“I need a beer. Doesn’t matter what kind.”
He takes one of the glasses from the raw pine shelf behind him, without turning away from me. He wrinkles up his nose and looks me up and down.
“I’m not a cop.” I hook my leg around the stool and straddle it to sit down. I plant my elbows on the bar and press my hands to my temples. “Fucking promise.”
“Never thought you were. Just deciding if you look more like a lager man or if you’re a Double India Pale Ale.”
“Sorry.” I rub my head. “Either one is fine, as long as it’s cold.” And as long as it helps me stop thinking about her.
He puts the glass down under one of the taps and pulls on the polished wooden handle. But trying to stop thinking about her is going to be way easier said than done, because I can’t fucking help myself; as he’s pulling the pint, I flip through the photos I took, now easier to see than outside in the sun. I zoom in on her face and feel a punch to my gut. Wham.
The thing is, I didn’t want to lie to her. She already thinks I’m a Hollywood scout, and that’s bad enough. I didn’t want to make some promise I couldn’t keep on top of it, and so I didn’t. I gave it to her straight, and now look where it’s got me. Drinking a beer alone at a carnival at three o’clock on a Friday. Fuck.
The bartender puts down a coaster and then the glass on top of it. Still looking at her in the window of my camera, I take a long draw. It’s bitter, cold, and fucking delicious.
“God, that hits the spot,” I say, wiping my mouth.
“Right? Made that myself.” He taps on the coaster, on an old-fashioned logo, with one of those hand-sketched fingers. Redemption Brewery.
Man, I can get down with a lot of things, but if this guy starts quoting Isaiah 3:whatever at me right now, I’m going to have to split. Still though, I don’t want to be an asshole. “What’d you get redeemed from?”
“Me? Nothing, son! I was raised a Unitarian Universalist. Our church motto was, ‘You’re already saved, come on in!’ He chuckles to himself, lost in some old memory. “No, here’s how it is: I used to be a probation officer, till I lost heart for it.”
“Can’t blame you there.”
“But I started brewing in my garage, and lo and behold, I discovered the best way to keep guys out of the slammer? Teach them to brew beer and sell it.” He nods nice and slow. “Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life. Teach a man to make India Pale Ale, and he’ll stay too busy to get in trouble.”
This place really is the Twilight Zone. I come here looking for dirt on the mayor, and I find the salt of the goddamned earth.
“I’m Russ.” I reach out to shake his hand. “And this is one hell of a beer.”
“Glad to hear it. I’m Tom Darling.”
Wait. No. For fuck’s sake. “Darling. You related to Penny?”
His tanned old face transforms into an ear-to-ear smile. “She’s my niece. You know her?”
Knowing her isn’t the half of it. That roller coaster was bullshit compared to the last eighteen hours. “Met her earlier today through work.”
Pinned to his shirt, part of his costume, is a sheriff’s star exactly like Guppy’s. Welcome to small-town Florida, Macklin. There’s no escaping her, no matter what you do.
“She’s the apple of my eye, that girl,” he says, crossing his arms over his beer gut. He shakes his head and grins even wider. “Always has been, always will be. She’s a shareholder in Redemption. Five percent stake.” He beams again. “That beer in your hand is called Penny’s IPA.”
If he’d sucker-punched me, it wouldn’t have made me feel quite so bad. I stare at the half-finished beer, feeling half-finished myself. Empty, shitty, and drained: There’s a lovely woman out there, she’s got a delicious beer named after her, and I’ll never have her. Ever again.
“I better get going.” I pull out my wallet and put down a ten. “That cover it?”
“Jesus, I appreciate it. And say, if you see Penny, give her a big squeeze from Uncle Tom, you hear?”
“Yeah, man,” I tell him, heading for the exit flap, feeling a headache coming on. “I will.”
* * *
The manager at the Residence Inn says, “Name?”
I’m so out of it that it takes me a second to remember if I put it under Macklin or… “Stevenson, Russ.”
