He was working behind the counter, handing out beers and taking money as fast as he could while the thirsty mob clamored for more. For some reason, the Juliette fireworks display set off a bizarre phenomenon that probably rivaled the ending of prohibition in the way that seemingly-sane adults insanely craved plastic Solo cups full of warm, flat beer, salivating for it like rabid dogs. Usually three people worked the garden and it was still almost impossible to keep up with the demanding crowd, but George appeared to be manning it alone.
“You want some help?” she asked him when she finally worked her way to the counter.
He shot a quick glance in her direction. “Love some.”
She held his eyes for the briefest moment in apology and he held hers in acceptance, and then she hopped onto the counter and swung her legs over to his side. They worked side-by-side in a frenzied pace for the next hour, occasionally accidentally bumping into each other as they reached for the cooler, or the tap, or the cash register, but otherwise without communicating. The crowd eventually started to thin out and Olivia could divide her attention on more than one thing at a time.
“How have you been?” she asked, lost for anything else to say.
“Good… You?”
“Good.”
“That’s good,” George said.
Five minutes of awkward silence followed while Olivia searched for something else to say to him. She came up with, “Read any good books lately?”
George just stared at her, slightly open-mouthed and dumbfounded.
“I guess that’s a no,” she muttered to herself and helped a few late-comers get their drunk started.
When they left, George relaxed against the counter and, with a twinkle in his eye, he asked, “Seen any scary movies lately?”
Olivia laughed. “Actually, now that you mention it, I have.”
“Really?” George smiled, and her face flushed in response.
Damn, he was fine.
“Really.”
“And here you are, still alive. Will wonders never cease?”
With her heart aflutter, Olivia took a step closer to him. She drew in a breath, preparing to delve into the dirty details of her and Mark Wahlberg’s torrid love affair, but before she could utter a single word, George’s eyes left hers and settled over her right shoulder. The smile fell from his face, replaced by something entirely different. Something other than good fortune.
“George!” Yvette brushed past Olivia and into George’s arms. “I’m so sorry I’m late.”
George’s eyes shot to Olivia as he hugged the wench, but he quickly looked away.
Olivia’s eyes narrowed and her lips pursed tight together.
“I had to take poor Muffin home. Some kind of wild animal jumped out of the bushes and started humping away at my poor, little Yorkie! It was like he was possessed by the devil or something. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.” Yvette started to cry and hugged George tighter. “It was horrible!”
A slow, evil smile spread across Olivia’s face. Chester.
George kept his eyes adverted from Olivia’s. “Is Muffin ok?”
“I think so. She’s just a little traumatized.”
“It’ll be ok,” George assured Yvette as he rubbed her back.
Olivia grabbed a beer out of the cooler and wandered off in the direction of the bandstand. George didn’t need her help anymore. He had Yvette. George and Yvette, sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n—
“Hello, Olivia.”
Fuck!
Olivia sighed and turned to face him. “Hey, Mitch.”
Her night was getting better and better by the second. She twisted the cap off her beer and chugged.
“How are you?”
“Good.” Olivia nodded and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You?”
“Good.”
Olivia’s miserable life was starting to feel a little like perpetual déjà vu and it made her cranky. “What do you want, Mitch?”
“Nothing. Just wanted to say hey.”
“Hey,” she said with an angry roll of her eyes. As she brushed past him, he reached out and grabbed her arm. “Don’t touch me!”
Mitch immediately let go and held his hands up. “Sorry.”
“Prick,” Olivia muttered. She started to leave again, but he called after her.
“You want to dance?”
Olivia whipped around to him. “Why the hell would I ever want to dance with you?”
“Because we were good at it.”
“Yeah,” she admitted with a sad smile as memories hit her in painful waves. “We were.”
Olivia turned her back on him again, and this time when he called after her she kept walking. She headed toward the parking lot with a determined stride and her head held high, but when she got to her car she couldn’t fight the emotion any longer. Damn him!
Hot tears stung her eyes, pouring down her cheeks as she struggled to keep from completely losing it right there in the gravel lot. She fumbled with her keys, finally ramming the right one into the ignition, and cranked. But the Buick didn’t roar to life like it usually did. It just clicked. Click.
She tried it again. Click.
“Goddamn motherfucking piece of shit!” she screamed, exploding into a full-blown Olivia tantrum. The kind she hadn’t had in a very, very long time. She lost all sense of time and space as her anger poured out and inflicted itself on the poor Buick.
A rapping on the window snapped her to attention, but the rage was still unleashing. She threw open the car door and jumped out with a, “What the fuck do you want, asshole?” spewing from her mouth, landing squarely on an officer of the law.
“Have you been drinking tonight, ma’am?” the officer asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.” She stood tall, defiant and pissed as hell, and she got right in his face. “What are you going to do about it?”
He shined his flashlight into her eyes. “License and registration.”
“For what? I’m fucking parked!”
“Your key is in the ignition.” He moved the beam of the flashlight from her face to her keys and back to her face. “License and registration. Please.”
