New Adult Romance Box Set

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

  Gratitude and relief seeped in as I made my way back to Darla, the sensation of cloth against my skin a bit unreal.

  But I was clothed.

  Three more items on my list to go. A huge growl from my guts told me which to check off next.

  "I suspect you're taking him out back," Cathy said, her voice going up at the end like a question but the words a statement.

  Darla nodded and then smiled, a surprise flash of happiness that caught both me and her mother off guard. She'd seemed so dour since we'd come in, and embarrassed and skittish, which wasn't like her—not the woman I'd known for the past few hours.

  Not the woman I felt myself falling for.

  Chapter Five

  Trevor

  I could feel my breathing change, each breath deeper, harder, stronger than the last as the moment slipped by second by second. Darla grabbed my hand and pulled me back out the front door, under the crazy crooked porch and then down onto the earth. The flip flops felt foreign and so did the pants. My nakedness had lasted for so long that I'd become accustomed to it, and now I had both hands free again, no Mylar to use as a sort of fig leaf.

  She took me around the corner and then walked straight up to a little junky shed, the kind of thing my parents would have had removed from their property long ago. Moss grew into the roof, so much that I started to wonder if it was one of those green-roof experiments, a biodiversity project that maybe she'd started back in eighth grade.

  No—it was just that neglected.

  "What is this?" I whispered.

  "Hang on," her voice held a tone of hope and pride that made me even more intrigued, and that made me feel comfortable and in my own skin again. She pulled a key out of her pocket and slid it into a padlock, unclicked it, unlooped it and then opened the latch. The door creaked so loudly it sounded like the hinges must be rusted shut. As she pushed gently on the door there was a moonlit darkness to the tiny space.

  I expected a musty, earthy odor like every potting shed I'd ever been in, with a little bit of mildew, the smell of fertilizer and a smattering of loose tools, and maybe a gasoline soaked lawnmower. She turned, fumbled for something on the right and then, a little click, the sound of a lamp. The room illuminated instantly and showed something like a little dream house in the middle of so much less.

  "What is this?" I asked again.

  She pulled me in, my feet scuffling against carpet, and then she gently shut the creaky door. She had a small bolt on the inside and slid it shut. The shed couldn't have been more than 8'X8', with one tiny window that I noticed was open ever so slightly, not even an inch. Rope lighting, the kind people use to string around houses at Christmas time, was neatly attached to the perimeter of the ceiling, lending the room its glow.

  The walls were a rich purple and the floor, covered in different squares of carpet, was a mishmash of colors that made it look like a patchwork. There was a small bed, like a dorm room twin, off to one side, taking up most of the left half of this place and then a little table, a cheap card table with four metal legs, on it a hot plate and under it a small dorm fridge. There was a coffee maker, too, and my mouth began to water.

  Food.

  I hadn't eaten in ages but I was also hungry for something other than a meal right now. I reached for her, the warm, soft glow of this little world she'd built making me want her even more. My stomach betrayed me, though, growling even louder than before. She pulled back and laughed, her face open and wanting again.

  "Trevor, you must be starving," she said, her face dawning with the realization. "When was the last time you ate?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know how the hell I got here and you expect me to remember the last thing I ate?"

  "Fair enough." She gestured for me to sit on the bed, which turned out to be soft, like memory foam topped with down. I rested, stretching out, my ankles hanging over the edge of the small bed. But it felt like relaxing on a California king at the Omni in downtown Boston.

  She pulled various things out of the refrigerator and then turned on the hotplate. The clattering of a pan made me sit up. "What are you doing?"

  "Do you eat eggs?" she asked.

  I chuckled. "Are you kidding me? You're going to make me food now? Here?"

  "Of course."

  The room smelled like eucalyptus and lavender, a lush, heady scent of escape, of something divine being sought. I watched as she poured oil into the pan and then, in an interesting interpretation of an omelet, she just cracked the eggs, threw in cheese and something I couldn't name, and then sprinkled a bunch of spices on top.

