He purses his lips together and narrows his eyes at me. “Uh huh, likely story. It’s fine, though. No worries. I’m not in the market for dating, anyway.”
“Oh really? That’s not what I’ve heard,” I snap back.
His snide smirk reappears. “Not sure what you heard, doll-face, but don’t believe everything people tell you, especially if it comes from our sweetheart, Cali, next door.” The way he says sweetheart makes me believe she has gotten under his skin too—not surprising at all. It doesn’t take much for Cali to get on your nerves.
“Whatever you say, Mr. Jags.”
He takes a few steps back toward the door, grabbing at each side of the threshold with his oversized bear claw hands. God, those things are huge. “It was nice seeing you again, Miss Sasha. Oh and…my arms are pretty ‘marked-up’ huh? Good one,” he says with a quick wink.
“Just hold on one minute,” I tell him, turning to my bag that’s sitting on the floor. I dig my hand inside, feeling around for the two cords I have knotted up individually. As I pull one out and zip the bag back up, I reach my closed hand out to him.
“You tied your charger into a bow?” he asks.
“No sense in wasting time untangling it,” I say, matter-of-factly.
“That’s just adorable,” he says, smirking a bit.
For some reason, him calling my charger adorable makes my cheeks heat up, and he wasn’t even talking about me, just this stupid white cord in my hands. Sasha, relax. This man is not even close to being my type, so the word adorable should not have any effect on me…but for some reason, it kinda does.
I reach toward him a little more so he takes the charger and he releases his grip from the wall, stretching his arm out toward me. I drop the cord into his hand, noticing how small my hand looks against his. He’s quick to clasp his fingers closed over the cord, nipping at my fingertips before I can move my hand away fast enough, and I feel my heart do a little—leap? “So then, that date you asked me on…shall we meet at Chet’s in Stanley Park for lunch tomorrow?”
He’s serious? A date? No way. “I can’t go on a date with you, Mr. Jags.” Never. I just escaped life with a psychopath. I am in no position to find myself alone with a man like this—a tattooed, bearded, loud-mouth, and most likely, womanizing sailor.
“Okay, so meet me for some grub,” he says without skipping a beat. His question is serious, and I’m assuming he’s seeking a serious answer. “We have mutual friends. We might as well be friends too, right?”
“It’s not a date?” I question.
“Just grub,” he replies in the same stern manner. “And, so I can return your phone charger.”
I let the thoughts sway around in my head for a minute. I shouldn’t think this man who served our country could be harmful or someone I should be worried about being near, although I do hear those loose cannon stories sometimes too. But, I just told myself “never” and that should be that. I shouldn’t trust anyone. That’s what Cali is diligently planting in my head, anyway. Though, Jags is Tango’s best friend, so I don’t think either of them would tell me to use caution around him. They wouldn’t have had him stay in this house with their five-year-old daughter, who seriously knows how to sleep through a friggin’ earthquake with the racket Cali and Tango make here. Poor little thing.
“Is it really that much to think about, doll-face?”
“Yes,” I retort, folding my arms over my chest. Over my braless chest. Oh, dear God, how did I forget that as I was swinging my arms all over the place?
“Okay, well if you’d like your charger back, I’ll leave it up to you. I’ll be at Chet’s tomorrow at noon. If I see you, I see you. If not, we do have our mutual best friends, so you never know when we might run into each other again,” he says with a smirk.
“Didn’t you just tell me you’d probably never see me again?” I ask with confusion. He just grins in return. Just grins, that’s it. He doesn’t need to say any more, and he knows it. “See, you do lie!”
He takes my words with him and reaches for the bedroom doorknob to leave. As he opens the door a little wider than it was already open, his other hand tosses something into my face. My bra. My bra that was hanging off the back side of the door knob. No! “That’s adorable too,” he says from the hall.