“Bite me.”
“Ma’am, I’m going to ask one more time… License. And registration.”
“Kiss... My…” She turned and bent, dropping her pants and flashing her lily-white, bare-assed beauty for the entire world to see. “Ass.”
Two-point-seven seconds later, Olivia found herself sprawled across the hood of her car, the officer pinning her down with one massive hand. Her hands were cuffed tight behind her back and her pants were still pulled down around her ankles.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
“You have the right to remain silent,” the officer began.
“Oh, come on!” Olivia grunted out in anger.
“If you give up that right, anything you say can and will—”
“At least let me pull up my pants!”
“—be used against you in a court of law.”
“You asshole! Pull up my goddamn pants!”
“You have the right to an attorney.”
“Son of a bitch!” Olivia tried to lift herself off the car but the officer held her down.
“If you cannot afford an attorney—”
“You fucker!” Olivia screamed at the top of her lungs, and then she continued screaming.
People stopped and stared, murmured to each other, and took pictures with camera phones, but no one came to Olivia’s rescue. When the officer finished reading her Miranda rights, Olivia panicked. Fight-or-flight kicked in, and she chose fight. She twisted her body and bit the officer’s arm as hard as she could.
He cried out in surprise, momentarily stunned, but then he chose the ‘fight’ response as well and hit her behind the knees with his baton. She screamed out again, this time in searing pain as her legs went out from under her. She crumpled onto the car and sobbed.
“What the
hell is going on here?” a male voice bellowed out from behind Olivia.
Before she knew what was happening, she had been lifted off the car, her pants were back up around her hips, and she was sitting in the back of a squad car, behind the cage. She fell over on the seat with her hands still secured behind her back, and she cried. What the fuck had her life become that she dared to moon a policeman and got beat with a Billy club?
She should have gone home with Eugene.
After what felt like an eternity, the door opened and a younger, nicer-looking officer pulled her to her feet. He unlocked the handcuffs, led her to the front passenger seat and put her back into the police car without a word. Seconds later, he appeared at the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel.
“What’s your name?” he asked. His face was angry, but his tone was soft.
“Olivia,” she said in a voice so low she might have said it in her head.
“Olivia what?”
“Olivia Newton John Hanson,” she said, feeling the same shame she felt every time she had to give her full name. She royally hated her mother.
The officer sighed and turned in his seat to look her square in the eye. “Don’t play games with me.”
“I’m not.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “It’s really my name. Fucking laugh at me if you want. Everyone else does.”
“I’m not going to laugh,” he said. And he didn’t. “Where do you live, Ms. Hanson?”
“Valley View.”
He put the car into drive and Olivia panicked again. She had no idea why, but she did.
“Don’t take me home!” she pleaded and made a desperate grab for him.
His hand flew up to stop her from touching him and she flinched.
“Hey, whoa,” he said in a soft, tender tone. He threw the car into park and turned to face her again. “I’m not going to hit you. I promise.”
Olivia nodded, but scooted further away from him.
“Ms. Hanson, I have to take you somewhere because you can’t stay here. You have two choices. I can either take you home and you can forget this whole night ever happened, or I can take you into the station where you will be charged, at the very least, with public intoxication. Which would you prefer?”
Olivia’s eyes started to tear up and her throat got tight as she weighed her options. She didn’t want to go to the station, and she sure as hell didn’t want to be fingerprinted and thrown in the slammer, but she also didn’t want Eugene to see her when she was upset. Until she stopped fucking crying, there was no way in hell she was going to go home.
“Could you maybe drive around a little bit first, and then take me home?”
He drew in a deep breath and held it in as he debated. When he finally exhaled, he reached for his radio. “Seventeen.”
“Go ahead, Seventeen.”
“Disregard my last call. I’m back on that ten-ten.”
“Copy that.”
The officer turned down the radio. “Where do you want to go?”
Olivia dried her eyes with the back of her hand. “Is ten-ten the code for crazy woman in car?” she asked with a huff.
“No.” He smiled. “Ten-ten means I’m off-duty.”
“But you’re not… Are you?”
“Technically, I am. I was already off-duty and on my way home when I happened across your little scene in the parking lot, and as soon as I drop you off I will be on my way home again. I’m skipping the non-essential information with dispatch.”
“I’m making you work late,” she said.
“It’s ok. I didn’t have any plans for the night besides sleeping.”
“Are you tired?” she asked, but somehow she already knew he was. She could feel it, as though they shared in the same exhaustion.
“Yes, I am.”
She felt along the door for the handle. “I’ll just walk and you can go home and go to bed.”
“How about we go get some coffee and you can tell me what’s going on with you?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He put the car in gear, rolled out of the parking lot, and ten minutes later they were sitting across from each other in a booth at Denny’s, sipping coffee and waiting for their midnight-breakfast order. Once they were out of the car and into the light, and Olivia got a good look at him, she was convinced she knew him from somewhere. There was something about his eyes.
“So, Ms. Hanson,” the officer began, but Olivia cut him off.
