I pulled out my phone and my hands started to tremble as I dialed Scout’s number. As the phone rang, my stomach inched closer to my throat and I refused to breathe. After the third ring I relaxed a bit, confident I’d soon be transferred to his voicemail, but then something completely unexpected happened: he picked up.
“Hello?” His voice was thick and raspy like I’d just woken him up.
Was he in bed? My breath caught in my chest at the thought of Scout lying in bed, his muscles languid and exposed, and his huge arms draped across my—
“Hello?” he said again and I was jolted out of my daydream.
“Hi…” I nearly whispered. “It’s—“
“Nola,” he breathed into my ear and for a moment it almost felt like he was standing right behind me. “I’m glad you called,” he said. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t.”
“Sorry about that. Things got a little busy between work and school and,” I seriously needed to get my blathering under control. “Anyway, I wanted to say thank you.”
“For what?”
“The tip. It was way too generous, like 300-percent. I almost felt bad about taking it.”
“You felt bad?” His voice rose in my ear like he was annoyed.
“I mean, it was just way too much,” I said, hoping I didn’t upset him.
I heard Scout release a sigh. “You deserve it, Nola.”
“Well,” I said quietly, “I don’t want to hold you. I just called to say thanks.”
“No worries. But hey, what are you up to now? Heading to work?”
I flopped down on a nearby bench and twirled strands of hair around my index finger. I had planned to only speak to Scout’s voicemail, and then push him completely out of my head, but as we talked, I realized I didn’t want our conversation to end.
“Umm, no. Not working today. I was thinking of heading to the Getty.”
“What time?” he asked, and I felt myself easing at the sound of his voice.
Scout sounded like a man. Not like the guys at UCLA who pretended to be men, but really weren’t. His voice was deep and masculine, but whenever he said my name he caressed it like a precious jewel.
“Nola?” he said, snapping me out of my thoughts again.
“Huh?”
“What time are you going to the Getty?”
“Oh, now. I’m on campus, so I’ll probably get there in a half hour or so.”
“I’ll meet you there,” he said, perking up.
“What? No, Scout, you don’t have to—“
“I want to, Nola,” he said. “Have you eaten yet? We could grab a bite if you feel like it.”
Before I could think about it, I heard myself say, “Okay.”
What could happen in a museum anyway? We’d see some art, get a sandwich at the café, and then go our separate ways. I figured it would be completely harmless. Besides, I told myself, after dealing with Professor St. James’ antics I needed to see a friendly face.
“So I’ll see you there in, what, a half hour?” he asked.
I tried to calculate how long it would take me to get from UCLA to the Getty Center on the metro. It was only a few miles away, but with traffic and the constant stop-and-go of the bus, who knew how long it would take.
“Let’s make it an hour.”
“Great!” he said, and I could hear the excitement in his voice. “I’ll see you there.”
“Hey Scout,” I said, my face spreading into a smile. “Lunch is on me.”
5 Scout
She finally called, and I almost missed it.
I had crawled into bed just after seven a.m. and fallen into a restless sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I wondered if I should run back to Nola’s job to see her again, but I didn’t want to scare her away. I had enough baggage I’d have to convince her to accept, I didn’t need to add “stalker” to the list.
Before my phone rang I’d drifted into a semi-deep sleep and didn’t want to give up my first real chance at rest, but something told me to pick it up. And I’m glad I did.
As soon as she said hello I knew it was Nola. She sounded so nervous and cute thanking me for the tip. I wanted to tell her I’d give her anything, but I knew I couldn’t come on too strong. Not yet at least.
Listening to her voice in my ear made me want to race to her campus, bring her home and lay her down in my bed, just so I could wake up to those beautiful hazel eyes.
My house was up the hill from the Getty, so I had a little time to prepare for our date. Normally I didn’t care what I wore around a woman, it didn’t seem to matter anyway. But this was different; I actually wanted to impress Nola.
I jumped in the shower, soaped my tired muscles and washed my hair. When I got out, I scanned my closet for the perfect outfit. I had to laugh at myself; I was behaving like a teenaged girl. If my boys saw me now they’d never stop cracking jokes on me.
I grimaced. What would Nola think of my friends?
My boys were a ragtag bunch of guys I’d grown up with in Pacoima. A few had gone off to college and had gotten out of the neighborhood, most worked two or three jobs to survive, and some made their living just on the other side of the law. But I loved them all; they were my brothers.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and marveled at how lucky I’d been. When I was 16, I got into a back alley brawl with this kid from another neighborhood in the hopes that I’d win a few hundred bucks.
Everyone had bet on the fight, and although I had never trained, I had enough pent-up rage to take on half of his friends. The fight was a bloody affair, I broke his nose, and I had a huge gash in my forehead before we were done. But like most things, I won. Instead of wasting the money on a shit-ton of weed and partying with my boys I bought a secondhand laptop and fell in love with coding.
It was like I was addicted to my computer. I dropped out of high school to hang out with my friends during the day, and stayed up deep into the night writing code. It paid off. A texting app I built sold for $100 million a few years ago, and since then I’d been making shit and learning how to earn more money from the sum I already had.
