Random Acts of Fantasy (Random Series #3, Invitation to Eden)

by Julia Kent

  But I was still in earshot. Joe needed backup.

  “She’s plastic. Mommy and Daddy paid a boatload to keep that body going. Spray-on tan and shoes that cost $300,” Amy stage whispered to Darla.

  “$300! And she can barely walk in them.” My eyes watched what they critiqued and it made me realize chicks live on a completely different plane from me. All I saw when I looked at Suzy was nice, high tits, athletic legs, and smooth skin.

  Nice.

  But the crazy eyes negated it all. There was a look in them that said she was as likely to give a guy head while driving down the highway as she was to cut off his penis with an old nail file and fling it out the open window.

  Just as Amy was about to explain the $300 shoes to Darla, Suzy leaped forward and gave Joe a sweet kiss on the cheek. She grabbed her rolling bag and ran off down a slanted hallway to the international section of the airport.

  Joe walked toward us, alternating expressions of deep relief and uncertainty.

  “So that was Suzy,” he said to Darla as he got closer. “My—”

  “Ex.” They said it in unison. Amy and Darla folded their arms over their chests simultaneously, shifting their weight onto one hip.

  He was so fucked.

  Chapter Five

  Joe

  In the movies, there’s this moment when someone—one of those dispensable characters who has a first name but no other meaningful qualities—sees something and has a change in expression that tells the audience that he or she is about to die, and that the entire trajectory of the movie’s story line is seconds away from changing.

  Forever.

  Irrevocably.

  Meet that moment in my life. Right here. Right now.

  Suzy made me want that bus to take me out, that sniper to put a shot through my brain, for that deus ex machina to rip into the scene and make the problem of Suzy, and the detonation of Darla, end with a bang that took me out of the picture.

  Staying in the picture was a kind of torture.

  Like being in Saw 12.

  Her entire being gave me hives. Clinical case of actual hives. A release of histamine in my body was the reaction to seeing those pert tits, those tight little calves that used to wrap around my waist as she squealed my name when I made her come, her manicured fingers with that perfect, sophisticated shade of tannish-pink that had a name, like Sun-kissed Lips, that my mother would know if Suzy were to meet her for lunch at a vegan restaurant in the Back Bay and they traded fashion tips.

  And the nail polish would be cruelty-free, vegan, fair trade, and tested only on fully consenting disabled little people who were undergoing sex-change operations.

  In Darfur.

  Suzy’s eyes had gripped me the same way her lean, petite little cheerleader’s ass made my dick swell. Painfully and with total engagement.

  I could feel Darla’s eyes burning through us, like Godzilla, except with less control. Trevor could keep her contained, but why? There was nothing to worry about. Nothing to be jealous about.

  And that tiny detail where I never told her that I’d dumped Suzy a few months before I came to Ohio, and that it had taken the full strength of the Massachusetts court system to get her to stop stalking and sexting?

  Details. Just details. I was going to tell her.

  Eventually.

  Eventually just crept up on me in an unexpected place and my mind drifted to the calendar…yep. Ten days after the last RO expired. Fuck. I’d been too busy with finals to think about it.

  Those honey-brown eyes ate me up, the crazy that lived at the edges of her irises and multiplied like maggots sending a tingle of terror into the root of my cock.

  Part of my desire to go into law was Suzy. No, seriously. You call the police a few times and then fill out restraining-order paperwork and you realize how important knowing your legal shit really is.

  As long as we were still fucking and I showed up to her sorority parties, she didn’t care what I did with my time. But then my time became her time. Go more than five minutes without answering a text? I’d get eight voicemails in ten minutes.

  Not answer the voicemails? All my friends would be simul-texted.

  None of them answered? She’d start writing desperate wall posts on Facebook, like OMG, Joe’s hurt! He’s not answering his phone! If anyone’s seen him please get back 2 me!

  My mom was whipped into a frenzy every. Fucking. Time.

  And I was just whipped.

