by Casey Hagen
“I would date you.”
Somewhere in the past few minutes, her eyes had cleared a fraction so he couldn’t dismiss her words as a drunken accident. He wouldn’t necessarily put a date on his calendar either.
“You would, huh?” he said, feeling the need to give her an out.
“Sure,” she said with a shrug, her hair falling over her shoulder, the curled ends gliding over the top of her breast. “You seem to be honest, and you aren’t a cheater. So, you get naked for other women, but like you said, it’s a job.”
“Hey, man, I hate to interrupt,” Stephen said with a hand on his shoulder. “But the redhead over there paid for a dance from you, and she’s chomping at the bit so when you’re done, if you could head over.”
Of course she did. She’d been struggling to get her hands on him all night. “I’ll be right there.”
“I’ll let her know.”
“You have to go, I guess,” she said, picking at the edge of her napkin.
He pinched the curl at the end of her hair and rubbed the strands between his fingers. “For now, but I’ll stop in again.” He glanced up at the table of women. “Ladies, duty calls. Do me a favor, don’t let her go kissing any strangers tonight.”
“Does that include you?” Cassidy asked, the look in her eye telling him she hadn’t missed a bit of their conversation no matter how hard he’d tried to keep it private.
“It most definitely includes me,” he said. He locked eyes with Mabel Lee, needing to see her every reaction to his words. “When I kiss her, I want her stone-cold sober and with me for every last second of it.”
Her mouth fell open. Then snapped shut. Then fell open again.
He stretched his tank top right back over his head, ready to start from scratch before turning away.
Cassidy’s taunting words following him as he went.
“Well, well, well, forget the list; it looks like Mabel Lee just bagged herself the hottest stripper in all of Georgia,” Aurora said.
He forced a smile on his face as he approached his customer, already bristling at the gleam in her eye. Would Mabel Lee be watching him? Would she be trying to cross off more items on that damn list?
He got what her friends were trying to do, but damn, in a sea of women, all screaming and thirsty as hell, Mabel Lee stood out with a hint of class and calm. In a room vibrating with sex, she made a man think of holding hands, opening doors, and old-fashioned big moves…like being bold enough to put an arm around her.
The whole time he danced for the redhead, he stole glances at Mabel Lee.
With each glance, she transitioned more and more from the sloppy mess to the painfully shy woman he’d first spotted.
Good.
Drinking was fine, but losing control, not so much. That shit could be downright dangerous more often than not. They had a strict policy here as to the treatment of women, but he didn’t fool himself into thinking rules were a hundred percent effective. The cold, hard truth was, they just weren’t.
She had four friends with her, but the ladies who’d brought her were all drinking too so anything could happen.
The redhead sitting before him had scooted her ass onto the edge of her seat and wandered her fingertips over his nipple while she gave him fuck-me eyes from under fake lashes.
His cock couldn’t care less. But if it had been Mabel Lee’s neat cropped fingernails catching the edge of his nipple like that, he’d be ready to drill a hole into the ground.
Attraction aside, he had a job to do, so he shot his hands through the redhead’s hair and gave it a tug.
She gasped, and more bills emerged from her bra, landing in the thong he’d revealed under his jeans.
Mabel Lee glanced in his direction, studying him as he bent over and pressed his cheek to the cheek of his current client.
She watched with an openly curious expression and a tilt of her head, no jealousy flashing over her features at all as he straddled the customer before him, rolling his hips against hers with only the barest of touches.
For once, he wondered if maybe he’d gotten it all wrong after all. Could he successfully date? Did he just need to find a woman strong enough to separate reality from fantasy and trust him to be able to do the same?
He brushed the bead of sweat from his forehead as the beat faded away and the dance finished.
“How about another, hot stuff?” she said with her fingertips digging into his ass.
“Hey, Viper, we need you,” Joe called.
“I’d love to, but duty calls, Julia.” He used her name, knowing that the small gesture would smooth any ruffled feathers when he walked away. Sliding up his jeans, he followed Joe to the back.
“The A/C is down,” Joe said.
“I thought it was getting hot out there.”
“Yeah, it’s going to be a damn mess if we don’t get it up and running. I know women tend to love their men wet, but I don’t think pouring sweat and sitting in the salty splash zone of the human variety is quite what they have in mind,” Joe said, his forehead creased with frustration. “I hate to ask, but since HVAC is your specialty, I figured you’d be quicker than calling a company.”
“No problem, I’ll get right on it.” He’d gotten into the habit of driving his work truck almost everywhere because nothing sucked more than being called during an emergency and having to lose precious time switching vehicles. The habit had saved his ass more than once and it looked like tonight, it might just save Joe’s.
An hour later, he had the unit torn apart and was heading to the back lot for his soldering kit. He rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the frustration building inside of him as the clock ticked away and the air conditioning issue grew more complicated the deeper he dug into the unit. Normally, he’d lose himself in this. He’d go through the checklist of potential issues, starting small, working his way up to the big stuff until he sniffed out the problem and solved it.