I’m a long way from the days when I used to go to bed hungry, get into fights, smoke weed, and collect tattoos with my friends. I had a lot of skeletons in my closet, I just wondered if Nola could accept them.
I searched for a shirt and pulled on a soft cotton V-neck. I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered what Nola would think of my tats. The first two times I’d seen her they were covered up by long-sleeves, but now they were on full display. My torso was covered in ink; it told the story of my life. I hoped I could share that story with Nola, but I didn’t want to scare her. She seemed so innocent and pure and wide-eyed. I’d seen enough horrible shit to last me three lifetimes, so it was time for something good. And Nola felt good.
I thought about changing into a different shirt to cover up my tattoos, but I kept the V-neck on. It would be a test. If she were repulsed I’d know I needed to work that much harder to convince her to be with me, and if she loved them I would be one step closer to claiming her heart.
When I was done getting dressed I jogged to my garage and jumped into my vintage Mustang on the way to see my girl. Traffic was pretty light so I got to the Getty Center early. I took the elevator to the main floor and waited near the tram that would take us up the hill to the museum.
I waited, and waited, and waited. After several tense minutes I started to get nervous. What if she didn’t show?
I checked the time; she was 15 minutes late and I was starting to panic. What if something happened to her? What if she changed her mind? What if she had a boyfriend who told her she couldn’t meet up with me?
I froze. Fuck. I never even thought to ask if she was single, not that it would stop me if she wasn’t. Her boyfriend would just have to get out of the way because Nola was mine, and nobody was going to stop me from getting what I wanted.
I took out my phone and scrolled for her number. I was about to hit send when the elevator di
nged and she came bounding out the door.
Fucking gorgeous.
“Hey Scout! I’m sooo sorry I’m late. The bus made like every single stop and it took way longer to get here than I thought it would. I’m sorry for making you wait.”
Nola was smiling, but her cheeks were pink with embarrassment. Did I make her nervous or was she just worried about being impolite because she was late? I hoped it was me.
“The bus? You don’t have a car?”
“Nope, no car,” she said still smiling and it took every ounce of my willpower not to grab her head and taste her lips.
“Are you some type of green fanatic?” I joked. “Save the trees and all that?”
She giggled and I never wanted that sound to end. “No, just a broke college student. I know everybody in L.A. drives, but it’s not so bad. I get a lot of reading done on the bus.”
“But don’t you work late sometime? How do you get home?”
“I usually get a ride from my friend Tara,” she said, and I felt a little relief. I was hoping she wouldn’t say she took the bus at night. I could only imagine what kind of wolves were out there looking to devour a sweet girl like Nola.
“...And if she can’t take me I call Uber or Lyft, or hop on the bus.”
Dammit. My chest constricted and I gritted my teeth. I could not have my Nola on the bus or in the back of some random guy’s car. Not late at night, hell, not even during the day, the risks were just too great. I’d heard about girls getting assaulted by those fake taxi drivers, and I shuddered to think about what I’d do if something happened to Nola.
“I see,” I said, already wanting to buy her a car.
“So, ready to go up? Have you ever been here before?” she asked, staring up at me. Again, I wanted to kiss her, but resisted.
“Nope, never. I’ve been meaning to, but just never seemed to find the time.”
“Cool. I’ve been here a million times, so you’re in good hands,” Nola said, smiling and I damn near had a heart attack because her smile hit me straight in the chest. “C’mon, I’ll show you around.” She tugged on my shirt and pulled me toward the line for the tram, and my dick swelled at just the hint of her touch against my stomach.
I walked behind her and forced myself to think of something that would make my erection go down. When I caught a guy gawking at her breasts my mood quickly shifted from arousal to rage.
I wanted to smack his eyes out, but I’d probably look like a jealous psycho, so I shot daggers from my eyes instead. As we got closer to the man, he still didn’t seem to get the hint that I would beat the shit out of him if he didn’t stop ogling Nola’s tits, so I stepped in front of her to block his view.
I felt her finger trace the back of my arm and I flinched. Her touch sent an electric surge to my groin.
“Sorry,” she said, sheepishly. “It’s just…you have a lot of tattoos.”
I turned around and studied her face to see if my tats turned her off, but she had that same wonderful wide-eyed look like the first time I saw her.
“Yeah, it’s pretty addictive.”
“How many do you have?” she asked, still studying my arm.
“I dunno. I stopped counting a while ago.”
She ran her finger across the ink on my collarbone, setting my whole body on fire. I swallowed hard and hoped she didn’t notice the bulge pushing against my jeans.
“Did they hurt?”
“A little bit,” I whispered, afraid anything louder would give away my thoughts. I wanted to throw Nola over my shoulder, race to my house, and climb inside her.
She fingered a long scar on my forearm. “What happened here?”
I gulped, burning at the lightness of her touch. “Fell off a motorcycle.”
She winced, and then gently touched the scar on my forehead. “And here?”
“Got it in a fight,” I said, struggling to control the yearning coursing through my frame.
