New Adult Romance Box Set

by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose

  “I know some anthro majors. It's good for grad school and museum work, mostly.” He peered at me as the car hit the end of the big loop and we headed back toward my trailer. If I weren't so afraid of the events that were about to unfold I would have hugged him in appreciation for not laughing at me, for so casually accepting my education choice as if it were normal and fine and perfectly reasonable. What a world he must live in if people knew what anthro was and respected it as a life choice. My heart ached to go there.

  No more stalling; the clock read 12:13 a.m. And I was getting tired. We needed to crash somewhere, and we might as well do it where there was a bed and a roof.

  He was pointedly looking at me. Oh. Yeah. An answer. “I just took the classes because they taught me a lot about why humans are as fucked up as we are.”

  “I majored in political science for the same reason,” he answered. I snorted. “No—really!” he protested. “That and because my parents pressured me into it to go to law school,” he admitted.

  “Are you going?”

  His turn to snort. “That's what everyone says. I got into plenty of good schools, and I'll join the six-figure debt club soon. But...” His voice trailed off.

  “But you'd rather go on tour,” I finished for him. Something in the way his eyes went wistful, how his hand curled into a fist, the way his eyes went hooded when he talked about his parents—it made me wonder how good he really had it. Whatever Sudborough was like, it clearly wasn't what Trevor wanted. Music was it—so why didn't he just do that?

  I was about to ask when I slowed the car down, snaking my way past trailer after trailer to reach mine. Trevor frowned. “What is this place?” His face was a mask of revulsion and bemusement, a look most people couldn't pull off. Each trailer was different from the other, but none of them was the Taj Mahal, you know? Ours was smack on the low end of the spectrum of living here, but at least we had fully functioning utilities.

  Well, this month, at least. Any month that came within two months of tax refund season was good for running water and heat.

  The rest was a crap shoot, a game of Musical Utility Bills. Would the water be on today, or the lights—or both? You just never knew. From the way Trevor had eyed my flip phone with a look like I was pressing a fresh log of dog crap to his ear, I had a feeling that his “fake” life involved far more financial stability and luxuries compared to mine.

  And I'll bet he never, ever ate meat from a can.

  I had spent so much time and energy in these short hours worrying here and there—when I wasn’t damn close to being pleasured under a pine tree in a rest area on the interstate—worrying about what Trevor would think about my house, my Mama, my life when it hit me that I had no choice but to bring him home. Scant attention, though, had I paid to what Mama might think of my bringing home a buck naked young man covered only in a Mylar blanket and a cowboy hat.

  If Davey had beaten me home—and I suspected he had, the man had a cell phone for God’s sake and even if it was only a flip phone it meant that he could make a goddamn phone call—then Mama was about to encounter one of the strangest things her child had ever brought home.

  Now, mind you, I’d brought plenty of crazy shit home, including twin brothers I’d won in a wet t-shirt contest. Don’t ask—it’s a long story and right now you want to read about the rest of this one. That one, I can get to it later, but I doubt it. Let’s just say law enforcement officers from three different counties were involved and when someone tells you they’re eighteen, don’t believe me. Er...them.

  As I pulled into our parking spot, two dogs and a cat with three legs limped off. Trevor turned and looked at me with a tentative smile. “Home?” he asked.

  “The Taj Mahal,” I said, trying to play myself off as being outside of this life, Miss Disingenuous, as if Oh, dear—what happened here? Why am I living in this? “I wasn't kidding.”

  I tried to look at it from and outsider’s eye. Around here a double wide was bigger and better than a single wide. It conferred a kind of status to you that said, yeah, I may be trailer park trash—but at least I’m double wide trailer park trash. I suspected such nuances weren’t on Trevor’s radar screen.

  He gave me one of those looks that I’d read about in books but I’d never actually had someone project at me. It was a slightly sickly, polite look of extraordinary pity mingled with something else that made his eyes go from that beautiful ocean blue to a faded grayish color, reminding me of a pulsating vein under extremely thin skin.