He is infuriating. He’s kind of hot too, but more infuriating than hot. And he lies. That is definitely not hot. I should not be thinking about him like that at all. Listening to Cali and Tango constantly getting busy must be clouding my judgment. I need to just iron my shirt, ignore the love-humping happening next door, and get to work—a place I have called out sick from for an entire week. I might not even have a job when I get there. It’ll be just another fun issue to add to my life right now.
This is what my life has come to. I fall in love with a man who wants to destroy my life and who takes me out to a friggin’ field to have his way with me, then I find myself in the presence of a man who can’t tell the truth if his life were to depend on it. The odds of any relationship ever working out for me are not in my favor. I’m a living joke. I should swear off men, but to start with, I should swear off Jags.
Maybe I should just meet him for lunch first, though. I do need that charger back…that particular kind is hard to find in the stores, so it only makes sense. No it doesn’t, it makes no sense. I’m not making sense. I haven’t had a logical thought in days, and it’s beginning to show.
CHAPTER THREE
JAGS
THAT GIRL MIGHT not make it in Tango’s house another night. Poor thing looks like she’s seen a ghost or a famous Tango boner. Not sure which is scarier. I feel sorry for her, getting mixed up with that shithead ex-boyfriend.
I clamber back into my woman and rev her up a bit. The poor little lady has been in this blazing sun all day. Well, for weeks actually. If Pops knew what I’d been putting her through here, he’d have a thing or two to say about it. The idea of his thoughts reminds me of what I’m supposed to be doing with my life right now, which surprisingly enough isn’t state-hopping looking for hot chicks. This area wouldn’t be the worst place to take a rest for a while, but the heat is killer. For me and the woman I drive. I might melt if I open up a shop here. Whatever, there’s time to make up my mind.
Pulling into Chet’s, I park my woman under a shaded area. This dumpy lot is safer than the dumpier lot adjacent to the motel so she’s staying here. I realize she’s only a rental, but she’s a pretty rental and I don’t want to hurt her. I lock it up and head back toward the shortcut I made last night while walking to the motel, which, I now see looked a hell of a lot better in the dark.
“What are you doing?” A voice calls from behind me as I’m shoving my way through the bushes. “Did you sleep here last night or something?”
I turn around, finding Bambi on my heels. “Um, a better question is: what are you doing?”
“Going to get breakfast?” she says, as if I’m the weird person creeping through shortcuts.
“Through the bushes?” I ask.
“Uh, hello? What are you doing right now?” Walking through the bushes.
“Wait, you told me the place to get breakfast was over behind Chet’s, I thought?
“I’m not a big breakfast person; I prefer coffee and a muffin, so, that’s why I’m cutting through my shortcut over to the main road.”
“Your shortcut?”
“Oh,” she croons. “You thought you found this little cut through? Because um, it’s been here pretty much forever.” I didn’t even say that to her.
“Dude, you have a pole up your ass,” I tell her.
“Dude?”
This conversation is fucking fantastic.
“Bambi. That better?”
“You have zero class,” she argues.
“But I saved your ass. And on top of that, I can rhyme! You can’t really beat that now, can you?”
“Can you even be serious for half a second?” she asks, whipping a bra
nch into my face as she pushes in front of me.
“Shit!” The thing didn’t really hit me in the eye, but she wouldn’t know if it did or not. I can play that card. “You trying to make me go blind or something?”
“That didn’t hit your face,” she says without skipping a beat as she breaks out of the mass of bushes.
“Yeah, it did,” I argue, exaggerating a little groan for extra effect. “You were just waiting here in this parking lot for me, weren’t you? You knew I would be coming to Chet’s for breakfast and here you are trying to be all slick like you accidentally ran into me. Not too smooth, Bambi. I expected more from you; I’m not going to lie.”
“You wonder why I said you had no class,” she mutters while looking in both directions for cars.
“Where is this coffee place you speak of?”
“Okay, for real? You live in that motel right over there, and you haven’t noticed Dan’s Coffee and Donuts right next door? When exactly did you move back to Texas?”
