New Adult Romance Box Set

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

  Before I could open my mouth, Trevor interrupted both of us. “Let's just take him where he wants to go,” he said to Darla.

  She started to protest and he cut her off with fingertips to her lips. It was a gesture I'd never seen anyone do to a woman and I expected she'd blow up at him but instead, she popped one fingertip into her mouth and sucked on it through a grin. Holy shit. If I'd been uncomfortable a minute ago, now I was so hard I was stratospherically crawling out of my skin—for a much better reason.

  Trevor pulled back and some sort of look passed between the two of them that made me feel like I was intruding. “Besides,” he said quietly, “if he has his own room then you and I get this to ourselves,” nodding his head toward her little broken shed.

  Darla

  “You two argue about whatever it is that you wanna do while I go take a shower,” I said, escaping the back and forth between these two. My body still tasted like Trevor's mouth, smelled like both of us, and needed a good, full cleansing. Kind of like being dipped in a baptismal pool. My new existence needed that kind of reset and my heart needed that kind of purity because, even though we'd been handed these extra hours, that was it. After that, my new life would leave me in a puddle of misery and nostalgia.

  That, though, was better than what I'd had before I'd picked up this naked soul. Walking back into the trailer, I saw where Joe had put his foot through the rotted out porch. Dammit! I knew the floor was going, I just didn't think it was going to go that quickly. Some furry creature of indistinct origin scurried under there and I hoped to God it wasn't a swamp rat from the nearby wetlands.

  When I walked into the trailer, Mama was in her place at the kitchen table and she looked up and just shook her head slowly. “Two men, now, Darla? Really?”

  “Not at the same time, Mama,” I said, laughing at her, waving a hand as if the idea were so extreme that no one would ever think to do such a thing. Liar, a voice in my head whispered. Oh God, at the rate I was going I was gonna have more voices in there than a goddamn tryout for American Idol.

  The shower spray was non-existent. The water pressure was down, which meant somebody was washing clothes or running the dishwasher right now. If it was Mama I'd be surprised. Most of the cleaning that got done around here was by me or Uncle Mike when he was in town. Maybe she was having one of her better times. That would be nice. When Mama was going through a good phase it meant that the world was easier to take.

  As I washed the parts of my body that Trevor had touched most, the soap stripping away his essence but not his memory, I felt a twinge of regret. The scent of him was burned into my brain, the pressure of his fingertips, the friction of his skin against mine a sultry memory. It didn't have to be just a memory. What we'd done already, of course, was stored away, nice and neat in a compartment in my mind that I could draw from whenever I needed it. New memories could be made in the next couple of hours and I didn't think that bowling was gonna be one of them.

  Washing my hair, discovering we were out of conditioner and cursing myself for not keeping track of that, I realized that when I blew dry my hair I was gonna look like a giant Chia Pet. Better to leave it damp and down and let it curl up than turn into a frizzball. I found some clean clothes in the dresser drawer of what you could loosely call my room—it was taken over mostly with trinkets that Mama had won over the past five or six years using online sweepstakes and gambling to keep herself busy.

  Every once in a while she won something nice. One year she got a couple hundred dollars and a night at any hotel she wanted and she picked the water park and sent me and some friends. Another time, she won a really nice two week trip to Italy, all expenses paid, but it turns out when you win things in a sweepstakes you have to pay the taxes on the value of the thing or trip and we couldn't afford it. Someone else got Mama's trip to Italy and we just got a story to tell.

  I walked back clean and ready to take on the rest of the day only to find Trevor and Joe whispering to each other furiously, Joe darting glances at me that didn't look inviting. “What's going on?” I asked.

  Trevor slid his arm around my waist and smelled my wet hair. “You smell nice,” he whispered.

  “It's coconut chemicals,” I whispered back.

  That made Joe go from sour to smirking. It was a small victory but I'd take it. “Joe definitely wants to go to the hotel,” Trevor said, frowning.