  His hand that had rested on my thigh squeezed slightly and then it moved, fingertip under my chin. Our eyes met and I wanted to close mine, to sink into this last moment when we could still live in this crazy little bubble of a few hours stolen between a hitchhiker and a crazy lady, all tumbled along like stones being polished by fate.

  “I don’t judge,” he said and I laughed, ropy strands of giggles being pulled out of me like anal beads from the star stripper in a moderately hardcore club—a little bit painful but one hell of a show for the person watching.

  “Trevor, everybody judges, and this,” I pointed to the house, “shit, I’m judging it.”

  His shoulders slumped a little and he looked out the window again, peering around the dust spots on my windshield. I tried to take it in through his eyes. The gutter that hung off the left side of the roof, fourteen or fifteen garbage bags filled, probably, with Mama’s recycling. Every few months she convinced somebody to drive her up to Michigan and turn in the ten cent cans. It wasn’t nearly as interesting a story as the Seinfeld episode about it.

  Trash, just pure trash, littered the little patches of grass around the driveway and the porch really did slump at about a twenty-five degree angle on one corner, meaning you had to kind of bend your shoulders and neck to walk in to reach the front door. For $380 a month we paid lot rent, and that included our water, sewer, and supposedly our garbage. That was about all Mama could afford, her disability check not much more than twice that.

  I’d been working some kind of a job since I was nine, from a dollar an hour yard work up to turning fifteen and lying about my age to make the glorious minimum wage at a truck stop a few exits down. I lost that job when Mama couldn’t afford the gas, and luckily I turned sixteen shortly after and picked up the gas station gig I held now. When my car didn’t work, or Mama’s didn’t, or we didn’t have gas money, I could walk or hitch a ride.

  It made me think that in some ways I was just like Trevor, because right now we were both hitchhiking through life and we were both stark naked. Except him? His nudity was on the outside.

  I wished we could trade places.

  Trevor

  I knew people lived like this but I always figured it was part of an episode on one of those A& E series on cable television. Holy shit! No, really, actual shit. Animal shit from the looks of it, strewn all over the neighbors’ side yard where a chain link fence held six...seven—I lost count—dogs. Were those pitbulls and puppies in there? It made my dick shrivel up and my balls crawl into my gut.

  Once again that vulnerable feeling set in, because when you’re naked and the only thing protecting you from the world is a cowboy hat and a Mylar blanket, it would be an aberration not to feel unsafe.

  If this is where Darla lived, then my sense of admiration for her actually shot up. She seemed so funny and deep, with an outlook on life that just took in whatever happened and rolled with it in a way that no tight-assed woman I generally met back at home would ever act. Even the sluts, the worst of the worst, the whores’ whores at home were so controlling, using unwritten rules of life and social graces that seemed to be ingrained in us from preschool to make every interaction pre-programmed, nothing spontaneous unless it involved some sort of substance that altered your consciousness.

  I didn’t need any of that here. In fact, I think that whatever I’d taken must have been out of my blood by the time we pulled into her driveway because I was stone cold sober and I had a feeling that that was the only way I was go
ing to get through the next experience here.

  I told her I wasn’t judging her—but I lied. This made me, first of all, appreciate the fuck out of the four bedroom, three bath, bonus room with a game room/bar in the basement, house where I’d grown up in Sudborough. Dad commuted all week and some Saturdays into the city and Mom had returned to work when I had hit first grade. They could be prim, and proper, and priggish, and fake, and plastic—but damn, we had way more than Darla did.

  I felt bad for poking fun at her flip phone, for pointing out the rusty holes in the floorboard of her shitbox. What I was looking at, sitting right here in the comfort of her car, was like something we’d watched in an eighth grade documentary—some PBS episode about poverty in America.

  She said she’d gone to college and a massive wave of protectiveness hit me, of wanting to rescue her, to take her away from all of this. And yet, here she was, my rescuer. The one who found me stumbling, high as a kite, six hundred miles from home. So who was judging whom?

  And who should judge whom?

  She opened her car door and then paused, shutting it again, turning to me. Her hand covered my hand, which covered her knee now, rubbing slowly, soothing us both.