She doesn’t look up from the screen, but clatters away on her keyboard. “We don’t have a reservation for a Mr. Russ. Could it be under a different name?”
“Try Stevenson. Russ Stevenson.”
“You were supposed to check in yesterday, Mr. Russ-Stevenson.”
“I got delayed. Sorry about that.”
She clatters away a little longer. On the muted television behind her is a local station, broadcasting the evening news live. I watch the mayor shuffle across the frame at the front of a conga line.
“Unfortunately, due to the Polish Freedom Festival combined with the Tangerine Festival and the Kumquat Festival this week, we’re very short on rooms… I don’t see anything opening up for another four days. We did try to call you when you didn’t show up for your reservation.” She looks at my cell phone on the check-in desk. “But I suppose that didn’t get through to you. Let me check one more thing.”
She returns to the clatter-clatter. Of course they gave away my room, my fucking luck. Someone hands the mayor a beer stein, and the crawl on the bottom of the screen says, Mayor Jeffers Enjoys Afternoon at Elks’ Fundraiser to Benefit New Preschool. The closed-captioning flashes onto the screen as the reporter puts a microphone near his mouth.
“JUST WANT TO SAY GET WELL SOON, PENNY!” says the mayor’s block quote. This confirms the obvious: I’m an asshole. Clearly, she went home and called in sick. Because of me. Us. This high-speed whirlwind we’re both caught inside, and that I pushed to its maximum velocity way too fucking soon.
Now he raises his beer. His lips move, and then the caption says, “TO PENNY!” Sprinkling the screen are echoing cheers.
* * *
TO PENNY!
FEEL BETTER PENNY!
HI PENNY!
PENNY!
PENNY!
TO PENNY!
Are these people for real? Is this place for real?
“Sorry to say we’re all booked up, Mr. Russ-Stevenson.”
Real enough. “Any other hotels in town?”
“Mmmm, no. We are the only hotel in town. There’s always the KOA camp ground, and you can shower at the YMCA, but a word to the wise—” She drops her voice. “—I’d recommend bringing some protective footwear for the shower. I’ve heard you can get some mighty resistant fungal…”
I hold up a hand to stop her right there. “I’m with you. What else?”
She blinks slowly, staring straight at me like there must be something wrong with me. “There are no other options. Not in Port Flamingo itself.”
My mind unspools in the direction of Dickerson’s new resort. What I wouldn’t give for twenty minutes in a sauna and a few laps in an Olympic-sized pool right about now. “Not even some sort of sketchy motel?”
“Not since Health and Safety shut them down.”
I rub my face, feeling the sting of sunburn on my cheeks. I figure I could drive back to Aunt Sharon’s and spend the night with a low-to-medium marijuana buzz while we conspire against the mayor into the small hours of the morning. Tempting, but man, as much as I love my Aunt Sharon, I can’t hack it with the weed. And in that house, there’s no avoiding it. A second-hand high is part of the ambience.
There are probably other options, too, I guess, but there’s only one I want. There’s only one place I need to be.
With her.
The fact is that there’s a time to be a gentleman, and there’s a time for something else. After the roller coaster, she had me on my heels, and I respected her choice. But goddamn it, there is no universe in which I can be within driving distance of that woman and not find my way back to her and that perfect body, that soft skin, that giggle and
the way she moans. There is no way I’m taking no for an answer, not tonight. “Is there a florist around here?”
The manager touches her bangs, which are crispy with hairspray, and nods. “There’s the bait shop.” She points across the street to a gas station with a smiling worm on the sign. “They’ve got nice carnations. Sometimes.”
24
Penny
My face is stiff with a homemade egg white mask. From the couch, Guppy and I watch a line of little penguins hop along a cliff, and the narrator says, “Rockhopper penguins are faithful for life, and the males spend several weeks preparing their nest before their mates arrive.”
I let my body fall against Guppy. Penguins can have life-mates, but not me. Not Penelope Eloise Darling of Port Flamingo, who was too sensible to risk her heart.