  "I can't do a full omelet," she said, turning her head to talk to me over her shoulder. "But I can at least make you a scramble that will make your stomach shut up."

  I watched her from behind, that heart-shaped ass turned upside down, her legs thick and strong, her shoulders moving as her arms cooked for me. No one cooked for me. Hell, my mom didn't even cook for me. Everything was prepackaged and made up and if you wanted something made from scratch, you pretty much had to wait for a holiday or to go over to a friend's house where the mom actually cooked.

  Something stirred inside me—and it wasn't just my ever-anxious penis. This little shed that Darla had turned into some kind of sanctuary for herself, it was like my parent's basement for me. That felt so stupid to even think because her life was nothing like mine. A pang of ingratitude struck me. What an ungrateful little shit I had been, thinking that the fake, plastic life forced on me by my parents was something I needed to suffer through.

  Look what she had created for herself in the middle of all this misery. It made me feel inadequate. It made me feel like a wimp. I didn't want to go to law school. I wanted to sing, I wanted to go on tour, see what I could make for myself from this world that I loved to taste and touch.... I wanted to take music and turn it into this—a thing that looked shabby on the outside, but was beautiful and whole from the inside, all I really needed. And because that could only be some part time side gig that my parents barely tolerated, I thought that was real pain, a real dilemma. Compared to what Darla had overcome, I could see I was a fool.

  Darla

  Letting Trevor see my little hideaway was worse than stripping naked and walking down the middle of the street where all the bars were downtown on the first day of hunting season. Thank God he had taken it the way I had hoped—with a sense of delight. I had mixed feelings about that look on his face, though, because it was so different from the one that had crossed his faced when he'd walked into the trailer and seen Mama.

  I had a love/hate relationship with my relationship with Mama. This wasn't the life that I was meant to live, and when the owner of the trailer park had told me, a few years ago when he caught me smoking pot in the potting shed, that I could use it however I wanted, I took him at his word. Hey, don't blame me—smoking pot in a potting shed sounded really, really funny at 4:20, you know? I'd dispensed with most of that, though, by the time I'd graduated high school. Getting high was just a way to escape and if you were never really going to escape, why bother?

  Painting the walls had been easiest. Finding a can of discarded but unused paint for five bucks at the recycling center a few towns over meant that I could cover the walls in a bright color that made me happy. Anything but yellow. Anything but yellow would do.

  The bed was a funny little contraption. I went on the internet and looked for plans for a simple bed, and it turned out I could do it with some thick pieces of joist, plywood, and a lot of really hokey, propped up things that kept the bed up. An old memory foam roll, and strangely enough, a down comforter, had come from the small college about half an hour away where my uncle had gone—not Mama's brother, but daddy's brother.

  A long time ago, Josie had told me that if you go to the colleges after the May term ended, you could find some really awesome stuff—and she'd been right. If my Toyota weren't so small, I would have filled it with much more but at least I got this, right?

  I had enough money to buy a couple of th
ings for nice and cheap at yard sales and the Goodwill. That's how I acquired the coffee maker, my table, some kitchen utensils, a few pots and pans. The real coup had been that dorm fridge. It had taken two years of searching the dumpsters at the local college, but I'd finally found one that worked.

  And now I had my own little home. Mama didn't mind if I ran an extension cord through the window to give me some electricity. That had been good enough.

  Nobody knew what I had made out here. Not even Mama—I wouldn't let her in. She probably couldn't walk all the way over, anyhow. Walking had been hard enough with her foot missing, but then the weight that had gathered with time, turning her into a different person altogether, like moss overtaking a roof until it is the only thing holding it up.

  This was the real me. That's right—this room, this little thing. This is where I went to escape all the shit from people like Davey, where I listened to Trevor over and over again, to his beautiful naked voice. Not just him—I had other favorites, like the Parlotones, Thermal and a Quarter, and other weird-ass shit that nobody in this little town had ever heard of but me. So it was all mine. It was mine the same way that a lot of my memories I didn't talk about were mine.