  When I made eye contact with Joe, it was like falling into a pool of beautiful. I wanted to swim in it forever. I shouldn't have had these thoughts but I did. It was like I was cheating on Trevor right in front of his face but I wasn't. I wasn't interested in Joe, I just kind of wanted to marvel at him. Nobody around here looked like him. Nobody.

  Around here, adolescent acne meant that you had adult scars, crooked teeth just were, and walking with that kind of fluidity and grace, well, you didn't get that way working at the gas station, bagging groceries, or framing a house. You especially didn't get that way driving truck, spending seventy, eighty, a hundred hours a week on the road, hunched over a wheel.

  “I can take you,” I said. “No problem.”

  Trevor looked at me and his eyes widened a little, then he smiled. “Let's go.”

  Joe

  “Alright,” she turned to me. “Get in the car. We'll take you to the hotel. Do you want to go bowling with us first?”

  I yawned. I swear to God it wasn't fake. The exhaustion of dealing with Trevor's disappearance, with his mom, with the drive, my broken car, all of it was wearing on me.

  “You don't need to throw that in,” she said as we walked over and I opened the back door. I could see parts of the asphalt beneath us under her car and wondered if I needed to put my feet through to make this thing run, like something out of a cartoon. She started it up and it was surprisingly quiet, Trevor crawling in the front seat.

  As he sat down he said, “Oh! My ass feels weird.”

  “What did you guys do last night?” I asked.

  Darla let out a loose peal of laughter that made me start to like her a little bit. “We only used the strap-on once,” she said.

  Trevor punched her lightly on the shoulder as she started the car. He turned around and said, “No, I mean I only rode in the front of this car naked. Not being scratched by the torn vinyl is a luxury.”

  Turning around to catch my attention, Trevor kept glaring at me in ways that clearly expressed that he thought I was being rude—but it looked like Darla had figured out my point of view. What a treat to be considered for once. Trevor's selfishness pervaded this entire experience, from the moment he disappeared—no, actually from the moment he ate all my peyote—right up until the second Darla reappeared. All I wanted right now was my own room, my own space, my own bed. Later tonight, if the car could be fixed or tomorrow morning—God, I hoped it wasn't tomorrow morning—then away we went and I could escape from this chaos.

  Fuck Trevor. Fuck, fuck, fuck Trevor. He stood here arguing that I should shield him from his mom, that I should stay here at Darla's little...whatever you call that thing...and that I should stop being a snobby asshole. I didn't think I was being a snob. I just—I mean look at this place. I was being a realist.

  Darla's little shitbox got us on the road and we put put putted on the interstate up one exit. She pulled off to one of those buildings that looks like it could be a factory, a hospital, a hotel, or a registry of motor vehicles—it was that nondescript. Hotels just didn't look like this back home. At least not in Eastern Mass. Maybe out west in the boonies.

  Oh. Right. I was in the boonies. Ground Zero of the boonies. The prototype for—

  “Here it is. The luxury five-star hotel of northern Ohio.”

  “You don't have to keep digging it in. I get the point.” I was tired and pissed and she kept going on as if I were some kind of snob and I was pretty fucking sick of it.

  “I don't think you do get the message, Joe,” she snapped back.

  Now it was Trevor who looked at us like he was watching a Wimbledon
game.

  “You're jealous,” I snapped back. “I drive a nice car, we come from a nicer place, I have nicer things, yadda yadda yadda. It's not my fault you live this way.”

  I could tell from the look on Trevor's face that I'd crossed a line—and I could tell from the way that her face reddened that I'd hit a nerve.

  “You just proved her point, you asshole,” Trevor growled.

  “I think she's proving mine.” I got out of the car as fast as I could, four eyes glaring at me as if they could somehow erase the fact that they were wrong with the sheer force of anger. I didn't care. This was so out of the realm of anything I had ever wanted to experience that I figured Trevor had gone half mad again. We weren't on some reality television show. This wasn't Big Brother - Ohio Edition or An Idiot Abroad—U.S. Version. This was me being treated like shit for coming out here and rescuing Trevor in the boonies.