“One penguin, however, returns to the flock and cannot find her mate, no matter where she looks.”
The music shifts to a forlorn violin solo.
“I’m with you, little lady,” I tell the lone lady penguin. Maisie couldn’t even drag me to the Polish Freedom Day festival—it’s the very first one I’ve ever missed. When I told her no, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, she came back and stuck a thermometer in my ear.
And now here I am. From the arm of the sofa, I take my wine. I’ve taken a page from Maisie’s book and am drinking it straight from a mason jar with a straw. I’m wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt with no bra. Full-on, single-girl wallowing mode. Because of the mask, dry and crackling now, I have to sort of contort my lips around the straw. A small dribble of chardonnay slides down my chin and Guppy licks it off my leg.
The documentary focuses in on the lone female. “Finding a mate is difficult. She begins to display her grief in her mourning dance.”
But before I can hurl myself at Guppy again, the doorbell fills up the house with a long dinnnnnnnng-dong.
“Leave it there, Norm,” I call out, my words slightly malformed because of the mask holding my lips like I've gotten an overdose of Botox. I try to scan back through my Amazon purchases to think of what it might be. God only knows with Subscribe and Save, the best bad idea anybody ever had. I’ve got more wheat-free peanut butter cookies than Guppy will ever be able to eat, but they just keep coming.
Dinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng-dong goes the doorbell again. That means it can’t be Norm, because Norm knows the drill. Norm never rings twice.
I turn to look over the back of the couch, toward the frosted window adjacent to the door. I see the shadow of someone, but not their actual shape, so it’s definitely not one of the kids from down the street coming to try to sell me Girl Scout Cookies. They always wait with their noses pushed against the glass—they know an easy mark when they spot one.
“I don’t need a new roof!” I say, and slurp up a little bit more wine.
Knock-knock-knock.
“Or new windows!”
Dinnnnnnnng-dong.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” I thrust myself off the couch and stomp toward the door, wine in hand. I fling it open and get ready to give whoever it is a piece of my mind.
And then I see him.
He’s holding a single wilted blue carnation in one hand, and a six-pack of Penny’s IPA in the other. He’s got the shopping bag with my dress dangling from his finger, and his suitcase is behind him.
My heart careens through my chest like Guppy does through the house when he’s got the zoomies. “It’s you.”
“Penny…” he says gruffly, but trails off. His sexy lips part, and he leans into me, blocking out the setting sun with his body.
In my head, about a hundred different possible sentences come next, but I hear them all at once. I don’t care if you push me away, I want you, I have to have you. And, How can you know you don’t want a fling if you’ve never had one, tell me that? And, Didn’t you listen to that palm reader? Didn’t you feel it?
But instead he says, “Are you okay?”
I push my fingers against the crackly surface of my cheek. Oh, my God, the mask. The egg white mask.
* * *
I rinse off my face in the bathroom and towel it off on one of my bath towels, inhaling hard into the terrycloth, catching a tiny hint of his smell deep in the fabric. It’s sharp and clean, like cedar.
From the drying rack I take a bra and panties, and then from the back of my door I take my beach robe—a flowery, short kimono. I put on a little makeup and blink into the mascara wand, then give my throat a squirt of perfume and open the door. Before I round the corner, I push back my shoulders and take a steadying breathing. Then I take a step forward into the living room, where I find him sharing the couch with Guppy. He’s got a beer in his hand, and together they’re watching the penguins.
When he sees me he stands up, and Guppy sprawls out on the sofa. I am completely flustered, in spite of the fresh makeup and the perfume. But to keep myself from babbling, I grab my phone and turn on the nearest playlist to hand. Peggy Lee fills the room, singing about fevers.
“Here.” He hands me a beer, which he had open and ready. Our fingers just touch on the label, an old-fashioned cameo drawing of my profile in silhouette.
“Are you hungry? Can I make you something to eat?” I pick up the box of wine. I notice it’s a lot lighter than it was when I sat down with Guppy and the penguins. “I should probably get something in my stomach…”
“Don’t go to any trouble. We can go out.”