  And now Trevor really was mine, at least until his friend came and took him away. Until he went back to whatever world he lived in that was so alien from mine. Mama had called Trevor the alien, wrapped in silver, and so had Davey—but they were wrong. They were wrong.

  I was the alien. A long time ago, I had accepted that.

  So if I was an alien and Trevor was an alien then it was time for two aliens to get funky.

  “I hope you’re not expecting fancy,” I informed Trevor as I finished cooking eggs and slid them onto one of my two plates. I had no appetite, so I wasn't going to bother, but I handed it to him with a fork and he dug into it as if I had given him caviar and filet mignon.

  “Oh, my God,” he groaned.

  “That bad?” I said, flinching.

  “Oh, Darla. This is unbelievable. What is in this?”

  He ate half the plate before I could open my mouth to answer. “It's just eggs and some cream and a bunch of cheese and some ham and...I don't know, a little garlic, tarragon, and some pepper.”

  “It's like something from Top Chef,” he said.

  “Now you're just flattering me.”

  He flashed me a comfortable, saucy grin, the kind of look that you give someone you have been with for a while, someone who can read your signals, who can know from the slightest fold in the skin around your eyes whether you're having a good day or a bad day. Whether you want to be fucked or be made love to. Whether you want to be alone, or to cry on their shoulder.

  And then he said, “Yes, ma'am, I am.”

  “Well,” I said, stalling for a little time, my heart and my throat and my eyes welling up with some deep uprising of emotion that I had no right to own. “I have a secret to tell you, Trevor,” I said, walking over.

  He was sitting up on the edge of my bed, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, his head bent over the plate. He stopped eating and looked up at me, again with a half smile of something intimate and more than just sex—or maybe I was just reading that. I have a tendency to do that.

  “I'm a sure thing,” I whispered inches from his face.

  He swallowed hard. We stared into each other’s eyes for way longer than we should have. I broke away first and then laughed, the sound tinny and uncomfortable as I felt myself ruining this.

  Dammit. Dammit, Darla, why do you always do this?

  He swallowed a few more bites—good God, did the man ever chew?—and laughed, a throaty sound of something special, a vibration that I would save inside my heart forever, to pull out when I needed it most.

  “Darla,” he said quietly, nodding. “I'm a sure thing, too.”

  “Then there's no rush, is there?” I said, letting myself go serious.

  “No rush,” he answered, reaching out, brushing a stray strand of hair out of my face. The sweetness of the gesture made me swallow and pull back, tenderness cutting through my shields and turning the entire night into something more than I could handle.

  He dropped his hand, finished eating, and then walked over and set the plate on the table. He looked funny in my uncle's clothes, the pants hanging down so low I could see the top of his ass crack. It was mighty fine, with little dimples at the top of each buttock, his lower back tight. His spine was clearly visible, not from sickly skinniness, but because his well developed, well-formed tendons and bone had honed his body from the privilege of his life—just as his lyrics intuitively honed angst and heartache and pain into hope.

  He turned and he stood in the glow of the cheap Christmas lights that I'd scavenged from God knows where. And then he said the words that I never expected him to say.

  “I'm sorry, Darla but I need to use the bathroom.”

  Trevor

  Darla burst out laughing and I felt myself crawl in my skin a little bit but I couldn't help it. I had ignored nature's call for who knows how long, and something about sitting here and filling my stomach made me need to go. It felt like the least romantic thing I could have blurted out but dude, when a dude's gotta go, a dude's gotta go.

  Besides, I knew what was coming. We both did. We were exhausted, and horny, and tired, and horny, and frustrated. And did I mention horny? With the inevitable in front of us I figured maybe I could slip back into the trailer, take a quick shower, and at least be as ready and raring to go as possible.