I shrug. “Three…no, maybe four weeks ago.” A car is racing down the street, but not fast enough that we can’t make it across first. I can already see the warning signs in her eyes, telling me not to run, which is exactly why we’re going to run. I grip my hand around her wrist and yank her along with me as we fly across the street, feeling the wind from the passing, beat-up piece-of-shit zooming by.
“Shit, what the fuck is wrong with you, man? Look, clearly, you got some issues you need to resolve, but you ain’t taking me to crazytown with you.” Okay, maybe I went too far that time but God, we all gotta live it up sometimes. She rips her wrist out of my grip and reflexively slaps it against her thigh. “You’re an asshole, and you need to go find someone else to irritate.”
“You’re kind of an asshole, too,” I quip.
“Yeah, you’re right. It’s to protect myself against dickwads like you.”
“Whoa, whoa,” I say, holding my hand up to my chest, forcing a pained look on my face. She does stop walking in response to my loud gesture and actually turns around to face me. The sun is beating down on the side of her face, the side that took the most impact from the shrapnel. She’s looking at me like I truly offended her, and that wasn’t my intention. I thought she was playing my game with me. Everyone knows…one asshole, two assholes, now who’s the asshole? It’s a legit thing…that I made up one night while I was sitting in the middle of the desert. That was when I did my best thinking.
“Seriously, you’re like a bull in a china shop. Just chill,” she scoffs and piles her hair up on her left shoulder. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry.” Those words usually feel so sour coming from my mouth. I don’t like to say it. It doesn’t really fix much, and it doesn’t take back whatever stupid thing I’ve done, but it seems to make everything all better. Not that I know what I did wrong, but I know women. Women always find something wrong with whatever I’ve done.
“You know, if you just took it down a few notches, or ten, we could actually be friends.”
I take a sharp inhale through my nose and dramatically let it out slowly, as if taking myself down a few notches will kind of suck. “Okay. I can do that. I think. I can try.”
Bambi rolls her eyes at me and pulls a cigarette out of her back pocket.
“Got a spare?” I ask. She hands me the one she was about to place between her lips and pulls a second out of the box I now see sticking out of her pocket. “I haven’t had one of these suckers in over a year.”
“And you’re choosing this particular moment to stop being a quitter?” she asks dryly.
“If I have to take it down a few notches…”
She plucks the stick from my lips and slips it back into the box it came from. “No. Quitting sucks and I’m not going to be the reason you started back up again.”
I lean toward her and yank the butt from her lips in rebuttal. “Fine, then you’re becoming a quitter with me.”
With an unexpected and quick movement, she elbows me in the gut and retrieves the cigarette from my grip. “Friends don’t torture each other,” she snaps. Holding the cigarette tightly within her hand, she continues walking, and I follow toward what I now know to be the little coffee shop beside the motel. It’s like a shed, but whatever. If they have coffee and donuts, I’ll be a happy man.
We wait outside in silence while Bambi sucks the life out of the cigarette I’m now dreaming about. She’s fast about it, though, and blows the beautiful scent into the opposite direction. Appreciated, but not helping. Once the evidence of my sneaky desire is gone, I pull open the glass door and wave Bambi inside first.
“What can I get for you? Coffee and what kind of muffin?”
“You were actually listening? Impressive. Blueberry, please.” Bambi smirks, an expression I haven’t seen happen in any of the conversations we have held in the past twenty-four hours. She slides into one of the four booths and relaxes against the cushioned spot, twisting her head to look out the window. I’ve noticed she does this a lot—looking away from everything and everyone. I can understand.
I order a couple of muffins and coffees then slide into the bench across from her. “So, where do you work?” I ask while handing her the muffin.
She glances over at me with a thank you in her eyes before answering me. “Ah, over there,” she points out the window and down the street. “John’s Auto Body.” I glance down the street and see a tire spinning above the other low-level buildings. I so badly want to ask her if she’s the receptionist named Bambi, but that would not go over well. See, I’m already learning. Smart guy, I am.
