"Twenty-two."
"Hmpf!"
"What?"
"No, um, I'm — well, I mean, with" — damn it, how to approach the ex-boyfriend subject — "the other guy, you know, I'd guessed his age at twenty-seven. But I'd been wrong. He was twenty-four when I met him. With you, however, I got it right."
"I see. And you? Eighteen or so, right?"
My eyes widened. My mouth opened in awe. I looked much older than I was...
"Don't get your knickers in a knot. Troy told me."
I punched him in the shoulder. He swayed a bit with the force (no doubt to humor me) and then he did something very unexpected. I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. He hugged me. He put his right arm around my shoulders, pulled my left leg from over the edge so we were now facing the street, pulled me into him, and hugged me. And my head fell to his chest. And that's how we sat awhile. Hearing nothing but the soft ocean breakers and the tugging wind.
Damn it. This was so not good.
-2-
On the way back to my place (he walked me home) we spoke about random shit. Nothing important. The kind of stuff you tell people when you want to impress them but don't want to tell them anything truly important. Every now and then he'd bump into me as we walked, and then I'd fall onto the street. I'd push him as well but ended up only bouncing away myself.
Dorian made me feel small, protected. And I wasn't small. I wasn't small by a long shot. I'd stopped pumping weights as regularly (and picked up a little "smoothing-out" fat) but I was still pretty stocky. Shapely, I preferred to call it.
We avoided the subject of ex boyfriends. And I avoided the subject of ex girlfriends. We were two people talking over a neighbor's fence, neither willing to step fully into the other's backyard.
It had been so different with My Long Lost Love. I'd opened myself completely to him. And him to me. No reservations. Just pure honesty.
Pure — and I hated to admit it — naïveté.
When Dorian dropped me off we stood and chatted briefly, again, chatted about shit. We parted without kissing. I liked it that way. No commitment.
Is this what life would be like for me now? Would I eventually settle down with someone in whose yard I never dared to step, fingering myself behind that neighborly fence while I thought about The Man I Truly Loved? The only one who ever really meant anything to me?
I needed to talk to Kayla. Dani was cool. She was good for laughs. She was good for more than that, actually. But Kayla, my best friend, the love of my life, was different. As far as girlfriends go, we were so deep into each other's yards that you wouldn't be able to take us out of them with a demolition permit.
I texted her when I got to my room.
Leora: Need help. Met a guy. Made me come. Now I'm so fucking confused.
Knowing Kayla, I expected something like Finally! in return. Instead, I got:
Kayla: Damn it! Why confused!? That's it. I'm coming over!
Leora: Ha ha. Very funny. How's Brad from Bushwick?
Kayla: Still doing me like a rhino on Viagra. What a man...
Oh, brother. There was nothing like Kayla's horrifically disgusting foul mouth to make me both cringe and smile. But, after what she'd been through, she was allowed to say whatever the fuck she wanted. At least in my books!
Leora: Thanks for the image. Chat tomorrow?
My landlady was long since asleep. As much as I wanted to chat to Kayla now, I couldn't. It would wake her up.
Kayla: Yes, chat in person.
Leora: Ha ha. Stop teasing. It's enough that u let me down on the whole Europe trip.
Kayla: I never let u down. Europe should be travelled in the SUMMER, dumbass!
Leora: Yeah well... What time should I call?
Kayla: Like I said, see u tmrw.
Yeah, I finally got the hint. And I couldn't fucking wait! I called.
"You're shitting me, aren't you?" I whispered.
"Well, hello to fucking you, too, BFF," said Kayla. It was so good to hear her voice! I hadn't heard it in weeks. My heart melted like I'd seen a long-last lover.
"Stop screwing with me, what's happening?" I asked.
"Yeah, well, you will see me tomorrow. Only, it was supposed to be a surprise. But after you told me about your unholy and promiscuous behavior, I figured I'd give you a heads up."
"Oh, my God!" The words squeaked out like a bath-toy. I was so excited. I almost damn-near jumped on my bed! "I can't believe it!" I heard some floorboards creak. I'd no doubt woken up my landlady. "Damn it!" I whispered. "I gotta go."
