My drive to impress her, to do good things for her was shouting at me to press the issue, but I saw something in her eyes, an independent streak that I recognized as like my own. If I was in her position, I wouldn’t take the bed.
“I really don’t mind,” I said. “My sister visited me a few months ago, and I gave her the bed, and I slept on the pull-out. Slept like a baby.” Sue me—I had to try.
“If you slept like a baby on it, then so will I.”
The conversation had been easy, and I hadn’t even noticed when we’d moved to sit on the couch. We were close—not quite touching, but sitting with less distance between us than near-total strangers would normally have. She leaned forward, and I thought for a split second that she was going to kiss me; my heart started pounding and my dick sat up and took notice.
Instead, however, she slid her arms around my neck in a hug. God, she smelled good. Felt good leaning against me. Soft, warm. I hugged her back.
“Thank you, Rhys,” she whispered. “I’d still be out in the rain if it wasn’t for you.”
“Yeah, I—no problem. It’s my pleasure to be able to help you out.” I had to let go. Didn’t want to, but if I didn’t let go, my idiot dick would start thinking something was going to happen, and I’d never sleep.
When I let go, so did she, and there was a split second, a brief moment when we were within kissing distance, and I felt an electric sizzle like static jumping from my lips to hers.
A heartbeat…
And the moment passed.
I stood up. “I, uh…I’ll hunt down some extra sheets, blankets, and pillows. I think there’s some in my closet.”
She licked her lips, watching me with an expression on her face, one I couldn’t hope to fathom. “Yeah, I’ll open this up,” she said, gesturing to the pull-out.
It wasn’t an awkward moment. It was…tense. Thick with chemical reactions.
I dug the extra sheets and blankets from the top of my closet, brought them to the couch, and I flung the fitted sheet toward one corner, and Torie, already on that side of the bed, took it and fitted it onto the corner of the mattress. Working together, we finished the job as if we’d been making a bed together forever.
It was a stupid little thing, but something about the ease with which Torie and I moved in synch stuck in the back of my head as being…shit. Something? I had no words for it, but it was just a tickly, niggling, fuzzy little feeling of…rightness.
Too bad she was going to Alaska, and I’d never see her again.
“I’m uh…gonna go.” I spotted her wet things on the bathroom floor. “I’ll toss your stuff through the washer and dryer.”
She grabbed her backpack, pulled things out of it—hairbrush, cell phone charger block and cord, and a handful of other items.
I also spotted a Ziploc bag with something green in it—she was quick and crafty about the way she moved it so I wouldn’t see it, but I did.
“Rule breaker, huh?” I said, grinning.
She seemed embarrassed. “Yeah.” A shrug.
“Hey, no judgment here.”
She lifted the bag and held in up, displaying it. “You ever smoke pot?”
I shook my head. “Nah. Was offered it a few times, but I was too scared of getting hooked on pot and ending up a meth-head like so many people I knew, so I just never had the balls to try it. I knew my only shot at getting out of the trailer park was keeping clean, saving my cash, staying out of trouble, and leaving the very second I had my diploma. I’m a follow-the-plan kinda guy, anyway. Not really rules, just…I figure out where I want to be, make a plan to get there, and I don’t deviate from the plan.”
She withdrew the small bag. Eyed me. “Now that you’re out, and on your own…interested in trying?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to seem like a straightlaced nerd. I wasn’t. But old resistances died hard. But like she said, I was on my own, running my own business. Why not?
“Sure?”
She shrugged. “No pressure. Just offering.”
“Would you smoke right now, if you were at home?”
She nodded. “It’s been a hell of a day. One little hit will take the edge off my stress and let me actually fall asleep. Otherwise I’ll be up for hours, no matter how tired I am.”
I snorted. “That I get. It’s hard as hell for me to fall asleep. My brain is just always going.”
She fished in the outside pocket of her backpack, and pulled out what looked like a ceramic cigarette, and a clear red plastic lighter. She opened the bag, reached in, pinched off a tiny bit, thumbed it into the tip of the…whatever that thing was called. It wasn’t a pipe as I’d think of it, and damn if I had a clue about paraphernalia terminology. She closed the baggie most of the way, pressed the air out, zipped it the rest of the way closed.