  “Trevor,” she said with that sweet voice that spoke of beer and roasted corn and fun in a field of wildflowers, a kicked back kind of energy that made my erection turn the Mylar blanket into a tent. Oh, God no, I thought, the last thing I can do is walk in that trailer and meet her mother with a fuckinghard-on pointing at her.

  “Trevor, there’s something that you need to know about my Mama,” she started and the tone in her voice made my dick wither like a vine cut off at the root.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “She’s umm...” Darla sighed. “Well, she’s...” What? my mind filled in. She’s what? Drunk? Crazy? Fat? Schizophrenic? A criminal? A murderer? Really a man? “She’s...she’s, well,” Darla stumbled.

  Oh, boy. Of all the things that I could say about Darla in the past couple of hours of getting to know her, fumbling for words was not one of them. Whatever she was trying to spit out, it made my body go tense, made my eyes narrow and I could feel every bone go on alert, every muscle at the ready for whatever I needed to know.

  “She’s real picky about her cooking.” I didn’t expect that. “And she also talks about sweepstakes non-stop.”

  “That’s it?” I said, shaking my head, palms up. When I lifted my hands up it made the Mylar blanket drop a bit and Darla’s eyes drifted down to check out the one part of me that I hadn’t managed to put in her.

  “Yeah, and umm.... She’s gonna wonder why you’re naked.”

  “Most people would, Darla.”

  “No, actually you aren’t the first...” Darla’s voice went quiet.

  “I’m not the first what?”

  “You’re not the first naked man I’ve ever brought home.”

  She cut the conversation short, opened her door, stepped out and slammed it shut. I followed suit, wondering what the hell that meant and we walked up rotted out, wooden boards that used to resemble steps and then entered this cave-like collapsed porch. Without any ceremony, Darla opened the front door. The scent of cigarette smoke almost knocked me backward. I’ve performed in some serious dive bars, in basements with no windows with horrible ventilation, in rooms not much bigger than my mother’s clothing closet, but this was like eating cigarette smoke with a spoon. I plugged my nose instantly by shoving the back of my tongue up against the roof of my mouth and breathed through my lips.

  “Oh, yeah,” Darla said turning back, almost making me trip off of the crooked stair. “She’s a chimney, too.”

  “Yeah, I kind of noticed,” I said.

  “Why are you talkin’ funny?” she whispered.

  “Because I’m trying not to breathe through my nose.”

  “That bad?” she said, wrinkling hers.

  I nodded. “You can’t smell it?”

  “I guess I’m used to it,” she shrugged.

  As we walked into the kitchen, two friendly eyes stared at me from under layer after layer of fat. I wasn't quite sure whether the person before me was female or male. Two cats began rubbing up against my legs, their fur so soft they had to be kittens. A quick glance down told me I was right. My sense of touch seemed heightened, as if being without clothes for so long had drawn out a proprioceptive connection to a tactile dimension.

  That, or I was still a little high. My stomach chose that exact moment to make the loudest gurgle possible, an annoying rumbling that reminded me I was absolutely famished.

  “You brought home an alien from the rest area, Darla Jo?” a mouth said, opening under the eyes. The eyes flashed over to Darla, who reached for my hand with a friendly squeeze. The voice was female, and had that craggy, curmudgeonly sound that plenty of old people in New England seemed to cultivate.

  Then she coughed, a phlegmy, gross sound that made it seem like she'd hock up a lung and the kittens would feast on it tonight. My hand instinctively went for my pocket—the one that didn't exist—because I wanted to call Joe and talk to someone, anyone, from my fake life back in Sudborough. Some deep core of politeness kicked in, though, the part of me that was nice to teachers even while my mind screamed asshole! behind my eye sockets.

  Darla's mom wasn't an asshole, though. Her hair was neat and combed in a style that reminded me of the pictures my mom showed me of the late '60s, of Grandma dressed in bouffant hairdos and sleeveless dresses that looked like they were made from curtain cloth. I remembered my grandma wearing one of those plastic bonnets whenever it rained, to protect her curly helmet head, and I was pretty certain that if it started raining and this woman needed to go outside, she had one of those plastic hats stuffed in a purse somewhere.

