Super nachos it would be. And another pitcher of margaritas for sure.
She got so wrapped up in the Cupcake story that she didn’t touch our nachos, so she got tipsy quicker than usual. Not going to lie, I fucking loved it. I noticed something I’d never let myself notice before, which was that when she got a little drunk, she touched me more than normal—she’d reach out and touch my forearm or shove me when she was kidding. But every touch now was fucking electric. After what I’d seen that morning, there was no going back.
“Eat up,” I told her, pushing the nacho platter toward her.
“You named her Cupcake! I love cupcakes!”
Exactly. I picked out a choice chip, piled high with chicken and once melted but now cooled cheese. I added a dollop of guacamole and some sour cream and brought it toward her like parents do when they’re trying to get their kids to eat a spoonful of peas. “Open sesame.”
She didn’t even bite it in two, but ate the whole thing at once, and then kept on spraying me with questions, while shielding her full mouth with her hand. How big is she? How much does she weigh? What color is her fur? Finally, “Is she okay?”
I nodded. “So they said.”
But Rosie didn’t look convinced. She looked seriously at our side order of onion rings and picked out a crispy one. “Seawater can be very dangerous for dogs.”
I took an onion ring, too, and turned my margarita on the coaster, spreading the condensation so it made a circle on the cardboard. “They told me she’d be fine. Said they’re going to try to track down her owner.”
Rosie frowned, disappointed like I’d just hosed down her parade with a power washer. But as usual, when something didn’t quite line up with her plan, she ignored it. “When you adopt her, we can go to Petco! Just think! You picking out pink blankets for a dog that weighs as much as an organically raised chicken!”
I loaded up another chip and brought it to her mouth. “Who says it has to be pink?”
She pointed to her lightly tanned chest. “This girl! Right here,” she managed to say around a mouthful of nacho, with guacamole on her lip.
That girl. Right there.
In that moment, I knew that what had happened hadn’t been a fucking one-time sucker-punch lightning strike. It hadn’t just been that I saw her naked and got swallowed up by desire. It was real, and it wasn’t sudden at all. She really was the most beautiful woman in the world. I’d always wanted her. Only now, I knew what I wanted.
Rosie pulled out her phone and looked up something, typing away with her thumbs. She turned her screen to face me, and it was covered in screenshots of Chihuahua mixes. She flipped through one after the other, and I shook my head, until she landed on one that was a dead ringer for Cupcake. “That’s her. She’s cuter, but that’s the idea.”
She slumped back in the booth and pressed her phone to her cleavage. Christ. “Oh-em-gee, Maxie. Think of how the ladies will fall all over you. You!” she said, with a gentle press of my shoulder. “With a Chihuahua! Maybe we could even put her in a dress!”
“One step at a time.” Ladies? There are no ladies. Only you. “Anyway, I can’t be going shopping for dog dresses. I’ve got to fix your porch.”
Rosie dropped her phone in her purse and loaded up a nacho. “I told you. I can’t pay you. I can’t have you working for me for free, Max. I just can’t.”
I hovered the pitcher over her almost-empty margarita. “Down that one, skipper.” She gulped it back and then smacked her lips, nibbling on the bottom one like it was numb. I topped her off and added, “I’m the one doing the work. If something better comes up, I’ll tell you. Until then, better to be busy than bored, yeah?”
She flicked the salted edge of her glass with her tongue and savored the salt with her eyes closed. Naughty and she didn’t even realize it. “You’re a terrible liar, Max.”
True, of course. But on the other hand, I’d made it a whole six hours without telling her what I was really thinking. “And I’m not taking no for an answer.”
“Fine, fine, fine.” She took a long sip of her margarita. “But at least let me buy you a few rounds of pool. Have a heart, Max. I might be broke, but I’m not a damsel in distress. Let me keep my dignity.”
There were six thousand things I wanted to say back to her, lobbing them like unsmashable volleys. You’re some kind of damsel. I’ll show you distress. But nah. For now, I’d take whatever I could get. Even if I had to let her think she’d won to get it.