  Whatever had happened to turn me into the bad guy, I didn't even know what to think. I didn't know why they were both being so weird. I slammed the car door shut and something distinctly metal echoed in the air, a dropped piece of something. Darla didn't even flinch, so I didn't point it out.

  “Thank you for the ride,” I said. Just because they thought I was an asshole didn't mean I lost every bit of decency. I wasn't going to give them any more ammunition against me.

  “You're most welcome,” she said tartly as she squealed in reverse out of the parking lot. I watched them drive off until the car disappeared, and then looked around. At one end of the giant parking lot was a building that could have held the KGB…or the world’s saddest daycare center. That would be the hotel. At this point, as long as there was a bed, a bathroom, and a coffee maker, I didn’t care.

  Darla

  “Wow, you can pick 'em, can't you?” I said as we flew out of the parking lot. Trevor shook his head and opened the window, cranking it enough that the wind started whipping my hair about, the wild, loose, frizzy curls forcing me to take one hand off the wheel and pull my hair away from my forehead.

  “He's not usually like that, Darla,” Trevor insisted. “I swear to God I've never seen him like that.”

  “Have you ever seen him outside of Boston?”

  That gave Trevor pause. “Sure. Yeah. We've gone on, you know, class trips...been to New York, up to Niagara Falls, his parents have a beach house on the Cape.”

  I snorted. “And where else?”

  “Well, they took us to Vail that one time to go skiing and then there have been a couple trips to Martinique....” His voice trailed off as he realized what he was saying.

  “No humanitarian trips with your church to New Delhi to wash the feet of the poor people?” I couldn't keep the acid out of my voice. Trevor seemed to deflate with every word that I spat at him. This wasn't the way our last few hours were supposed to go but I was doing it, I was making it like this. Dammit. The “Mistress of Sabotage” Mama had called me once. I hated when Mama was right.

  He took a deep sigh. In it I could hear so many of my own emotions: anger, frustration, confusion, uncertainty—and a touch of hope. Joe had turned himself into a lightning rod for a lot of feelings that we were both experiencing but not talking about. At least, I wasn't—and as much as turning over the rock that was Joe revealed an awful lot of creepy, crawling critters underneath, now they were facing the cold, hard sunlight. Sunlight kills germs. It's the great disinfectant and I suspected we both had an awful lot of mess inside ourselves that needed a good cleaning.

  “He's right,” I admitted. There—a little bit of decluttering of my emotional state began.

  “He's wrong,” Trevor protested, shaking his head, sitting up straight and patting my knee. “There's nothing that makes us better than you.”

  “Oh, I didn't mean that part,” I said, loud and brasher than I wanted it to sound. But hell, that was me. Trevor was getting me and if he didn't like it he could just leave. He was gonna leave anyhow, right? “I don't mean that you guys are better because you have money. I mean that you live a completely different life than—” I gestured at the highway storefronts flying by the window. A liquor store, an ammo store and a fireworks store. “That isn't a Gucci, that isn't an American Girl Doll store, and that, certainly, isn't a Starbucks,” I pointed and a little smile twitched on his lips.

  We were starting to get serious here and I didn't do serious well. The wisecracks poured out, trying to cover emotions that I didn't process properly, either. Maybe I needed to think of Trevor as practice—a guy I could practice these deeper feelings on, someone who understood nuance, who even gave a shit about it. Then again, maybe that would be like exercising a muscle that I'd never use again, the energy a waste.

  I had to find out if I even had that muscle, though, so right then and there I made a decision and we drove straight past the bowling alley. Trevor pointed at it as it went past, his hand flying in the wind. “But wh—wait...what?” he asked and then turned to me with a puzzled grin.

  “I have a better idea,” I said.

  His hand clamped down on my knee and slid up. “Whatever your idea is,” he said, his hand moving up to hold my hair back, his knuckles brushing gently against my neck, making me shiver, “can it involve some balls?”

