Chuck and Ace’s fireworks show began, showering us with lights and colors and happiness. Amy tilted her head up to follow the streaks of sparks across the night sky, drowning out the brightness of the stars, if only for a few brief seconds, and I could see the person she really was, the curious one, the one who wasn’t afraid to ask hard questions, the one who wanted to tell people’s stories because she truly cared about them. Her face was so open, watching those fireworks, and I was so fascinated by it, that I didn’t even have the sense to look away when she turned toward me.
Her lips pursed in question, then curved upward as my face tilted downward, almost of its own accord. It was a sweet, questioning kiss we shared, one lit by showers of gold and green and blue. She smiled against my mouth, then we deepened the contact at the same time as if we’d coordinated it. Amy’s tongue felt like velvet, or maybe it was just that damn mouth feel thing from the beer Brody had been talking about, and she tasted sweet enough to count as dessert after the burgers and hotdogs we’d been noshing all day.
I felt like I could kiss her forever under the pyrotechnics until reality sort of slammed back into place. The fireworks would be over soon. The party would end. And when I woke up tomorrow, Amy would be a thorn in my side again, clawing her way toward the story that I wanted to share with her even less, now.
Why in the hell had I kissed her? What had happened to make me fuck up so badly?
I covered my mouth with my hand. “I’m sorry.”
If anything, she looked a little dazed. “It’s okay. It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. That was a mistake. And I’m sorry for making it.”
“Sloan, really. You don’t have to apologize. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“You don’t understand.” She couldn’t understand because I didn’t understand. What had come over me? I didn’t know anything about this woman. She was looking for my deepest secrets. What was her article even going to include? I could imagine the beginning of it going something along the lines of: “After Sloan Norris kissed me, he opened up about all of the horrors he’d endured in Iraq.”
Only, Jesus Christ, is that why she’d let me kiss her? Was it all some kind of ploy? How could I be sure?
“Sloan, are you all right?” Amy was staring at me, her big, dark eyes serving as mirrors to the fireworks above us.
I shook my head. “I think I’ve had too much to drink.”
“Are you going to be sick?”
My stomach was in knots. “Maybe.”
“Can I do anything to help?”
“No. I think I just need…need to get some space.”
Her hand wrapped around my elbow. “I could take you back to your place.”
“I” Boy, that was an invitation. An invitation for more. And a bad idea. No way. I did not want to be in a confined space with Amy. Not now. Probably not ever. “That’s okay. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“It’s not an inconvenience. I really don’t mind. And if you end up puking in the car, who cares? It’s a rental.”
“I think…” God, I just wanted to get away from her. She was making me feel so paranoid right now. Why had I kissed her? Had she in some way orchestrated it? Could I have been brainwashed into wanting to kiss her? The idea was laughable. The moment had been real, both of us standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the sky ignite. It had been real, and that was what frightened me the most. That I was somehow opening up to Amy. If I kept peeling back the layers for her, she’d reach the rotten part of me, and she’d recoil away from it. Or worse, she’d write about it, the decay, all of it. And then everyone would know what a monster I was.
“Sloan?”
“I think I’m just going to go inside and find somewhere to lie down,” I said finally. My gut was in a permanent state of unease. I wasn’t that drunk, and all the food I’d treated myself to had gone down fine to begin with. Now, though, I regretted all of it. The contents of my stomach seemed to be sloshing around as if there were a small typhoon in there. Maybe I’d make good on my promise and throw up just so I wouldn’t be branded a liar on top of everything else.
“Do you need any help?” Amy looked anxious, but I shook off her concerns.
“No. I’ll be fine after a nap. Have fun. Take care.”
The worst of it was that I wanted to kiss her again, right there and then, even if that was the action that had sent me spiraling into such turmoil in the first place. I was either some kind of masochist, or Amy was playing a game that good.
Chapter 5
“Rise and shine, my prince.”
I groaned and threw my arm over my eyes as bright sunlight lit the room, invading my slumber.
“Was that English? Were you trying to tell me something important?”
I grumbled and fumbled around until I found a cushion to try and smother my face. It would be a slow death of suffocation, but anything would be preferable to this slow painful death of bright light.
The pillow was wrestled bodily from my grasp, and I was forced to hiss and shade my eyes from the morning sun coming in through the open window.
And Brody.
“Good morning, Sloan,” he said, grinning, the very definition of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He looked like he’d been awake for ages, plotting out how he was going to send me to an early grave. He was doing a really good job of it so far.
“Blarg,” I said, or something close to it. “What. Why.”
“You’re in my house, Sloany-poo. If you spend the night in my house, you have to do what I say when you wake up.”
“Are you this nice to all the women who stay the night at your place?” I asked, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.
“I am a perfect gentleman to them,” he said, indignant. “You, on the other hand, I can treat however I like, because you’re my friend. Not my lady caller.”
“I might not be your friend for very much longer,” I vowed. “Give me a second to get my bearings, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Take all the time you need,” he said, his voice a little too sweet, smile a little too saccharine. It made me freeze in the middle of getting up off the couch, and I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What did you do?”