But tonight, all he could think about was getting the damn problem solved and fast so he could get back out to the floor and see what kind of trouble Mabel Lee was getting herself into.
He shouldn’t care. He’d spent a handful of minutes with her, nothing more, but every last second sparked his curiosity leaving him hungry for more.
Where did she live? What did she do? How did she end up with such a tight group so different from her? Was she really one of them or did they keep her in the circle for their entertainment?
Okay, that was a shitty thought, but he had to consider it. The idea that they kept her around to be their source of entertainment filled him with cold, hard anger. The need to go out and check on her screamed in him stronger than ever.
He intercepted Stephen on his way to the back door. “Hey, the woman who won a free dance still here?”
“I think they just paid their tab, why?”
“Shit, I wanted to get back out there and talk to her.”
“Oooh, are you hot for the prude?” Stephen laughed as though his words were nothing more than a joke and couldn’t possibly be true.
“None of your business. And yes,” he said, biting the cap off a Sharpie and searching for a piece of paper. “Look, I can’t get out there just yet. The temp is shooting up, and I need to get this compressor going. Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” Stephen said.
Any other time, he’d be buried up to his waist by little scraps of paper, but now that he actually needed one, he had nothing. Not even a napkin.
“Shit, I need something to write on.”
“Here, use this,” Stephen said, tossing him one of the Big Shift condoms they’d gotten in for promo.
I clutched the wrapper in my hand and glared at him. “Guy, I’m not going to give the girl my number on a rubber.”
Stephen craned his neck and winced. “You’d better do something because they just got up, and they’re headed for the door.”
“Shit.”
“Hurry up, dude,” Stephen said.
He scrawled h
is number across the tagline on the back: Big Shift gets you hot and gives you the gift of fanning that fire responsibly.
“Don’t let this get into anyone else’s hands,” Kellen said, holding out the rubber.
“Never,” Stephen said with a grin.
“Thanks,”
“Anytime. I hope she gives you a call.”
“You and me both, guy. You and me both,” Kellen said, wishing he had a chance to snag one more glance.
4
“Mabel Lee Montgomery! What on earth is this doing in your purse?”
Mabel Lee bobbled the coffee cake balancing on her palm as she peeled off the plastic wrap with the other. She glanced over her shoulder to find her mom, one hand on her hip and her mouth pinched with disapproval.
She barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
Barely.
Would the woman ever stop calling out her entire name in exasperation? It didn’t have to be today, but maybe if God could give her some kind of timeline on when it might happen, she could have hope to hold on to. When she turned thirty? Forty, maybe?
Or…they could address just why it was that her mama felt like she had the right to dig into her purse. But…one thing at a time. “What is it, Mama?” she said, fighting the exasperation that tried to creep into her voice.
“This!” Her mama held up a square wrapper pinched between her fingers.
She squinted, leaned in, and choked on the heart that had jumped out of her chest and into the back of her throat at the condom with the words Big Shift and a phone number scrawled diagonally across the front.
“Oh, that,” Mabel Lee said, pretending her lungs hadn’t drained of air like a balloon deflating and whizzing around the room.
She set the cake down and sifted through the cobwebs in her foggy brain, courtesy of liquor-laden dessert in a glass, but couldn’t recall any condoms from the night before.
She remembered the skin.
She remembered Viper’s dark-green eyes.
She’d been haunted all night by the memory of his lingering touches and long looks.
Then there was that tan skin stretched over hard muscles.
But no condom.
“Now, would you believe someone had the nerve to drop that in the donation plate this morning,” she said with an exasperated shake of her head that would make her mama proud. “I’m telling you, I don’t know what the world is coming to these days.”
Turning her back to her mama, she winced as the very words she’d heard come out of her mama’s mouth fell out of her own. Sometimes the truth drove through her like a freight train: the more she sounded like her mama and the more she toed the line her mama wanted her to, the more she lost herself in the process.
She needed to put a stop to it and make a stand. But maybe that stand would be better built on some sort of foundation. Any foundation really, and not a condom with a phone number on it.
When her mama made small talk earlier by asking her what they’d done to celebrate Aurora, Mabel Lee hadn’t lied. She just hadn’t said anything at all. And really, why should she have to? She was a grown woman. She’d be twenty-five in a month. She lived on her own. She had a job. She didn’t need her mama’s permission for anything.
It all seemed so easy when she pleaded her case in her own head, but when the time came for the words to form on her lips, self-preservation kicked in.
“So why exactly was it in your purse? Hmmm?”
Mabel Lee dusted the crumbs off her palms, tucked her hair behind her ear, and took her mama’s biceps in her hands. “Now look, Mama, don’t go getting upset,” she said in a hushed tone of righteous indignation that would make her mama’s church group proud. “Preacher Dawson was on his way in, and with the way his health has been lately, I couldn’t very well let him find it, now could I? So I tossed it into my purse before he could see.”
“You should have just tossed it in the trash where it belongs,” her mama said in a scathing tone.
“There wasn’t a trash can around.”
Her mama levelled her with a shrewd stare. “Well, there’s one right over there so you go on now and put this right where it belongs. Yeesh. What kind of person writes their phone number on such a thing? And from that sinful club no less.”