“Outside?” she asked.
I nodded, gestured at the door near the kitchenette. “That goes to a separate entrance.”
We went out and sat side by side on the top step, and again, we were just slightly too close. And this time, her thigh was touching mine. Like I was fourteen again with Shania, my heart was palpitating. Before we slept together the first time, every time I was around Shania, my heart would hammer and my palms would sweat, and my kneecaps would feel numb. Odd, that last one, I know. I’d have involuntary hard-ons around her that would last for fucking hours, until I could get alone and alleviate things for myself.
Those feelings went away after Shania and I screwed, and I haven’t felt them since.
Until now.
With Torie.
Heart? Hammering like a damn kettledrum. Palms? Damp and clammy. Kneecaps? What kneecaps?—they were totally numb.
Involuntary hard-on? Had one since…shit, since I saw her in that wet fuckin’ T-shirt.
This was shaping up to be…potentially problematic since, again, she was bound to exit my life permanently, and soon.
More’s the pity for my dick, since I was feeling fairly desperate to see her without a shirt on…if not get my hands on her.
I doubted it would happen before she vanished to the far north, but a guy could dream, right?
Although maybe fantasize was a better word…
Torie
Stupid man, with his stupid sexy stubble.
And his ridiculously huge, grease-stained hands, which were always fidgeting. He had so many scars on his hands—from skinning them and burning them on hot engine parts and smacking them on sharp nuts and hard edges. Strong, nimble hands. Huge hands, especially considering he wasn’t a huge guy.
Dad had been a big guy—six-four, and toward the end of his life weighed probably near three hundred pounds and, sadly, for his health, it hadn’t exactly been all muscle. I remember being a little girl and being fascinated by how enormous his hands were. He could engulf my entire hand in his, and if I made fists, he could fit both in one hand.
Rhys’s hands were bigger than Dad’s had been.
I watched his hands, now, as he plucked at a loose thread on the knee of his coverall, the grease in the wrinkles and folds, and under his nails. Even if he washed his hands, I knew they’d still look slightly grease stained, as if the grease and oil was just embedded in the molecules of his skin itself.
His eyes, god his eyes. Puppy dog brown.
Growing up, we’d had a beagle, Mr. Dillingsworth, named by six-year-old Charlie. We all called him Dilly. He had the biggest, brownest, most mournful and expressive brown eyes I’d ever seen. One look into his eyes and you’d just melt and want to hug him and snuggle his big floppy ears, and give him all the treats. Of course, the amount of treats he’d gotten from being so darned cute had probably contributed to his demise at the not-very-old age of twelve. But still, Dilly’s eyes had just been these huge brown pools of warmth and love and exuberant puppy affection.
Rhys’s eyes reminded me of Dilly’s, only less mournful and more…everything else male and intoxicating. Intelligent, amused, kind. So many things, and all of them had this way of ju
st sucking me in. Drawing me in and refusing to let go.
We’d been just sitting on the step for who knew how long, not talking, not quite touching except for the outside of my thigh on his. I had my one-hitter and lighter in my hand, wondering if this was me being a bad influence on this otherwise amazingly good man.
I handed him the paraphernalia. “You first. Only if you want to, though. I won’t, like, think less of you for saying no, okay?”
He sniffed the tip of the one-hitter. “Wow. Smells…pretty cool actually.” He glanced me. “First timer, here. Just…light it and inhale, huh?”
“Draw it into your mouth first, and then breathe in. Otherwise it’ll shotgun into your lungs and you’ll start hacking.” I tapped the ceramic tube. “That’s very, very potent stuff, so one hit is all you need.”
“Am I going to, like, see shit?”
I laughed. “Marijuana is not a hallucinogen, so no, you won’t see anything. You’ll just feel…floaty. Loose. Happy, probably. Maybe a little paranoid.”
He sighed. “Well, I guess we’ll see, huh?”