Fletcher would put the games on my tab. She wasn’t paying a penny, even if she thought she was. “You buy, I break?” I tipped my head at the pool tables.
The ice in her margarita tinkled. She smiled and said, “You’re on.”
There was a very real possibility that she was the worst pool player on the planet. It was unbelievable. For someone so graceful and so precise—someone who’d spend half a day perfecting the shading on the spiral on a snail’s shell, someone who made baked goods like she was a professional chemist—her pool game was absolutely fucking beyond the pale. For every shot she made, she blew at least two. Less-than-half odds, about the same as if she were blindfolded. It was pretty much a riot. But I never laughed.
Her blindfolded, though, now…there was an idea.
I gulped back my drink to try to recenter myself. She thought I wasn’t watching as she moved the cue ball a half inch to the right with her stick. I almost always let her beat me, but sometimes I couldn’t find a way to play that badly. She bent down over the rail, trying to figure out how to make a straight shot and sink the seven.
Which meant that I was standing right behind her, looking at her ass.
I grated my fingers down my stubble and tried as hard as I fucking could to ignore what was happening. Her. The feeling. The fact that my cock was responding in spite of my brain telling me not to be a douche. “Don’t think too hard.”
She did some practice passes of the stick over her finger. She shimmied her ass up farther onto the rail. I could almost see the spot where her thighs met her ass.
Yeah. I was a goner.
She brought her left arm back and hit the ball with the cue, totally whiffed it, as in, didn’t even make any contact at all. Her signature shot. When she realized she’d blown it and I had her beat, she made a big dramatic show of splaying herself out on the felt, laughing into the crook of her elbow as her feet came off the ground, her flip-flops dangling, as the eight ball popped out from under her stomach.
I bent down over her and took the pool cue from her hand, spooning her for one blissful second up against the rail. “Well done,” I told her.
“Why don’t I ever get any better at this game? It’s like a mental block. Like long division.”
I chalked up the cue. “It’s all a hustle. I know it. You know it. You secretly drive to Bar Harbor when I’m busy and make pool sharks cry. No need to lie. We’re all friends here.”
She looked back over her shoulder at me. “Maybe I should take up darts.”
“Christ.” I blew chalk residue off the end, watching her all the time. “You’re dangerous enough on the felt. Give you a pointed object, we’d all be missing an eye.”
She snort-chortled but made like she was pissed off and shoved me. I didn’t budge, but I felt the heat of her hand through my T-shirt. The bar was packed, and I used it to my advantage. The table behind me was getting rowdy, but I only noticed it in the way that I’d notice anything that was the opposite of my own reality. Like when you dive into the water and everything goes quiet, and then you notice how fucking loud the real world is all the time. She was like that—looking into her eyes was like that—like a deep dive into the ocean, where all I could hear was my heartbeat. But all I wanted to hear was hers.
I was aware of the guys behind me, getting aggressive with each other, and instinctively, I wanted to protect her from their bullshit. But more than that, I needed to be close. That was the instinct that I couldn’t ignore.
“You’re acting strange, Max,” s
he said. She plucked at my T-shirt, like she was pulling a piece of lint off me. A tiny gesture, but flirtatious as hell, different from how we were normally. She was tipsy, and I was hungry for her, and it felt like we were feeding off each other.
Strange? She had no fucking idea. I put down the chalk and leaned into her farther, compressing her body against the table, making her feel how much bigger than her I was. Rosie’s breathing quickened, I watched it happen, and I could see her pulse fluttering away in the hollow of her neck. “Listen. We don’t have secrets, do we?” I asked her.
She shook her head slowly. “No. We don’t…”
“If I saw something, if I realized something,” I said, all husky and almost hoarse, “you’d want to know?”
Rosie nodded and blinked.
“You’re fucking positive?”
Just a blink this time, and a whispered, “Yes.”
Here goes nothing. “I saw you naked today. Through your skylight.”
Her eyes popped open wide. A fast, embarrassed blush spread across her cheeks, of a redness and intensity that I’d never seen on her before. “You did? Naked-naked?”