  That alone wasn’t enough to stop slipping it to that piece of tanned Aphrodite who was the perfect complement to my arm, turning heads and gaining nods of approval. It was when she turned into Medusa that I realized it had to end.

  “I’ll never give you back your ring,” Suzy had whispered as she hugged me just now in the airport, her voice sending tentacles of revulsion down my body, one entwining perfectly between my balls, squeezing. Breaking up with her had been my only option, and while I knew it would be hard, I needed to do it.

  A man’s oxygen is a limited enough resource when he’s trying to move up in the world, and the world already had me by the throat. Half the time my mom had me by the balls, and Suzy had my—

  “I told you, Suzy, that you can keep it—”

  Here we were, less than an hour before we were about to embark on a huge step forward in climbing up an unconventional ladder, one with different checklists, but one that required no less ambition than law school.

  And goddamned Suzy had to rear her Medusa head, begging me to come back.

  Except the look in her eyes wasn’t one of contrition or pleading.

  It was one of determination.

  “Because you still want me to marry you,” she said in an Annie Wilkes voice, from that creepy movie my mom made me watch on cable one time when I was thirteen.

  Suzy was totally the type to hide a sledgehammer in her makeup bag.

  “No, because I’m done, and because I’ll never marry you and it means more to you than it does to me.” The psychologist I saw at our college told me that becoming a “gray blob” was the best approach when dealing with a psycho stalker…er, person with a character disorder.

  But with a face like mine, trying to become a “gray blob” was like asking Darla to stop screaming during sex, like she was trying out for a porno.

  Not possible.

  “I know you need me to prove myself to you, Joe,” Suzy said breathlessly.

  “No I don’t.” Robotic. Stoic. Blob.

  You know the most dangerous time for any man in college who is dating? It’s a vector. Amount of time dating someone and December break of the senior year. If X = amount of time dating someone and it’s over a year, and Y = December break, then Z = expectation of marriage proposal.

  By January, Suzy had popped the “question”: “We’re getting married.” It wasn’t interrogative.

  It was, most decidedly, declarative. She’d told my mother before she told me. The two of them were studying ring patterns when they invited me to coffee that day.

  I was just…meat. A fleshbag with good bone structure and a nice ass that would be good arm candy.

  Those were my mother’s exact words, by the way, as they cackled and pulled out the Tiffany’s wedding brochure and discussed the presentation of the bride at the aisle.

  “I am still in love with you,” Suzy hissed as Lufthansa Airlines made some sort of announcement about baggage and my arms began to shake, neck raising up like a cat’s, balls steady and under control as a chill shot through me.

  Thank God I hadn’t given her my great-grandma’s ring, holding myself back for—what? In the darker parts of my soul I’d restrained myself, knowing that the proposal had been a business transaction of sorts, a move designed to meet the Checklist of Life, like getting into a great college, graduating, going to grad school, getting the right internship…

  You get married in there and have the oceanside wedding with three hundred of your parents’ closest friends.

  A rite of passage, and Suz
y had the right (tight) passage. That had turned out to be the crazy tunnel, and when she took a sharp turn into borderline territory, I was a man naked and without a passport in an uncharted land.

  “Remember our last night together?” Her pupils had gone inky, so wide they reminded me of black holes. Which they were. My throat tightened and my eyes glanced over and back, seeing Amy and Darla now watching us, probably mocking.

  Mocking was good. Anything that kept Darla in a good mood.

  Ha.

  “I still have the scars,” I replied.

  Her eyes narrowed in that menacing way that used to make me jump in and calm her. Instead, I stared. Then I realized she wasn’t glaring at me. Her eyes rested on a point over my shoulder.

  “Who’s that bitch?” Suzy sneered. She didn’t need to clarify. I knew who she meant.

  “I only see one bitch here.” I couldn’t help it. My temper began to show itself, my clothes too intense against my body, eyes widening and brow lowering, the muscles in my jaw working themselves.

  That chill turned to a flush of fury.