  Trevor

  She shifted from anger, to reasonable, to playful so well it was like being with a grownup. As if I were a grownup and she were, too, and we were relating to each other on this mature but incredibly arousing level that made me hard and made me want her all the more. It was a bit like looking in and capturing your parents in an intimate moment by accident or seeing them struggle with a difficult ethical problem—but handling it with such grace that you wanted to be like them.

  Except, right now, I didn't want to be—I didn't need to be—like anyone except me. The me that was with Darla. Is that what love—

  She interrupted me. “I hope you're not allergic to wildflowers.” Her grin was saucy and impish and sexy as hell. I wondered what she had in store for me. We turned down a dusty, country road. Giant plumes of beige clouds floating in the air as her little car bumped and jumbled and rocked along a rutted dirt throughway.

  The area got more and more isolated, like conservation land…except around here everything seemed to be trailer parks, bars, truck stops and conservation land. I had a feeling that out here they didn't need to preserve twenty or fifty or a hundred acres of wetlands because land was about the only thing they seemed to have in abundance.

  It was beautiful, though, as the dust settled and I could see the field she'd brought me to. It stretched out for what seemed like miles, a bedspread of early spring flowers and long grasses, some still mottled by the old, dead fronds from last year's growth. A thin path took us from the hodge-podge parking lot and I could see at the base that a thin strip of dirt poked through. This must be some sort of walking path for people in better weather and we were catching it new, virgin territory again as spring erupted.

  We could cross. We could blaze the trail. We could claim it for ourselves this fine season and build a memory that I knew would have to be enough, that I hoped would linger long enough. In reality and in my memory.

  Darla jumped out of the car, whipped around the back, and was pulling on my door with such force that I thought she was going to yank me by the collar and drag me into that field. I wouldn't have minded. Instead, she let me climb out on my own and I reached for her, the wind whipping through our hair as I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her, the sunlight shining on us as if saying yes, yes, yes. And then, something else in me said yes, standing up at attention, pointing to the sun, an all-too-familiar hardening and tightness in my jeans that needed to be lessened, and could only be lessened by Darla.

  She took my hand and, laughing like a child, with glee and frolic in her feet and in her body, she pulled me down the narrow channel of grass. It came up over my hip and I waded through, my hands brushing against the tops of the flowers and grasses, her head and shoulders weaving in front of me, my knees and feet st
ruggling to keep up without dragging us both down. Then, a clearing—and I smiled. It was completely hidden from everyone, everything. No one could find us here and somehow the grass had lessened. Layers of moss and shorter grasses covered the area before a large, wooded thicket.

  “How do you know about this place?” I asked. She seemed to be a keeper of secret places, seeking asylum in the unknown, carving out her own place in a world so hostile to what she could offer.

  “This is my reading spot,” she said. “This is where I go when I want to be alone or I want to sink into a book.” Her face became troubled for a fleeting second and then she seemed to decide to say something that she struggled to confess. “And this is where I go to think about my daddy.”

  I kissed her lightly, on the nose, and then on the lips, a tender gesture that was more an acknowledgment than anything driven by passion. She looked up and her face was open to me, more of an offering than any part of her body in lovemaking and when I looked into her eyes it was her heart that was open too. And that was where I caught my first glimpse of her naked soul.

  Darla

  Urgency. A wave of eager, pressing need rained down on us, pervading everything. I needed Trevor now, I wanted him in me now, and I wanted to feel cared for and taken and needed right back. This wasn't the same fire that swept over me last night in my little purple passion place. This was something frantic and intense.

  I wanted him to know my body the way I imagined people did when they could truly indulge in lust, could just get funky and fun and be all about the release of all their urges, ticking them off one by one. We had another chance at that today. I unbuttoned his pants as he kissed me, unzipped his fly, and exposed him naked, dropping to my knees and—

  “Oh, God,” he groaned as my mouth covered his rigid hardness. He was already ready for me; my warm, accepting mouth was able to play and tease him, tongue lifting up the underside of his hard shaft, making his knees buckle slightly, his hands slipping into my hair like a man seeking grace. His fingernails brushed against my scalp, the effect so erotic my own orgasm came to the surface like a tsunami, holding back just before crashing onto shore.