“What?” He blinked at me, giving me his very best impression of having hurt feelings. “Why would you think I did something?”
I huffed a breath at him. “Let’s just say I’m in a constant state of paranoia these days.”
“What? Why’s that?”
“That girl.”
“That girl? You mean the writer? Amy? Sloan, you’re the one who invited her to the party.”
“I did it to be polite.”
“You didn’t have to do it at all, if you didn’t want to.”
But I had wanted to…kind of. She’d seemed lonely, and vulnerable, and she hadn’t really had anywhere to go.
I shuffled into the bathroom and flipped on the switch. “Goddammit, Brody!”
“What’s wrong?” There was laughter in his voice, and it enraged me even further.
“You know what the fuck is wrong. You all are grown-ass men. That’s what’s wrong.”
My face and arms had been drawn on, everything from crude depictions of male genitalia on my forehead to a wide selection of insults down my neck and arms. I was positive it was permanent marker. It didn’t so much as smudge when I rubbed at one of the hairs sprouting from the balls hanging down into my eyebrow.
“This is war, you know,” I informed Brody as he leaned against the door frame to the bathroom to watch the show. I turned on the tap and soaped up my hands. “Nobody in Horizon is safe. You can pass that on, if you’d like.” I started what I knew would be a long process of scrubbing.
“All in good fun,” he said, reasonable. “We could’ve given you a new haircut. Shaved an eyebrow.”
“I don’t even know why I’m friends with you guys,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut against the suds.
“You’re friends with us be
cause you’d do the same if the situations were reversed. You’re just upset that we got you, this time.”
“I have never drawn on anyone who was passed out.”
“What about the whipped cream and feather trick you pulled on Chuck that one time? You’re lucky he didn’t kick your ass.”
“Whipped cream is a lot easier to clean off than permanent marker,” I pointed out. “Who was the ringleader on this one? At least tell me that.”
“I will not. Don’t ask me to be a snitch. I won’t do it.”
“Then who drew the dick?”
Brody snorted. “Would you believe me if I told you it was Chuck?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Was it?”
“If you try to beat him up for it, I guarantee you that you’ll only get one good hit in, so you better make it count.”
“You’re underestimating how pissed I am about this.”
“Oh, come on. You didn’t even take your shoes off before you started snoring on my couch. There’s probably drool in the cushions. And you had a sure thing with that writer, and you bailed on her.”
Fuck. Didn’t I have enough to deal with in light of my new semi-temporary tattoos? The Amy situation was the last thing I wanted to think about right now.
“It wasn’t a sure thing,” I groused, hoping Brody would drop it.
He didn’t. “I saw you kiss her.”
“You didn’t see anything.”
“Very romantic, kissing like that, under the fireworks.”
“Just stop.”
“When’s the last time you got laid?”
“None of your damn business, is when.”
“Well, if it’s been that long, I don’t understand why you pushed her away.”
I helped myself to the hand towel hanging beside the sink, scrubbing at my face until I could see myself in the mirror again. The black markings my friends had left on me were only marginally removed.
“She wants something from me I don’t think I’m willing to give her,” I said, getting more soap so I could specifically target the cock and balls decorating my forehead.
“Hey, if you’re having trouble in the sex department”
“Dammit, Brody!” I had had about enough of his shit, along with just having gotten soap suds in one of my eyes. “Just stop talking already.”
“You know I’m just teasing you.”
“I don’t think I’m very well equipped to handle much more teasing this morning.”
“It’s not very fair for you not to let any of the rest of us have a crack at the writer, if you’re not going to.”
“She has a name, you know.”
“I know. I like calling her the writer, though. Makes it mysterious. Sexier, kind of.”
The thought of any of the other guys competing to woo her well, the other twowho weren’t currently in loving, committed relationships turned my stomach.
“Do what you want,” I said anyway.
Brody surprised me by laughing at me. “You’re so full of shit I’m surprised you can’t smell it.”
“Keep pushing me. See what happens.”
“I know you have feelings for her, now. Especially if you haven’t slept with her.”
I heaved a sigh, gripped either side of the sink with my slippery hands, face dripping water into the running sink until Brody reached around and turned the tap off.
“She tried to stop us from marking you up,” he said. “Said you were having a bad night and we should be nice to you.”
“You could’ve listened to her.”
“We eventually talked her into joining us.”
“What?” I scowled at his reflection in the mirror, then jabbed a pointer finger at my own forehead. “Please don’t tell me she’s responsible for this.”
“No, no.” Brody looked amused. “Her sole contribution is on your arm, I think.”
I hadn’t even regarded the mess on my arms, so intent I was on cleaning the marks from my face. There was a crude depiction of a pin-up girl, completely anatomically correct, a representation of an anchor tattoo, a heart with “Chuck” inside of it and a single smiley face, only it was frowning.
“That’s her work,” Brody said, pointing to the frown.
“Looks kind of sad,” I mused, more to myself than to him.
“It looked like she felt kind of sad for you. We tried to tell her not to bother, that you weren’t worth being sad over. She just told us we wouldn’t understand.”