  I was done with this “gray blob” shit.

  “I know she can’t mean anything to you.” Her eyes crawled over Darla’s body, head to toe, and I could see the unbridled desire in Suzy’s eyes.

  To cook Darla’s raw boobs in a lovely saute pan with fava beans.

  Barely a month into our “engagement” (is it an engagement if you never really agreed?), I’d broken it off.

  She’d broken my toe. Stomped on it, with those little Manolo Blahnik spiked heels on shoes that cost more than a week’s worth of solid Molly.

  The pain hadn’t ended there.

  No, that took the last night we were together. When she’d kidnapped me—

  You’re laughing.

  Go ahead.

  I’d woken up in my own bed, chained to the bedposts. Chained. Naked, too, with Suzy’s crazy eyes focused not on my dick, where they should have been (because it’s a fine specimen), but on the ring I’d asked her to give back the night before.

  And the rest is part of a long, sealed document that I’d rather not discuss.

  Trevor’s not the only one who finds himself naked and in compromising positions.

  And wearing a spiked collar.

  Right now, though, I didn’t want to think or talk about that, because my people—I had people!—were waiting for me, to go on a plane and experience our breakout moment.

  A flash of how cold the chilled air had been on my tied-down, exposed flesh ran through me, making me shiver. Darla’s eyebrows went lower, and if they dropped any more they’d be framing her pussy.

  My people needed me.

  “It’s been lovely, Suzy.”

  “Really?” She shifted so fast back to eager-peppy-cheerleader voice that I felt the air shimmer.

  “No. I’m being polite.”

  And then her face morphed. Rippled. It was extraordinary to watch, because I didn’t know human flesh could do that, as if she were a Stepford Wife and some developer ran a few lines of code in her internal software program and made a mood change.

  “It was really great to see you, too, Joe,” she said in a controlled, pleasant voice, eyes hooded and all sign of the nutjob she really was scrubbed from her, like emotion catalogued and killed off in a debate.

  Remarkable.

  I admired it.

  She still scared the shit out of me, but I admired it.

  Standing on tiptoes, she touched my shoulder and I flinched, trying to move back but stumbling and taking a half-step forward, into her body. A gentle peck on the cheek from her made me tense, then step back.

  But not before she whispered something in my ear.

  Three little words.

  “You. Are. Mine.”

  And with that she was gone with the rat-a-tat-tat of expensive leather shoes on airport floors, the sound melding into the rumbling of wheeled luggage, the whoosh of air-ventilation systems, the beep beep beep of golf carts moving the infirm and their luggage, and the sound of Darla’s glare.

  Oh yes.

  It had a sound. Darla managed to invoke synesthesia wherever she roamed when she was angry. Fury had a taste. A glare took on auditory qualities. A wave had an odor.

  And right now, that glare screamed a song.

  Do you want to die?

  “So that was Suzy,” I said to Darla as I got closer, knowing I was about to be questioned via the Socratic Method in a manner no law professor at Harvard or Yale could match. “My—”

  “Ex.” Amy and Darla said it in unison, both folding their arms over their chests simultaneously, shifting their weight onto one hip.

  I was so fucked.

  Amy cocked one eyebrow and turned to Darla, and their eyes locked. A series of micro-movements took place between them, a language of women that I couldn’t even hope to translate. Chick tongue.

  Actually, chick tongue could be great if it was—

  “You were going to marry someone? Don’t you think that at some point in the last, oh, seven months I’ve been part of your life you could have mentioned that?” Darla was fuming. It made her even hotter. The creeping flush at the tops of her breasts made me hard.

  Thinking with my dick got me Suzy.

  I needed to pay attention to Darla. Or pretend to pay attention. It didn’t matter which one, because she was worked up the way my mom gets when nothing I say matters. She just has to get it out.

  “I wanted to,” I said in that crooning voice I saved for seducing her—it always worked. The flush spread to her cheeks and the pulse in her throat seemed to skip a beat. Nailed it.