Mabel Lee slipped the condom from her mama’s hand and headed for the trash can.
She’d thought Viper would be back. He’d made it seem as though he would be and that he’d been interested in her. And not just as some woman stuffing money in his underwear, but really interested.
But the minute he’d slipped behind the curtain after the redhead had her way with him, he hadn’t returned. It wasn’t long after that the club air had grown hot and stagnant, a clear indicator they were having some sort of cooling issue and leaving Aurora with a queasy stomach.
She hadn’t seen a single condom that night. At least not that she could recall. So where did the phone number come from? Was it his? Did he maybe come back after all, and she was too drunk to remember?
She’d thought she sobered up relatively quickly after drinking the club soda concoction he had ordered, but maybe not.
Or had she snagged someone else’s number while she was there?
One thing was for certain, she needed to get ahold of her girls to find out.
Or she could call the number. Except, she needed to make sure it wound up in the trash can just like her mama expected.
With one last look she studied the number, knowing after four years of college that cramming was definitely not her strong suit. Especially when the last number was smudged along the edge. It might have been a four, or a nine, hard to tell with the smear along the top.
She dropped it into the can and smiled at her mom. “There. Now, let’s get these goodies set up. Our parish will be pouring in any minute to enjoy the spread you’ve made for them.”
“You’re a good girl, Mabel Lee. You know, I was terrified for you. Since your dad has been gone, God rest his soul, I’ve been so worried about you turning toward sin, but you’ll do nicely for a Godly young man. You just wait and see.”
Mabel Lee tried to take the words as a compliment. After all, in her mama’s eyes, her words were all meant to be positive, but all they did was remind Mabel Lee time and again that while she loved the Lord and loved the people of her parish, she didn’t want to spend her life in servitude to the church.
Adventure called to her. Maybe it was a hint of nostalgia, maybe just childhood fantasy, but here she was, almost halfway to thirty, and it was still those adventures of the teen years before college, jobs, and 401Ks came a-calling, adventures she’d missed out on, that she desperately longed for.
And it was the woman before her, with her kind smiles, and well-meaning words sticking like barbs in Mabel Lee’s heart that made her yearn for a chance to do each and every one.
What was it like to have a guy actually pick her up and take her to a drive-in alone instead of double dating? She wanted to skinny dip at the lake, camp under the stars, make out with a beautiful, warm man under warm blankets with a bonfire crackling nearby.
She wanted to feel the racing heart that matched her own of a man who wanted her completely. A man who only had eyes for her. Not someone trying to find the perfect wife, the perfect mama, the perfect supporter for his dreams while she cast aside her own.
Was that too much to ask?
She gave her mom a quick smile that felt brittle. “Thank you, Mama.”
The doors burst open, and Mildred Carnes headed for them. “Well, look at you, Mabel Lee, darling. You look just radiant this morning. You’re positively glowing. Is there a new man responsible for putting that pep in your step?”
The eighty-year-old matriarch of the gossip chain that was Willette Baptist’s greatest pride or shame, depending upon who you asked, studied her with a devious look in her eye. One that Mabel Lee knew had more to do with finding dirt than actually being concerned about her future prospects.
Mabel Lee smil
ed. “No man, Mrs. Carnes. Just a good time with friends and excitement for Aurora. She’s getting married in two weeks you know.”
“Yes, yes. To that Jeff McCoy, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s the one,” she said with a nod.
She smirked, her wrinkled chin wobbling with the gesture. “His father is the one who recommended Stuart Mouldon to your father for the church renovations.”
Mabel Lee fought the bile that rose up in her throat at the mention of the man who’d scammed her father out of thirty thousand dollars of the church’s money. “He is? Well, huh. I hadn’t realized that,” she said, adopting the same monotone, neutral reaction she’d perfected over the years whenever talk of her father’s misstep came up.
Not that it would have mattered if she had known. No one was responsible for what happened to her father other than the man who’d taken the church’s money and run. As much as Mrs. Carnes and probably half of the old biddies in their congregation loved to twist that knife into an old would, keeping it from ever really healing, the fault lay with the man who let addiction lead him astray.
Mabel Lee had spent the better part of seven years being polite and neutral, doing everything in her power to refrain from lashing out and letting the Devil take her tongue when subtle, and often not so subtle, jabs flew her way.
Of course, there was still that part of her that wouldn’t mind if karma found Mildred, and her bowels let loose in the middle of service, filling her support hose with turd.
After all, the woman didn’t mind spewing it from her calculating mouth.
She held the gold cross at her neck and took a deep breath, letting the anger ease from her heart. The problem with years of being polite at every turn was she had to vent at some point, and she just didn’t know how much longer she could bite her tongue.
“Yes, well, you’d do good to be careful who you take advice from. We don’t want you being led astray, now do we?” Mildren said with that keen eye that dolled out harsh judgment aimed right at her.
Her mama still struggled with seeking approval. The last thing she wanted was to embarrass her further since despite the judgment, their congregation had been her anchor, even more so without her father by her side.