“Call me Olivia. Or, just plain Liv.”
“All right then. Olivia.”
She liked the way her name sounded when he said it. “What’s your name?”
“Cletus Wade,” he said. “You can call me Clete.”
“Cletus? Are you serious?” Olivia laughed. “You don’t look like a Cletus.”
“What does a Cletus look like?” he asked with a smile.
She liked the way he smiled, too. “I don’t know… Old, fat, corn hat, one tooth, and suspenders?”
Clete laughed. “I hope I don’t look like that.”
She shook her head. Clete definitely did not look like that. Clete was hot. He wasn’t hot-hot, but he was cute-hot, kinda like a best friend’s brother you would crush on in high school. Hot, but not intimidating. And he was big. Not like giant-big—he wasn’t overly tall. He was broad-big. Not fat. Broad. Like maybe he had more than his fair share of muscles. Which, based on Olivia’s experience from sleeping with a wrestler in high school once, he more than likely had a teeny, weenie weenie. She had to stop herself from peeking under the table to try and check.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I turned the big three-O last Saturday.”
“You’re old.”
“Ancient.” He smiled.
Yeah, he was hot. His fingers were kinda thick, too. She liked thick fingers on men. There was nothing worse than holding hands with a guy who had girl-hands.
She sipped her coffee and shuddered. Seven packets of sugar and a healthy dose of creamer later, she asked, “Where do you live?”
“Why?”
“You said you were on your way home and Riverwalk’s kinda not on the way to anywhere. So either you live in your cruiser, or you were lying to me,” she said.
His eyebrows knitted together. “You’re pretty observant.”
She tapped her temple with her finger. “Mind like a steel trap.”
He was blonde. Kind of a dirty blonde, like his hair couldn’t decide if it wanted to be blonde or brown. It was thick and looked soft. She wanted to touch it. Her hand came up to do exactly that, and she quickly clinched it into a fist to stop it from reaching across the table.
“I live in South,” he said. “Off of Lincoln Drive.”
“Apartment or house?”
“House.”
“Own or rent?”
“Own.”
“Were you dropped on your head as a baby or something?” she asked.
Clete’s face betrayed his confusion from her question. He would make a horrible poker player. His overtly-honest face was probably why he was driving a squad car and wasn’t a detective.
“Why would you willingly choose to buy a house in South?” she clarified.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked, still confused.
“Never mind.” She sighed. If he was too stupid to figure it out, she wasn’t going to waste time explaining it to him. Clete would be a Souther for life, just like Kenny.
He wasn’t nearly as hot anymore.
The waitress came to the table with their food. She set an omelet with vegetables in it in front of Clete. Olivia wrinkled her nose. Peppers—yuck. Olivia had been smart and ordered pancakes, and she dove into them with gusto. They ate in relative silence, except for the occasional questions Olivia peppered Clete with. She learned his parents were still married, his mom a teacher and his dad a welder. His sister was older than he was, also a teacher, and lived in Denver with her husband and three little boys. He was divorced, shared custody with his ex of his s
even-year-old daughter, and he had sole custody of a dog named Juicy Fruit.
“What’s your daughter’s name?” Olivia asked when she finally pushed her plate away. Clete had been finished eating for quite some time. He sat back in the booth, relaxed in posture, almost serene as he patiently waited for her to finish, as if he had all the time in the world.
“Allison.”
“Let me guess, you call her Allie?”
He smiled. “I do.”
“I could tell.”
“How?”
“I can see it in your eyes when you talk about her that she’s an Allie.”
The smile stayed on his face but his eyebrows knitted again as he tried to figure out Olivia. She got that look from people a lot. Most gave up trying to figure her out after about five minutes. Clete seemed more determined than most, which is why she asked him her next question.
“Why would a man tell a woman he was gay if he wasn’t?”
The smile fell off of Clete’s face and his brow furrowed deeper. “I have no idea. Why?”
“Well, I don’t have a clue, that’s why I asked you.”
“Did someone lie to you about being gay?” Clete guessed.
She shrugged.
“Well,” he said slowly as he took a deep breath. “If he really, truly is not gay, but he told you he was, I hate to say it, but it was probably to keep you at arm’s length.”
“That’s what I figured.” Olivia swirled her fork in the left-over syrup coating her plate.
“Do you know for a fact that he’s straight?”
“Yep.” She sighed. “I have proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
“A whole big, fat binder full of proof. I haven’t looked at it all yet, but it doesn’t matter. I saw and heard enough to know the truth. And, the truth is, he lied to me.”
“I’m sorry, Olivia,” Clete said. And he did look truly sorry.
“You know the really shitty thing? He passed me up for this little tramp with a huge bubble ass. You know how fat she’s gonna be in ten years? She’s gonna need her own fucking zip code, that’s how fat she’s gonna be.” Olivia laughed.
Clete’s eyebrows knitted together again but he didn’t look nearly as amused with her as he had a moment before. “Are you ready to go home?”
Olivia Page 12
