of the room.
The hallways were dim, lit by what appeared to be backup lights, probably powered by a generator.
“Looks like it’s at least the whole floor.” Bennett didn’t drop her hand even though there was enough light to see by in the corridors and stairwell.
They found Reese addressing a group of guests. “As far as we can tell, it’s the whole county. The hail took out a bunch of substations.” She looked up as Bennett and Gia approached, and her eyes flickered down to their joined hands. Ha. Take that, “miss.”
“The lobby is being powered by generators, so you’re welcome to settle in here.”
Bennett turned to Gia, a question in his eyes.
“Nah,” she said. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”
So they turned around, still holding hands, and headed back to the stairs.
When they reached their room, Bennett dropped her hand. Something inside her sent up a protest, but she quas
hed it. Once inside, she felt her way over to the window to open the curtains. Not that that helped—the storm was still raging. The hail had stopped, though, replaced by an old-fashioned deluge.
She left the curtain open—there was something oddly enjoyable about being at the mercy of such powerful forces yet being safe inside, tucked away from them—and made her way back to the bed.
“I have almost no battery left on my phone,” she observed.
“You want to use mine to text Wendy or anything?” He sat on the other side of the bed and picked up his, his face lit by the blue glow of the screen as it came to life.
“Nah.” She noted that he’d come back to her bed rather than claim the other one. “We should save the power on yours in case the blackout becomes a long-term thing.”
“We should probably just go to sleep,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he was really endorsing the idea.
“You tired?”
“Strangely, no. I would have thought that this day would have long since done me in, but I guess I’ve got a second wind or something.”
“Me, too.” She’d been tired before, but now she was back to being restless and jumpy.
He got up, moved away from her, then came back. “We can play a game I like to call eating lukewarm chicken wings in the dark.”
Gia’s stomach growled—audibly, so she couldn’t claim she wasn’t hungry. Anyway, she’d decided she wasn’t going to continue starving herself on this trip—and it seemed like it was actually working. So she reached toward the box, felt her way inside, snagged a wing, and then carefully found and lifted the bottle of wine from the bedside table.
“Chicken wings are weird,” she said before gnawing off a bite. It was your basic wing—not that she’d had one for years, but somewhere in her brain, synapses fired and recognized the greasy meat and sweet barbeque sauce as “wing, chicken.” “Like, do chickens actually fly? They don’t, do they?”
“They can. Short distances—some of them, anyway. But they’re bred with a high weight-to-wing ratio these days, so they’re not really very well suited to it. But if you chase one with a cleaver, yeah, it will sort of hop-fly away from you.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience. Have you chased a chicken with a cleaver?”
“I have.”
Why did she find that hot?
“I got it into my head once that I should have the experience of personally butchering some of the animals we serve in the restaurant, so some of our suppliers let me visit their farms and do the dirty deed.”
“Well, aren’t you a badass, Chef Buchanan?”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen me do it. Let’s just say it took me a long time to catch that motherfucker. It was not a very manly or dignified effort.”
She snort-laughed.
“We have a saying in the South—madder than a wet hen. That day taught me exactly where that saying came from.”
He found her hand in the dark and stuck another chicken wing into it.
She wanted to keep asking him questions. She felt like she could sit here all night asking him questions, in fact. Little ones like what was the spice mixture in his boudin balls and big ones like was he actually going to have his parents to the restaurant?
“Okay, we need a new game,” he said. “Would you rather? Would you rather kill a chicken with a cleaver at close range or kill a cow from afar with a dart gun?”
She cracked up. “I would rather play truth or dare.”
It had just popped into her head. The dark, the air of confession and closeness—it reminded her of the slumber parties of her youth.
“Truth or dare?” He barked a laugh. “And then we’ll braid each other’s hair?”
“Yes!” She reached up and took her damp hair out of the bun she’d twisted it into after her shower. The idea of his hands combing through her hair, of his fingers on her scalp, made her stomach clench with something other than hunger. “Come on!” She swatted his shoulder to cover her unease. “I’ll go first.”
“Okay,” he said laughingly. “So how does this work? I ask you a question and you have to tell the truth?”
“Yes, if I choose truth, but if I choose dare, you think up a dare and I have to do it.”
“What if you refuse both?”
“I face the wrath of my peers?” She laughed. “It doesn’t sound very daunting, does it? But I can assure you that when I was twelve, I would have done anything to make my so-called friends like me—though that was pretty much a lost cause.”
He was silent for a long moment before saying, “Okay. Truth or dare?”