“What do you do there?”
“Well,” she says, in a mousy voice. “I—” with her gaze drifting to her nails, an angled smile touches her lips. “I’m the head mechanic.” Her voice levels out into her normal speaking tone as she states the last part. Funny girl, here.
“No shit?” Oh shit. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just as bad as asking her if she was the receptionist.
“No shit,” she mumbles.
“No, I just mean…well, first, your fingernails don’t look like mechanics’ nails. Second, my pops is Al’s Oldies But Caddys. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the guy, but because of him, I kind of always expect mechanics to look like the guys he works with, not exactly someone as attractive as you—”
“Wait a minute,” she laughs, taking the piece of muffin she was just about to eat away from her mouth. “Your dad is Al? Like the guy on the TV show, the king of oldie upgrades? You’re fucking kidding me. That man is my icon.”
“Yeah, he’s cool shit.” What else is there to say about the man who spent my entire childhood under the hood of a car?
“So then, what do you do for a living now? I mean, I know you were in the Navy and a medic and all that but it’s been years. Why are you back here?” She takes the opportunity to take small bites of the muffin. The small bites look like they’re due to the width she’s able to fully open her mouth because of the location of her scars. It’s suddenly hard knowing I couldn’t do anything more for her that day during the explosion. This is the exact reason I’m not in the medical field now. Too many what-ifs and should-haves.
“Nothing,” I laugh, popping half the muffin into my mouth. “I came out here because my buddy, Tango, needed help, and I just haven’t left.”
“Your dad must be a millionaire, and you’re living at that motel?” she asks, pointing next door.
“I don’t like to spend.” His money. The money that was more important than his family.
Our conversation goes quiet for a few minutes as she finishes up the muffin. I see speculation in her eyes, and I know she’s trying to figure me out. Good luck to her with that. Not like there’s much to figure out, and if she does come up with something, I’d love to hear what it is.
“So,” she finally breaks the silence. “How long are you staying out here? You need a job?”
“You move quickly,” I laugh through sa
rcasm. But yeah, I need a job right about now.
“Figured I’d ask the prince of cars sitting before me. A girl can dream, right?” Most girls wouldn’t be dreaming of a man fixated with cars. That’s what Ma has made clear to me. She was the happiest when I told her I was going into the medical field. A little less happy when I told her it would be in the Navy. I love her to death, but she heard the word Navy and immediately assumed I’d be shooting cannons from a pirate ship and getting shot in return. It was only half true.
“Yeah, I guess I am looking for a job.” So, evidently I just made the decision to stick around somewhere. That’s not like me, but Bambi’s kind of like me, though, and that’s weirdly refreshing. A female Jags. Ha. Makes me want to stick around for a bit.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says while bringing her coffee cup up to the good side of her lips.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the charger that Sasha either lent or gave to me, not sure which yet, and I plug it into the convenient outlet above the table top. Hooking my phone up, I lay it down face up on the table, waiting for the little charger symbol to light up. Not sure why I care about this thing so much since no one ever calls me on it, but if I have it, it might as well be alive. In Boston, everyone had their phones up to their noses all day. Here, it seems people are less infatuated with them. It’s kind of nice.
“Waiting on a call?” Bambi asks.
“Nah, just keeping it from dying again.”
“I see.”
“You got a man?” I ask her, curious as to what she does in her free time. Curious about every part of her life, really. I’ve done a great job avoiding friendships for a good reason, but she’s different. I don’t get to see the aftermath of destruction too often, and when I do see it, it’s never good. Yet, I hold out hope that just once, someone burdened with life’s heavy baggage could maybe pull out and survive the odds of misery.
Bambi laughs at my question while running her fingers up the side of her rippled and puckered face. “What man would want this?”
Spiked Lemonade: A Bad Boy Sailor and a Good Girl Romantic Comedy Standalone Page 4