“No trouble, not at all,” I say, and grab an apron from the pantry door, one of the more risqué ones in my collection. It’s the torso, midriff, and hips of a mermaid, complete with a shell bra.
He looks me up and down, laughing into his beer. “You really are adorable.”
Most men don’t make me nervous, but this one does. Nervous in a good way. Nervous like a tingly ball of nerves dying to get…
Untangled.
“Is ham and brie okay?” I ask, cinching the ties tight.
“Perfect.”
From the fridge, I take some ham and a small wheel of brie. I grab the cheese slicer and remove the rind with a few quick peels.
“When I was driving down the street, I’m pretty sure the girl from the surf shop passed me and gave me the finger.”
I freeze with the peeler stuck into the cheese and look over my shoulder. “That’s my best friend. Sorry. She’s very suspicious of outsiders. And men.”
A little smile creases his dimples, but he doesn’t laugh. He crosses his arms, watching me. “She was right about one thing, though. Seducing the Rake.” He winks.
I disengage the peeler from the brie and turn around. He’s already taken a step closer to me, and so I sort of go limp against the dishwasher, the heat from the dry cycle making a hot strip across my tush. While I’m not particularly into Regency myself, I can absolutely imagine it. He’s got the hair, the shoulders, the roguish smile.
Seduce me, you rake. Please.
Then he puts his arms on either side of me. The heat from his body soaks into mine. Move over, drying cycle. Russ is here. “Penny. About earlier… I’m sorry. I haven’t enjoyed being with anybody so much…. in ages. I got swept up in it all.”
That this man, this hunky stud, could get swept up because of little old me is more intoxicating to me than any box of wine, top shelf or generic label. I inhale hard and feel his hips pushing against my mermaid stomach. “I don’t want either of us to get hurt.”
“And I don’t want to be the one to hurt you.” He says it with a kind of resignation, a certainty. Total respect for me and what I’m saying. But there is something in his eyes that is greedy, and aggressive, almost. “Not unless you want me to.”
Disrespect me. Do it.
“I've never had a fling,” I say, slowly. “But…”
He growls. He gets closer, letting me feel his strength against my stomach. He’s hard already and getting harder. “Finish that sentence, Penny.”
“But…we only live once. And if it’s going to be with anybody…”
He doesn’t let me finish, but kisses the words right out of me. My head thumps back against the teacup cabinet. He undoes the ties of my mermaid apron and then breaks the kiss to slip it over my head. “Sandwiches are going to have to wait,” he whispers into my ear.
“I love when you talk dirty.”
And then he slings me over one shoulder, slaps my ass, and says, “You make it easy.”
25
Russ
As I lay her down and undo my belt, I see the bruises on her hip. “Fuck, yeah.” She props herself on her elbows and runs her fingers over the bruises, too. I put my hand over the top of them and she answers with a peaches-and-cream smile that makes her eyes twinkle.
“I know. I saw it today when I was in the dressing room.” I shift my hand half an inch to the left, so that her fingers fall between mine.
I remember when it happened. She was coming for the third time, and I was coming inside her for the second. Fuck.
With my pants half undone, I push her thighs apart and kneel on the bed. I pull her body up and undo her bra. “Tonight, you leave everything to me. You got that? Everything.” I take her face in my hands and look her in the eye. As I kiss her, I lay her back down, pinning her hard against the mattress. “Every moan, every orgasm, every please, please, please. Those are mine.”
She nods, and her hair slides on the sheets. “Everything for you.”
I move off the mattress and stand, taking her in as she lays there. The sheets, the blanket, the mess of pillows by the headboard. Her. Her.
In one quick movement, I flip her over onto her stomach, and she squeals. Then I hook my forearm under her hips and pull her up onto her knees. I am painfully hard in my boxers, and I let her feel me between her ass cheeks. “Feel that? Feel what you do to me?” She drops lower on her elbows and groans as I pull her panties down her thighs.
Just Like That Page 12