"Yeah, do me and lose me, that's how you play it, right?"
I rolled my eyes. And I knew that Kayla knew I was doing it!
"What time do you arrive?" I asked.
"Do you even know what a surprise is? Anyway, don't panic about accommos, I've got a place... I hope. You are in Seaford, right? Not that I end up living in some place in Ireland or something."
"Yeah, Seaford, East Sussex. Damn, I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight!"
"Yeah, I know you're hot for me. The day I kissed you is still on my top-ten list of hot moments with guys or girls... If only you'd been into it. Imagine the romance..."
"You told me I suck at kissing."
"Oh, right, I remember. 'Wet fish' I think were my exact words. Right, sorry, I was thinking about Brad."
I let out a laugh.
"I miss you, babe," I said.
"I miss you, too, Leo. More than you can imagine."
Suddenly everything was OK. All of it. I wondered how she and Brad were doing — I mean, really doing — but I didn't ask. My best friend, my closest friend, was coming over tomorrow!
I decided to call in sick, or get someone to cover my shift, or quit my damn job. There was no ways I was going to miss out on spending the next three days — at least — with Kayla, every minute of them!
CHAPTER FOUR
-1-
Not only did I get my shift covered, but so did Dani. And there we were, all three of us, sucking down creamy coffees at Starbucks. As I'd hoped, Dani and Kayla hit it off big time.
Kayla's hair was still shaven on the one side, but it was now green. She'd gotten two extra piercings, one on each ear, bringing the total to nine on the right and eight on the left. "And I also got another piercing...somewhere that would make Leora embarrassed if I showed it to her." She'd also gotten a new tattoo. "Brad" it said, across her left breast, on the side. "Hurt like a motherfucker!" she said as she pulled her shirt down to show us — never mind that we were in freaking Starbucks! I felt myself blush as a prim English woman looked over at us.
Dani showed her her own tattoos: A rose-stem across her lower back, covered in thorns; a spirally, rough, colorful thing above her belly button. "Then I have another one in a place very few people get to see. And you have no fucking idea about pain until you get one of them there!" she said.
"So, I guess you're the only virgin here," said Kayla, looking up at me knowingly. I knew very well she intended the double-meaning.
I sipped my coffee and said nothing.
"Although," continued Kayla, "with all these creamy coffees you're drinking — what's that called?" She pointed at my cup.
"Flat White," I said.
"Right, with all these 'Flat Whites' or whatevers you're drinking, soon you'll be too round to get any."
Dani made a raspberry sound. "Yeah, right!" Righ'! "Men like it round. Actually, men like anything that can suck properly. It's all in the tongue, and the lips, and the — "
"OK, OK, enough!" I put my hands up, looked around. I was sure I was red as the devil right now. The lady of earlier had since left. "I thought this was England, land of the proper and all that shit."
"Fuck that," said Dani.
The two of them — Dani and Kayla — looked like a toned-down version of Laurel and Hardy, only sexier. Much sexier. Damn, if I'd been a guy, I know I would've done both of them, no problem. Both licked the cream off their drinks like, well, you know...
&n
bsp; "I taught young Leora here how to give a blowjob," said Kayla.
My palm went to my face with a slapping sounding. My skin flushed red-hot. And then Kayla told her how — about the bananas and all of it. I was so embarrassed that I laughed myself to the point of forgetting all my problems, forgetting everything else except the three of us sitting here, drinking coffee, being obscene and obnoxious. I forgot all about That Man, even.
Until my phone buzzed.
-2-
Conall: Tomorrow. London. Outside the Ritz. Can you make it?
The phone felt like lead in my hands. Burning, glowing, hot molten lead. A hurricane blew around me — a tornado of coffee cups and English accents and giggles and chuckles and Laurel and Hardy, only Laurel had green hair and Hardy was a seductive blonde. They laughed. And they spun as well.
My phone fell.
When it hit the ground, Laurel — no, Kayla — was at my side. She was saying something to me. Then Dani spoke. Now they were both on my side. Fucked if I knew what the words were that were coming out their mouths...