  Normally that meant I’d get to nail her, but I could tell this one wasn’t blowing over any time soon. Whatever had been wrong with her back at the security gate was still there, too, and she was rattled.

  This was crisis management at its finest, and being fresh out of semester projects and only home for four days didn’t help me.

  Suzy put me over the top, too.

  “You wanted to?” she said, her voice softening. “I wanted to ride Santa’s sleigh over that damn naked scanner machine, but instead I got a squishless mammogram and walked out here to find my boyfriend’s ex-fiancee giving him a kiss.”

  “That’s not what—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Darla said quietly, her hands shaking, eyes red-rimmed with tears and the threat of more. Fuck. This I hadn’t planned for. A disappointed, dejected Darla was new to me. Her head tipped down and my gut clenched with something close to guilt.

  I should have told her. Why didn’t I tell her? Because I didn’t want to deal with shit like this. We met just as summer started and then she moved out here and summer was amazing and hot and oh…yeah…hot.

  Where was I?

  “Why didn’t I tell you?”

  She sniffed. “Quit using lawyer tactics on me. Repeating the last thing I said and all that shit.”

  Huh? She actually listened to me when I talked about that? The tightening in my gut got worse. That tugging feeling around my heart was real. This wasn’t the fake guilt I manufactured in a lame attempt to replicate the real guilt people actually felt when they’d disappointed someone. Never capable of being perfect enough for my mom, I’d just figured out a long time ago that what she wanted was a show of guilt. Whether I actually felt something was less important than acting like I felt something.

  But this was real.

  Darla was making something crack inside me.

  And the only way to make it go away was to use the truth.

  “I didn’t tell you,” I said as I reached for her hand and clasped it a little harder than I meant to. Desperation had a way of doing that to you. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know how to explain it. It was surreal.”

  “Like finding a naked man wearing only a guitar by the side of the interstate?”

  She had me there. “Yeah. Like that.” Her hand was so soft, the back of her palm under the knuckles like warm silk, the pul
se of her heart in the pad of her thumb. I blinked and it beat. Blink. Blink.

  When had I fallen so fucking hard for someone I wouldn’t have looked at twice—hell, once—seven months ago?

  When she looked up, her eyes did that thing only Darla could do, where somehow the way they moved told me everything she was feeling. The eyes themselves were a beacon, a light inviting me to come on an intense journey with her into our hearts and bodies.

  And I was hard. Just like that.

  All thoughts of Suzy vanquished, what was left in me was a big, roaring train full of want and hope aimed straight at this crooked-smiled, bright-eyed, curvy woman wearing no bra and looking like the most beautiful, vulnerable, challenging person in the world.

  Who had my heart and dick handcuffed to her hip.

  Voluntarily.

  I leaned down and brushed her golden hair away from her jaw, those knowing eyes finding mine. I heard the guys urging us to get our asses in gear, something about boarding, and then Amy’s beseeching tone, but when my lips found Darla’s it was all I could do not to take her right there, the world disappearing as my arms wrapped around her, the hair on my forearms brushing under her long, frizzy waves, buried in her the way I inhaled and found myself encased by her entire being.

  As it should be.

  She grounded me. Made my feet feel like I wasn’t always buzzing, needing to run off to do the Next Thing that someone expected of me, to tap dance on top of a rolling stone engulfed in flames. With Darla I could exhale. Then inhale. Smile. Then really smile.

  Sappy, huh?

  Suck it. You’re not the one who gets to feel her very real body pressed against yours, to breathe in her essence, to know that she is rock solid in her devotion and loyalty to you. Nothing replaces that. Not one damn thing in this world can, because the fakery and pretension that I subscribe to won’t let it.

  She makes me believe that the Suzys and Moms of the world are the pretend, and that my own doubt about them is truth.

  Which is why she’s so damn dangerous, and why I pried my lips from hers.

  “Damn it! They’re right. We’re going to miss the plane if we keep this up.” I grabbed her hand and my bag and started to move us toward the gate.