And that was just a whole new can of worms.
“I wish that we had met under different circumstances,” I admitted, staring at the little face frowning up at me.
“All that wishing isn’t worth shit,” Brody informed me almost cheerfully. “Take what you have now, and run with it.”
“There isn’t anything now,” I said, dumbfounded.
“Hello? You kissed her under the fireworks. You invited her to spend the holiday with us. There’s something going on between you two already. Stop wishing for something different, and embrace what you have.”
I simply shook my head. “That’s not going to work.”
“Tell me why not. I genuinely want to know.”
“The entire reason she’s even here is because she wants to write something about my time in Iraq.”
Brody narrowed his eyes. “What about your time in Iraq?”
“The time in Iraq I do not care to talk about.”
“Ah. That time.”
I pushed my wet hair back and combed my fingers through it. “So you can see why everything is so complicated.”
“No, I honestly don’t see. I see that you might be overcomplicating things, but not that the things themselves are complicated.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right about that.”
I tried a different tack. “Don’t you have things that you don’t talk about from the time you served?”
Brody shrugged. “Sure I do. But I’m not sure what that has to do with you being unable to seal the deal with a woman who’s so clearly into you.”
“That’s the thing, though. She’s only into me because she’s trying to coerce me into telling her the story.”
“What story?”
I rolled my eyes. “The story I don’t tell anyone. The story no one needs to know, let alone the entire world.”
“Let me get this straight.” Brody crossed his arms over his chest. “You think that Amy’s using sex to get a story out of you?”
“Why else would she want to have sex with me?”
He let out a whoosh of air, then gripped my shoulder. “Sloan, I’d laugh because this whole thing is so ludicrous it’s hilarious, but it’s also just pathetic.”
“Don’t call me pathetic.”
“Honestly, you’re such a sad sack right now”
“Hey, fuck you!”
“that I really pity you. Maybe Amy is actually interested in you. Have you ever thought about that? That she might want to kiss you and love you and have sex with you because she likes you? Because you and her have been clicking on some other kind of level? You all have something. All of us could see it.”
“You’re a bunch of old gossips,” I told him. “I bet you all harangued her about it the entire night.”
“Only part of the night,” Brody sniffed. “Search yourself. Would it really be such a bad thing if you did have feelings for her?”
“I don’t want to have feelings for her. That’s the bad thing.”
“No one’s telling you to marry her,” he said, exasperated. “Just loosen up a little. Have fun. I think she would be good for you. She seems really nice.”
“You’re not the one she’s looking to grill about past military service,” I grumbled. “It’s easy for you to talk about.”
“I mean, if you’re not interested in her, I’ll throw my hat into the ring,” Brody said with a knowing grin. “All you have to do is let me know. I don’t mind. I’m a pretty big fan of Amy, myself.�
�
“Fuck you.” But there was no heat to it. I was tired and hungover and ill-equipped to deal with this right now.
“Fuck you, too,” he said fondly. “Try nail polish remover for that permanent marker, and maybe you won’t have to scrub a layer of skin off.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for telling me after you’ve been standing there watching me scrub for the last twenty minutes.”
“Hey, what are friends for?”
Chapter 6
I didn’t know how to handle the knowledge that I might have feelings for Amy. Part of me still wished she’d never blown into Rio Seco, that I was still living a blissful life ignorant of her very existence. But the majority of me was glad she was here. That same part had started looking for her in places where I’d previously avoided her. I wanted to see her again. That much was sure. I just didn’t want to do what she wanted me to do. It would’ve been easier to spill my secrets if I didn’t have these feelings for her. She’d been right, when we first spoke in the diner. There was something comforting about anonymity. Now that I knew her better, and knew she had a better understanding of my situation, I was even more hesitant to tell her about Iraq.
I was tied up in some pretty exquisite knots about Amy. I wanted to see her. I didn’t want to see her. I had feelings for her. I didn’t want to have feelings for her. The only thing that remained constant was that I didn’t want to talk about Iraq with her, but even that was a little complicated. If I continued to resist telling her, she wouldn’t become the writer she wanted to be. If I did tell her and help her achieve her dreams, she’d leave Rio Seco when she was done writing her story.
I felt like I was at real risk of developing an ulcer, here.
But this little town could be a strange sometimes, when it wanted to be. Back when I hadn’t wanted to see Amy in town, I saw her everywhere. Now, when I did want to see her, Rio Seco just wouldn’t cough her up. She was nowhere to be found. Not the grocery store, not the gas station, not the bar. Not even jogging down the side of the road. Like a creeper, I drove past the motel several times, wondering whether she was even in town anymore. Maybe she’d had sincere regrets about the kiss we’d shared under the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Or maybe I’d hurt her feelings by refusing to let her take me home, for shrugging off the “sure thing” Brody had assured me I’d had with Amy. But her rental car was parked in the same spot. She was still in Rio Seco. We were either just missing each other constantly, or she was holed up in her room, doing and thinking and feeling only God knew what.
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