I put my hand to her hip and let her feel what I wanted. “Fucking naked-naked, yeah. And it’s got me all fucked up, because now, every goddamned time I look at you…” I didn’t fucking know how to finish that sentence, so I let it lie. I’d let her finish it. I’d let her feel it, because I was hard already. And getting a hell of a lot harder.
If she was tipsy earlier, she didn’t seem it now. Her eyes were wide and clear and certain. Her hand came down to my forearm and gripped me more tightly than I expected. That tiny gesture, that flexing of her hand that told me yes, set off a fucking chain reaction inside me. She wasn’t touching me like her best friend now.
So I went with it. Rode that wave to the breakers and hoped like hell I came out whole at the end. “I’m not sorry, either. That I saw you.”
“You saw…all of me? When I was changing?”
I nodded at her, getting closer and closer with every fucking second. “Down to the tattoo.”
She swallowed hard. “Max…”
Now I really gave her a press with my hips, driving my belt into her stomach, driving my cock and balls against her enough to be fucking clear about it. “You deserve to be treated right…”
It was a turning point, and I knew it. I could step back, I could walk out of the bar. I could deprive myself of my air, my water, the voltage that kept me going.
But she had me burning hot, and there was no fucking way I could turn away. I took that beautiful, perfect face in my hands. I looped my fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck. I pulled her close. I felt the softness of her skin against my stubble. And then I looked her right in the eye, telling her, “… I want to be the one to treat you like you deserve.”
And kissed the hell out of her.
I wasn’t a gentleman about it. With my tongue, I made her understand all the shit I hadn’t yet said. I want you. I adore you. I need to be inside you.
At first, she pulled me closer, and the head of my cock pushed against the inside of my zipper. Her hands made fists of my shirt, and she leaned back onto the pool table, damn near hooking her legs around me.
Fuck yeah, fuck yeah.
I tipped her back onto the felt. I came down low on top of her. I felt the lamp above the table brush against my shoulder. Somewhere a guy whistled. Another guy catcalled. But then her grip on my shirt tightened, and she started to push me away.
6
Rosie
I couldn’t do it. I wanted to do it because he kissed with such passion and such aggression that I felt like every single bone in my body was saying, Rosie, this is a table, just lie down and let him have you. But this was Max. My Max. I didn’t kiss Max; I needed Max. But now here I was, liquored up on way-more-than-two margaritas, and losing all my freaking common sense.
Idiot. Idiot.
Summoning up all my strength, and resisting the gravitational pull of the pool table too, I pushed him away. I turned away and slipped off the rail. I grabbed my purse from the hook underneath the corner pocket and hustled for the door. I could hear Max saying my name, I knew he was trying to make a grab for me, but I had to get out of there. The taste of him had been intoxicating, disorienting.
It had been heaven. And he could not be my heaven.
He was the gallon of Rocky Road I should not have. He was the box of chocolates I should not eat.
So without saying goodbye to Fletcher, without even paying my part of our tab, I beat a quick exit for the door, or I tried to anyway. The place was packed, and I had to squirm my way through a whole slew of enormous fishermen, all broad shoulders and barrel chests, like extras from some Viking documentary kicking back after a long day of Hollywood pillage and plunder. Each step was perilous, all their steel-toed boots mere inches from crunching my bare toes. Finally, I did get to the exit and hurled myself out of the door into the dark quiet of the gravel parking lot. Chirping crickets and the buzz of a slowly dying Summer Shandy sign filled the air. The hot air of the bar was swept away by the warm breeze off the water. I inhaled hard, trying to clear my head.
My mind spinning and my feathers decidedly ruffled, I grabbed my keys and tottered to my Bug. But no sooner had I put my key in the lock than the bar door squeaked open and there was Max, coming for me. “No fucking way,” he said, pulling my keys from my hand. “Don’t you dare, Rosie. Don’t you dare.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me what I was doing. I couldn’t drive, for God’s sake. I wasn’t tumble-down drunk, but I was far too tipsy to be going anywhere at all. So I went for Plan B and started to march down the street.