Instead of being disgusted, Nola looked at me with soft eyes and like I was a real person, not Scout Clayborne multimillionaire, or Scout Clayborne serial fuckup. To my surprise, she wasn’t repulsed when she looked at my tats and scars; instead she seemed intrigued. Of course, this just made me want to live between her thighs for the rest of my fucking life.
“I always wanted to get a tattoo, but I was always too scared,” she chuckled, pulling me out of my thoughts.
I cleared my throat and tried to quell my desire. “Oh yeah? What kind? A butterfly? A heart? Something girly?”
She shook her head and grinned. “No. A bird. The Sankofa bird actually.”
“The what?”
“It’s an African symbol. My dad, he’s Black. He was this Jamaican guy who was deep into African things, which is funny considering he married my mom,” she giggled.
“I don’t get it.”
“My mom is White. She’s this stunning, all-American blonde woman from Michigan, and my dad grew up in the slums of Kingston. It was an unlikely match,” she shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve always loved the Sankofa bird. There are a bunch of different designs, but the one I wanted is this bird with big, pretty wings, and its head is facing backward toward the past.”
She paused for a moment, and I didn’t dare say anything for fear she would stop talking. I wanted to know everything about her, wanted to hear every piece of her parents’ unlikely love story, hoping it would help us have one of our own.
“There’s a saying my father taught me,” she said, picking up her thoughts again. “It says, ‘It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.’ When I was little I used to wonder what it meant. Now, I think I understand.”
“Oh yeah? What do you think it means?”
“I think it means we can fix the past in a way.”
“How so?” I asked, hoping she was right. I’d been through so many things growing up that had left me scarred, suspicious of people, and scared to love. I hoped I could go back and patch things up because I really liked Nola, and for the first time ever, I wanted to love her…and I wanted—no, needed—her to love me back.
“Well, we can’t change the past, obviously, but we can learn from it, and then let it go. And we can make sure we don’t carry the bad stuff into the future,” she shrugged, “But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?”
“Definitely,” I said, wondering if Nola was reading my mind. “So, your parents are still together?” I asked, hoping to change the subject to something happier.
“No.” Her face fell. “My father died when I was 10.”
Fuck. The very last thing I wanted to do was cause Nola any pain, and in the first 10 minutes I’d struck a serious nerve. Her eyes got misty and I wanted to shoot myself for making her sad.
“Nola, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—“
She waved me off. “It’s okay, Scout, you didn’t know. Anyway, that was a long time ago. I should be over it by now, right?”
I stroked her face and wiped away an escaped tear. “Baby, some things you never get over.”
I should certainly know.
* * *
Nola
I felt like my head was going to explode. Everything about Scout told me I should run away, and fast. First, he had about a million tattoos etched into his skin: Chinese characters, names, quotes, and even a skull and crossbones. What kind of normal, good guy has one of those? Then there were the scars. Motorcycle accidents and street fights meant he probably had some kind of death wish, and getting involved with a man like that was certainly out of the question.
What the hell was I saying? Scout and I were not going to be getting involved, no matter how much I wanted to kiss him.
Still, I had to admit there was something about Scout that told me he was more than his sketchy-looking body art and hard muscles let on. Behind his gorgeously rough exterior lay something deeper that kept sucking me in, no matter how hard I wanted to fight it.
We rode up the tram to the top of the hill and I held my breath the entire time. Scou
t stood so close I could smell his musky cologne and feel the heat jumping off his body. I didn’t dare speak during the slow climb up the hill, fearful I’d say something stupid or start crying like I did when Scout asked about my parents. I wanted to kick myself for letting those tears flood my eyes, but I couldn’t help it, thinking about my dad always made me so sad.
While my parents weren’t traditional, and we constantly moved around, those years my dad was alive were the absolute best times of my life. Back then my mother smiled constantly and my dad treated me like I was the most precious, most beautiful girl in the whole entire world. Even when he got high he never yelled or got angry, just nodded in the corner with a dumb grin on his face until he drifted off to sleep.
After he died, my mom went to pieces and fell into a terrible depression. I had to grow up fast, learning how to cook and take care of myself just to keep from starving to death. After a couple years, my mom seemed to finally snap out of her funk, but things were never the same. Instead of doing mother-daughter things with me she turned her attention to an endless stream of trifling boyfriends to fill the hole my dad left in her heart. I knew she was in pain, but she didn’t even seem to notice I was hurting too.
The tram doors slid open, and Scout put his hand on my lower back to guide me out. I immediately stiffened at his touch, and then relaxed into its tenderness. Everything about Scout was a contradiction. He looked like a runway model, but wasn’t full of himself at all. He was covered in scary tattoos, but didn’t seem like a maniac. As a matter of fact, he’d been incredibly kind and caring with me, which was further confirmation that the saying, “Never judge a book by its cover,” was true.
Scout was like a complex puzzle that frustrated the hell out of you, but made you want to figure it out anyway. I just hoped I didn’t end up hurt if I decided to try to put all of his pieces together.
“Wow,” Scout breathed when we stepped off the tram and into the glorious day. The sun was shining brightly, and the sky was a vibrant blue that usually only happened after the rain had cleared out all the smog. Scout gazed at the travertine steps that led up to the cluster of art galleries and his eyes doubled in size.
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