  She stood. I forced my jaws together so I didn't gape. The limp was pronounced and her face was friendly, with Darla's pale skin that flushed easily with exertion, and brown eyes under brown hair that was so dated. Darla's dad must have blonde hair, like me. I wondered where her green eyes had come from.

  Hmm.

  Darla whispered in my ear. “She's missing a foot. Don't look. She isn't a fan of having her business talked about.”

  My business was wide open and on display for everyone, so I could certainly sympathize.

  “Cathy,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. Her fingernails were thick, neatly trimmed, and a shade of yellow I normally only saw after a bunch of us ate Ethiopian food in Cambridge, our nailbeds stained by the abundant turmeric.

  “Trevor.” I nodded and tried to stay as pleasant as possible. Keeping my junk covered with a thin Mylar blanket now being snagged by kittens’ tiny, curious claws meant that I was a little too overexposed.

  And exhausted. The reality of everything was settling in, and I could feel a deep irritability with the world welling up inside me. I went back over my list of needed things, and amended it to be, in no particular order:

  1. Clothes.

  2. A meal.

  3. To fuck Darla.

  4. A few hours of sleep.

  Darla let go of my hand so I could shake her mother's hand and be friendly, but to my surprise she slipped into another room, twisting her body around multiple piles of newspaper that lined the edge of the room. Cathy gestured for me to sit.

  And that's when it got awkward.

  “Darla, you're bringing another naked man home? What is with you?” she shouted in the direction Darla had disappeared. I tried not to look at anything, and especially not at my own dick, as I worked to sit down and keep my groin completely covered with what felt like 2.2 square inches of Mylar. An instinct to take off my hat and shove it over my now-limp dick went away fast as Cathy just stared at me, slack jawed, waiting for Darla's response. Her ear cocked in a really obvious manner, she was a sitcom caricature. A bad sitcom starring Jeff Foxworthy or Drew Carey.

  Wait. Another naked man? Darla wasn't kidding?

  “It wasn't my fault this time, Mama. He was standing right by the sid
e of the road.”

  “With his Twinkie hanging out?” Twinkie? I looked down, my hips a little loose as I started to bend down to sit. I beg to differ, I thought. If anything, it was a baguette. A full-on, French baguette.

  I sat up tall and wrapped the blanket around me, only to have Darla tap me on the shoulder. As I turned, I saw Cathy staring at my, uh, baguette. Darla's face was a mask of a fake smile, horrified eyes gleaming bright and shiny, like green pennies in the sun.

  “Here.” Shoving an armful of clothes at my midsection, she forced me to wrap one arm around the bundle and pull harder with the other, the Mylar stretching and probably pulling so hard against my ass Cathy could see which moles were where.

  “Thanks,” I gasped, bent over like a freak. “Where can I...?”

  “Change back there, in the bathroom.” Darla looked like she was holding herself together with duct tape and Xanax right now. Why did she act so strange? Sure, the house wasn't exactly nice, but it wasn't a horror show, either. Plenty of frat houses looked like a more structured version of this. Spend a few nights at an apartment in Allston where eight BU guys cut off from family funds share a two-bedroom place and start naming the cockroaches and you get a sense of filth. Darla's trailer was run down and cluttered and it smelled like Philip Morris died here, but it wasn't that bad.

  Whatever shred of pride remained, I lost when I entered the bathroom, which was about as big as an airplane toilet, but with a bucket-sized tub. The clothes she brought me said 3X on the shirts labels, a t-shirt and flannel button-down that was more like a tent than clothing. The pants fit remarkably well, though, a bit loose but doable. If she'd handed me underwear I'd have looked like Justin Bieber getting caught climbing the stairs, pants so low they kissed my anus, but at least I had something—anything—to cover myself. A pair of flip-flops with the U.S. Flag and the words “Jones Insurance” stamped on them rounded out the look.