“Truth. Dare is gonna be pretty hard around here. We don’t have parents’ closets to raid or a kitchen from which to concoct disgusting things to eat.”
“Why didn’t your friends like you when you were twelve?”
Whoa. He didn’t mess around, did he?
“You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to,” he added quickly.
“You’re not very good at this, Bennett,” she teased, even as she thought seriously about the question. She wasn’t sure she knew the answer. If she had, back then at least, she wouldn’t have been such an outcast, would she?
“I’m not that likable, generally,” she said. But knowing that if she was choosing to answer, he wouldn’t accept something that vague, she added, “This is going to sound like a horrible, privileged, clichéd thing to say, but I think they were jealous. Girls are mean. My mom had me on the child beauty pageant circuit, as you know.”
“This would be the appearance-obsessed mother?”
“That’s the one. And she didn’t mess around. She had me painted and plucked and made up to within an inch of my life, so I actually won most of them. But it was a double-edged sword, because the girls in my social circle started to…well, to bully me, basically. As an adult, I can look back and be pretty sure that it was a situation of…” She trailed off, not knowing how to say it without sounding like an asshole. So she put on a fake theatrical voice and trilled, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
He didn’t say anything. Which was awkward. So she kept talking. “And around that time, my mom started me in some regional modeling gigs, too, which didn’t help. I used to hear them talking about me behind my back. At a sleepover once, I’d gone upstairs to go to the bathroom, and when I was on my way back down, I heard them talking about what a conceited bitch I was. I sat there on the stairwell panicking, trying to think up an excuse to leave, but it was the middle of the night, so I was stuck.” She still remembered sitting on the scratchy carpet of the stairs, shivering because it was winter, and wondering how long she could hide out there before they’d start looking for her. “I saw then that I’d been playing it wrong. This group of girls used to ask me questions about modeling all the time. They seemed really interested, so I’d try to entertain them with stories. I was in and out of school because I had jobs, so I didn’t have a lot of friends. All I’d wanted was for them to like me. But I guess they saw it as bragging or something.”
He still didn’t say anything. She couldn’t even hear him breathing, though she could sense his weighty presence next to her. She sighed. She needed to wrap this up. This was truth or dare, not psychotherapy. “I don’t know. When your whole point in life is to be good-looking, it’s hard to find people who actually like you for you.”
That loosened his tongue. “Your whole point in life is not to be good-looking.”
Whoa. He sounded really peevish.
“It kind of is, though. People pay me to wear clothes, or makeup, or whatever, and look pretty doing it.”
“Yes,” he said dismissively, “but that’s your job. That’s not you.”
He didn’t get it. “So the restaurant. The current one and the community restaurant you want to open. Those are just jobs? They’re not tied up in who you are as a person?”
“That’s different.”
“Why? You love food. You want to help people. All
those parts of you get tangled up in your job. They created your job. I’m good-looking. That’s my big ‘skill’”—she made air quotes with her fingers even though he couldn’t see them. “So I became a model. There’s no shame in that.”
“Of course there’s no shame in that.” He was still irritated. “All I’m trying to say is, yes, you’re extremely beautiful. But you’re a lot of other things, too. And anyway, I suspect being a successful model takes more than just beauty.”
There was something about the dismissive way he acknowledged her beauty, like it was a fact but not, ultimately, a very important one, that made her shiver even though the room was getting hot without the air-conditioning running.
“Anyway,” she said, wanting to end this line of discussion. “The relevant point to this ‘truth’ is that when beauty is what you’re known for, it’s hard to make friends. To forge real relationships you can rely on.”
“Is that why you only do casual?”
“That, my friend, is another question.” He was spot-on, though. The way to avoid being used or fetishized by men for her beauty was to keep them at arm’s length: one-and-done; two-and-through. But she didn’t want to get into that with him. It was her system, and yes, maybe it was kind of fucked up, but it worked just fine. Hadn’t he told her only last night that things didn’t have to be rational for them to work? “It’s your turn. So, what’ll it be? Truth or dare?”
“Truth.”
“What do you hope happens with your parents?”
He huffed a self-deprecating laugh. “You don’t mess around, do you?”
“Well, I dunno, you’ve already told me about your dramatic criminal past and about your weird-ass rules of dating, and no one was making you say any of that stuff, so this seems like a softball of a question, relatively speaking.”
He chuckled. “Touché.” Then he got up. “I think I’m gonna need to find my tea for this. You want a glass for your wine?”
“Nah. I’ll stick with chugging straight from the bottle. Not very dignified, but it seems safer than trying to pour red wine in the dark.”
Three Little Words Page 15