I touched his hand to stop him. “Rhys—”
He smiled at me gently. “I appreciate that you’re concerned about not pressuring me. But hon, I made it through middle school and high school without giving into a shitload of peer pressure. Like, Shania smoked cigarettes, my best friend Dougy was a pothead, everyone I knew drank like fuckin’ fish, and several dudes I knew well got into meth and crack. I was the goody-goody in my town. Didn’t get drunk pretty much ever, didn’t smoke, didn’t do drugs. Didn’t skip school, didn’t go to none of the parties in Old Man Fenner’s back forty.”
“Old man’s who’s what?” I asked.
“Old Man Fenner’s back forty,” he repeated. “James Fenner, he was—still is, far as I know—one of the most successful farmers in the area. Owned like two hundred, two hundred ’n fifty acres of the most prime farm land, had it fenced off into chunks of forty acres, most of it south of the county road, with like, two chunks of forty north of it. The chunk of forty that was north of the county road was way back, out of sight of the road and the town, and it was the party spot for the kids in town. Any given night after sunset, there’d be trucks parked all over the field, kids sitting in trees, maybe a bonfire going.”
“Didn’t Old Man Fenner do anything about it? Seems like a liability.”
“Oh, he knew,” Rhys said, “but it was an unspoken rule that you cleaned up after yourself. You didn’t leave cans or bottles or trash, you put out your fire, and you didn’t do donuts and tear shit up. If you didn’t fuck up the field, he wouldn’t come checking, and nobody ever broke those rules. The adults all knew, because the back forty had been the party spot for decades. Generations of people from my town had their first drink in that field, their first kiss, and for a lot of us, lost our virginity there. The deal was, you didn’t drive around town acting a fool and being vandals and jackasses and hooligans. You got your kicks out in the field, far from the houses, where no one would get hurt and shit wouldn’t get broken. The sheriff and deputies left us alone as long as we kept a lid on it. And we, in turn, had a place to go be kids.”
I frowned at him. “You say ‘we,’ but you said you didn’t go to the parties.”
He grinned, somewhere between amused and sheepish. “Well, I did go sometimes. But there’d be at least a handful of kids in that field every night, and probably a few dozen on the weekends. It was pretty much the only thing for anyone between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one to do in town, so it’s what you did. So yeah, I went. But not every night or every weekend, and I usually only had a couple drinks. I almost never drank to get hammered, but for a lot of the kids I grew up with that was the only goal, and as frequently as possible.”
I nodded. “So you’ve always just naturally been a man of moderation.”
“More or less, yeah,” he agreed.
I indicated the paraphernalia in his hand. “Well, be moderate in taking a little puff. See what you think.”
Rhys laughed. “Enough talk, huh?”
He put the pipe to his lips, flipped his thumb over the wheel of the lighter; the flame erupted to life with a soft whump, and he touched the flame the tip of the tube. There was a soft crackling, and he drew his cheeks in concave and inhaled. Except he did it wrong, and the pipe was still in his lips when he inhaled and got another bolt of the smoke. Immediately, his lungs reacted, forcing him to cough, but coughing only meant he sucked more smoke in, and then he was hacking and his eyes were watering.
I watched him with amusement. “You were supposed to pull it away from your mouth before you inhaled,” I said, my voice wry.
He laughed as the hacking spell tapered off. “Yeah, no kidding.”
I took the fake ceramic cigarette from him and took a hit with familiar ease. Inhaled, held it, and exhaled the smoke out of my mouth, inhaling it again through my nostrils before spewing it out again—showing off a little, I admit.
“How you feeling, Rhys?” I asked.
“Um, fine, so far?” he said.
I nodded. “Give it a few minutes.” We sat in silence for a while. “You said you have a sister?” I asked.
“SEER-sha.”
I blinked at him. “Say what?”