An old woman — very old, skin haggard and wrinkly — laughed like the clown from It by Stephen King. A bald-headed man looked at me menacingly.
I was hallucinating.
Before I knew it, I was outside, practically carried out, hands under my armpits, by Dani and Kayla. My two best friends in the world. My rocks. My anchors in this ocean. Drowning. Drowning.
A voice.
And another.
My name?
Leo! Leo!
"Leora!"
Huh? What?
And then I snapped to. And I was here. A charity store sat across the road. Oxfam. That was its name. I usually got books from there. A Café Nero stood next to it. A woman shouted at her kid a few feet away, then slapped him.
Yip, I was here.
I breathed.
"He wants to meet me. Tomorrow. In London."
I didn't need to explain to either of them who "he" was.
-3-
After I'd agreed to meet him (what else was I gonna do?) Conall had texted me back one message:
Conall: Come alone. 2PM. Not even Kayla can come with you.
I didn't tell Kayla about that one. Because the creepiest thing about the message was that he knew she was here.
We hung out drinking coffee and then, later, went to Jolly Roger as paying customers (with a staff discount) to get pissed. Kayla and Dani got pissed. Very pissed. Floor-Lickingly hammered, in fact. By the end of the night they were hugging and singing The Beatles and Coldplay songs that Kayla didn't know the words to. Eventually they settled on a Cranberries hit (who would've thought!) which both of them knew by heart. Only, slurring and babbling from all the booze, most of the lyrics simply came out as: "gmmhtplffs shhuiffg (hiccup)!" The rest of the pub soon joined them. One thing I'd learned in English pubs is that knowing the words to songs had jack-shit to do with singing them. They all had a lot of fun.
At eleven P.M. I was smiling, a bit. Freckled Troy The Manager got the girls home safely. I had no worries about either of them. Dani was about the hardest person to take advantage of in the world, and Troy, for all his faults, was actually a decent guy about that kind of stuff. He never flirted with the staff.
I walked home. Jolly Roger was only a few blocks from the hole-under-the-roof I was staying in. I really liked where I stayed, really did. It was warm at least (quite an achievement for an English house in winter!) and it was small, cozy. I'd taken to reading — a lot! — since coming to England, and most of the already cramped space was filled with paperbacks of anything and everything I could find that had to do with love. They had almost zero New Adult novels at the places I bought books from, so I ended up reading mostly authors like Nora Roberts or even Sandra Brown (not bad), a ton of English authors, copious love stories where they dim out the lights before any steam... But when I did find a hot book I normally got through it in an evening.
It hadn't been good for keeping my mind off You-Know-Who...
Many of the books were tragic (God, what a downer), much more were wistful and hopeful.
A sea gull squawked as I turned the corner to where my little home was situated. It amazed me that some of these things — tenacious as hell! — actually stayed the winter in Seaford. Most flew away, but there was never a night without a caw or a call of a gull somewhere, even if only in the distance. Part of me believed that it was a family of gulls that had found a little place with central heating near my house and which stayed the winter only to irritate the crap out of me every morning as they landed on the roof just inches above my head and started their incessant alarm clock, just to remind me that "yes, it's six A.M. and, yes, you promised you'd run every day!"
My eyes focused on the ground. Wind whipped my hair every which way. It was warmer than usual, not that bitter, crisp cold we'd been having ever since I'd arrived. Maybe that's why the gull was so loud tonight. Maybe some of them were already returning from the south, or wherever they went...
I was thinking about all of this, when I heard Dorian's manly baritone: "Hey there." ('ey there.) I looked up and saw him leaning against the brick-face pillar of my gate, his fingers in his tight denim pockets, nothing else but a skin-hugging tee and a smile on him.
"Shouldn't you be asleep?" I asked. I wasn't even flirting with him. I wasn't.
He shrugged, looked to the street. My key was already in my hand.
"Wanna walk?" he asked.
Walk? What did that mean? Last time he asked me if I'd like a drink and he ended up fingering me on the ocean wall... What could "walk" mean?