  She looked me up and down and shook her head. “Of course, Trevor. Of course you can go to the bathroom. You probably want to shower too, don't you? How long have you been on the road?”

  I looked around this little cottage, a hippie version of a hobbit home. “Well, there's no clock. I don't know what time it is.”

  She reached into her pocket and took out her phone. “It's nearly 2 a.m..”

  “Shit,” I said as she opened the door and led me back out, over to her mom's house.

  “That's OK,” she said. “Besides, I probably should help my mom check her sugars.”

  “Her sugars?”

  “She's diabetic,” Darla said, her eyes averted, her voice floating next to me in the dark.

  A cool breeze slipped across my neck, my body warm from the tiny space we'd just shared, by my full stomach, and by the clothing which I was starting to get used to again.

  The wall of cigarette smoke hit me again when we opened the door, but not quite as fiercely this time. Cathy looked up from her spot at the table and said, “What are you doing?” to no one in particular.

  Darla held a contraption like a label maker out to her mom. “Check your sugars, Mama. Trevor's gonna go and freshen up.”

  Cathy looked me up and down and smiled, her face heavy but her warmth evident, making me smile back. “Well, I would imagine wherever Darla found you, you're gonna be dirty.”

  “Mama,” Darla said, her voice scolding and a little bit ashamed. I didn't like it. I didn't want her to turn away from what I'd seen in her, from that creature who created something so good out of so much that wasn't. She was a conundrum.

  She led me back to the tiny, cramped bathroom and handed me a clean, threadbare towel and steered me away from the medicated shampoo, handing me something involving colored hair. I couldn't help myself and just reached out, shut the door, and grabbed her in my arms.

  She melted against me, our bodies separated by two layers of clothes now, the feeling weird. My mouth found her and she responded, lips parting quickly. Whatever we'd been holding onto, or holding back from, we allowed to spill over right here, right now in this tiny, cramped bathroom, her back shoved against the door, my ass pressed into the corner of a sink more cigarette-burned than I'd ever seen in any dive bar bathroom.

  I didn't care, my hands roaming through her lush hair, down to find fistfuls of ass. Her hands sliding under my unfamiliar t-shirt, reaching to that sensitive spot just where my ribs met my shoulders, making
me shiver, making me rise up to take her with no more waiting.

  But she decided to exert control, pulling back, pushing gently until I had to move slightly to the right to avoid being penetrated by the corner of that sink. She held her head down, then looked up, all bliss and full of hope.

  “You freshen up Trevor. Meet me back at my place. That's where this belongs, not here.” She looked around. The shower was covered with soap scum but the room smelled of bleach. It had been cleaned recently but, like so many other things in Darla's life, it was worn, neglected, the towels faded and old, the walls pockmarked and stained, the room designed for function but not for anything else. This life she lived seemed to have no room for purple walls and glowing lights that created an atmosphere of something more.

  My arms wrapped around her and she leaned in, her cheek pressed against my chest, sighing deeply. And then she pulled away and turned around. The door opened before I could stop her.

  “Go ahead, Trevor. Take care of everything and then,” she said, locking her eyes with mine, her face intense and so deep I wanted to fall into her eyes and just live there forever, “and then come take care of me.”

  “Jesus Christ, with an offer like that—” Unsnapping my pants was a chore because Darla's words had made me rock hard in an instant. I scrambled to turn on the shower, which was about as low flow as you could possibly get, like a baby bottle squeezed listlessly upside down. But hey, I couldn't be choosy these days, and while it certainly wasn't the four-head shower and jacuzzi tub I was used to at home, it was a shower and I could wash the crud of being naked on the road for a day off of my poor body.

  Poor body.

  As if. My body was rocking right now (pun intended) and about to rock Darla's world.

  Relatively clean in three minutes, I threw my clothes back on and stopped for a minute, fumbling through the drawers attached to the tiny sink. If I guessed just right...yup, there it was. A brand new toothbrush, still in its dental-office wrapper.