“It’s an Irish name. S-A-O-I-R-S-E, pronounced SEER-sha.” He laughed, sounding somewhat self-conscious. “My mom has always been a little obsessed with Ireland. She’s first-generation American, her parents moved here from Ireland when they were first married, ended up in the town where I grew up, outside Lexington, Kentucky, had Mom. Mom met Dad and had Saoirse at eighteen, and thus the cycle began. Except Saoirse was pretty much my idol and example growing up—she’s three years older than me. She kept her nose clean, stayed off drugs and alcohol, did good in school, worked her ass off during the school year and had two jobs in the summer to save up enough money for a car, and then enough money to move the day she graduated. And she did exactly that, just like I did—the day she got her diploma, she left town and didn’t look back. She’s living in Dallas, Texas, and she’s…” He rolled a shoulder uncomfortably. “Ah hell, she ain’t embarrassed about it, so I shouldn’t be. She’s stripping to pay her way through med school.”
I widened my eyes, and hunted for something to say. “Med school. Wow. Good for her.”
He laughed. “Don’t hold back on me, now, Torie. You can say what you’re thinking.”
“I guess maybe it seems a little ironic that she kept herself out of trouble to leave your hometown, only to end up a stripper.”
He chuckled. “I guess there is a certain irony in it. But the club she works at sponsors this competition or something where the dancers get scholarships, and I guess she’s pretty good because she’s getting a scholarship, plus she got good grades and is getting more money in loans and grants and scholarships from the federal government, so she’s gettin’ through med school with pretty minimal debt. And I guess, to her, that’s worth being a stripper.” He laughed. “And, truth is, when I said she stayed out of trouble, I meant the chemical and pregnancy kind. She was kind of, um…fast and loose, you might say. Not exactly concerned with her reputation, and I guarantee you, tell anyone we grew up with that Saoirse is stripping her way through college, not a one would be in the least surprised. She’s smart as hell, she’s just not overly concerned with virtue or modesty. Part of the reason I avoided the back forty parties was because I stood a good chance of seeing my sister parading around topless. She just didn’t much care about folks seeing her topless, if not naked.”
I nodded, shrugged. “I’m…well, not prudish or overly modest, but not extroverted like Lexie, or not giving a shit like Cassie.”
“Takes all kinds to make the world go round, so no shame in being who you are.” He shrugged. “It is a little weird to me that my sister is a stripper but, like I said, she ain’t embarrassed by it, and hell, she’s almost proud of it. Some girls wait tables and pour drinks to get through college, she takes her clothes
off. In the end, she’s doin’ what works for her, and I ain’t about to judge her for it.”
“Are you close to her?”
He tilted his head side to side. “Kind of. We talk pretty regular, every week or two. Text each other now and then, keep up with each other. She’s in Texas and I’m here, so I wouldn’t say we’re, like, besties, but I love her and if she needs me, I’m here for her.”
He was smirking. His eyes were glassy.
“How you feeling now?” I asked
He laughed. Nodded. “Pretty good. Just sorta…whoosh.” He rocketed his hand in an upward arc. Laughed again. “Whatever the hell that means.”
I chuckled. “It means you, sir, are stoned.”
He nodded. “I guess I was expecting something more…nefarious. This is just…mellow.”
“Right? There’s a reason you never hear about a stoner getting in bar fights.”
I peered at the tip of the one-hitter, saw there was a bit of green left, so I finished it off with another partial hit. Tapped the ash loose, put the lighter and pipe in the pocket of Rhys’s sweatpants.
You wouldn’t think ratty old sweatpants and a threadbare T-shirt could make a girl feel sexy, but somehow…these did. The sweats fit like my tightest pair of yoga pants, form-fitting on my ass, hips, and thighs, and I hadn’t bothered with underwear since I was planning on taking Rhys up on his offer of laundering my clothes. No underwear, no bra—not that I ever wore a bra, anyway. I hated the damn things and wore them as infrequently as possible.
So, like, never.
The shirt fit about the same as the pants: tight, and it was see-through, and my areola were playing peekaboo—or should I say, peek-a-boob? I know he noticed—I’d caught him staring.
And liked it.
I had a weird, out of character, impulse to peel the shirt off and see what he did. I restrained the impulse, thank god, but it’d been a close one.
Max was the only guy who’d seen me naked since I was a little girl, and we tended to do our messing around in the dark with all the lights off, so I wasn’t sure he could even pick out my naked body in a lineup.
A Real Goode Time Page 5