I looked at my key...
"It's warm out," he said, looking up ahead at the road, and that same wall we'd kissed at the night before, just like two kids in high school.
I put the key in my pocket. "Sure, why not?"
"Had a good day?" he asked as we strolled over to the beach wall — that wall, and, yes, I was thinking about the night before as we approached it.
"I guess," I said.
Dorian wasn't much of a talker. We eventually got to the famous wall and sat down, our backs to the ocean. Dorian pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and my heart cringed at the thought of their flavor on my tongue. Not my thing. He lit it, puffed out some smoke.
I know what the right thing to say would've been, if I'd been flirting: You know, if you're looking to score with me, you'd better make sure you don't taste like ash... But I wasn't flirting.
Dorian dropped the half-smoked cigarette on the ground, squashed it with his cream CAT boots. He pulled out a pack of Fisherman's Friend and threw one in his mouth, offered me one. I took it. Damn! That was strong!
So, ash-breath handled...
"Wanna go to my place?" he asked.
I knew what it meant. And when I answered, I hadn't been thinking. The answer just dropped off my lips. "Sure."
His place was small, very small. But that didn't say much for England. Every place was small except for the occasional Manor House or Country Estate — but those didn't exist in the city.
There were only two rooms and a tiny bedroom in his apartment from what I could see. The kitchenette half-merged with the dining-room-slash-TV-room. The walls were off-cream, desperately in need of paint. His drapes were brown. Just brown, not even an interesting shade of it.
His refrigerator buzzed. A silver microwave sat next to it. A tube-TV rested on a table in front of a two-seater tweed couch in that living-room-slash-TV-room. Some sort of lawn table lay unceremoniously in the center of the kitchenette, covered by an oilcloth with a few cigarette burns in it. I didn't know if they were his. He'd hardly arrived in town after all.
"It's not much," he said. But there was no embarrassment in his voice. Just a statement of fact.
"Your place?" I asked.
He scoffed. "No ways. This is only for the job. I have a place up north. Newcastle."
Ahhh, so that's where the over-the-top accent was from.
"It's bigger than this,
of course," he said. "At least twice the size." It was a joke, because this place wasn't much larger than the tiny room I was sleeping in. I smiled. It was funny. Dorian clearly had no beef about pretending to have more than he did, and he seemed proud of what he did have.
"Beer?" he asked.
I shook my head, momentarily unable to answer because of some weird, warm feeling I'd felt at his humor. Finally, I said, "I don't really drink." And I didn't really, except for tonight. And one more beer might put me over an edge I wasn't willing to go over with big-chested Dorian in the same room — the same claustrophobic room.
"You don't?" He pulled out a Beck's from the refrigerator, opened it with a butter-knife.
"No, but you clearly do!" For a moment he was confused, until he saw me looking at the knife in his hand.
"Oh, that? That's an old trick. Everyone knows how to do it over here." He threw the butter knife back in a drawer.
I perched lightly on the table in the kitchenette, knowing it would crash if I actually rested any weight on it. I looked around, waiting for what would come next...
What would come next?
I didn't feel odd here. I didn't feel hot or turned on in any way. But I wasn't turned off, either. What was I? Was I using him? Was he a substitute? A crutch? In a way, I felt kind of...bored. As if I needed something to do... Or maybe I was just inebriated.
"Leora?" he asked, pulling me from my internal debate.
"Uh, sorry... I do that sometimes."
"What, phase out?"
"Uh..." Phase out... Right. My Dream Guy had also once noticed that... Suddenly I was on a rooftop, in New York, That Dream Guy sitting in front of me, his hand up my skirt and tugging at my panties —
I stood up! "Um, where is your bathroom?"
Dorian pointed it out and I went and splashed my face in the too-tight bathroom. I eyed myself over, pulled my shoulder-length hair behind me and tied it up. I still looked OK, I figured. I'd never bothered to dye my hair mahogany as I'd once thought of doing. Mahogany's a sexy color, light-brown isn't. But I hadn't felt like being sexy for so long.
East Rising (Naive Mistakes #2) Page 4