“What are you going to do? Walk?”
“It’s not that far!” I swatted a huge mosquito that had attached itself to my arm like a jungle dart. “What is it, three miles? Four?” I flapped my hand in the air to say, It’s nothing! But honestly, I don’t think I’d ever walked three miles in my life. I’d have to call a cab. I’d have to hitchhike. Still though, still!
Max grabbed my hand and spun me into him. Our bodies collided, and I became acutely aware of his brawn. “Seven miles. Jesus. Let me take you home at least,” he said, his voice all growly and sexy and…
Rosie!
“I don’t want you out here by yourself,” Max said. “It’s not safe.”
“It’s Maine, for God’s sake! What’s going to happen? A moose going to mug me?”
“I know what these mosquitos do to you.” He swept his big, rough hand over my bare arm, letting his fingers move lightly along the bend in my elbow.
My breath got caught up in my throat. It was like a hiccup interrupted a cough. For the first time, I understood what it meant to have someone’s touch light you on fire. And not just that either: the kiss was still lingering, the taste of him still on my lips. Sweet and salty. Delicious. He trailed his fingers down the inside of my forearm and back up again. As proof of the fact he’d made alphabet soup of my brain, all I could think to say was, “I don’t know why they never bite you.”
He laughed a little and smiled as he stepped into me. “Because you’re way fucking sweeter.”
He kept his hand there, on my arm, and his other cradled me at the small of my back. Even in the semidarkness, I could see him perfectly, because I knew everything about him. His rarely seen right dimple, his smile lines, the salt and pepper that was starting to show in his sideburns. The necklace with half my name on it. The curve of his delicious bum. Even in the dark, I knew him. Even in the dark, I wanted him. But even in the dark, I knew it was a terrible idea.
So I stepped back again.
He raised his hands up, like a surrender. “Get in my truck. I won’t touch you.” The gravel crunched under his feet as he moved even farther away. He ran his hand through his hair and reached for his keys. “I’ll be good.”
He was good. And it was agony. We drove back to my house in a painful, awkward silence. The radio was on the fritz, s
o we didn’t even have that to break the ice. I clutched my purse in my lap and stared out at the dotted centerline disappearing under the truck as we drove, the flashing mile markers and the deer crossing signs. I’d driven down this road, in his truck, like this, thousands of times, but it had never felt so…off. So strained, so difficult, so uncomfortable. I felt as if, with that single kiss—that single, powerful, sweep-me-off-my-feet, lay-me-down kiss—it was possible everything might have changed.
Also, he’d seen me naked. Not part of my grand plan. At all.
But I desperately, desperately didn’t want anything to change. He was my rock. He was my compass. Our friendship was my anchor. I glanced at him, the cab dimly lit by the old radio. His forearms rippled, his big, manly hand gripped the top of the wheel. The muscles along his jaw made his temple pulse. Rocks are so sexy…
Rosie!
He turned down my driveway, and the flecks of quartz in the gravel shimmered in the headlights. I could tell from the position of his knee that he’d totally come off the gas, and the old Chevy was just doing her slow forward idle. “Sorry,” he said as he came to a careful stop at the end of my driveway, his lights shining over his power tools on my porch. “I am so fucking sorry.” He pinched his temple with his thumb and forefinger and hung his head.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine. These things happen.”
Even as I said it, I knew it was totally absurd. People said these things happen when they burned a pizza or offended a relative or forgot to pay their gas bill. Nobody said these things happen when, after twenty years of knowing one another, two people finally kiss and it’s amazing. That’s not even to be filed in the same file cabinet with these things happen. That kiss deserved its own filing system. Its own office. Its own building.
He leaned back on the bench seat, letting his head rest gently against the window at the back of the cab. I remembered I once shimmied through the window behind his head right now because he’d locked himself out and his shoulders were too broad to squeeze inside himself.
So Good (An Alpha Dogs Novel) Page 5