by Mimi Strong
“Pour, woman, and please stop talking.” Exactly what did she think rogering meant? I had a pretty good idea, but didn’t want to find out.
She topped up my glass. “I’m so glad we can be girlfriends now that you’re older.”
“I had sex with Dalton Deangelo.”
She frowned. “Did he roger you?”
“Yes, but you do know that just means regular sex, right? Anyway, we have another date for tomorrow.”
“You do know how babies are made.”
“Mom, would you say that to one of your girlfriends?”
“Probably. I have no filter.”
“That just makes you better.”
She took a seat next to me, and we were both sitting quietly, looking out the window over the sink into the back yard, when a bucket’s worth of something rained down on the bushes.
“I knew it!” she yelled, slamming her hand down on the counter.
By now, I had more vodka than blood in my veins, so I said, “Chill out, he’s just marking his territory.”
“I’m going to glue that mother-flipping attic window shut, that’s what I’ll do.”
Mother-flipping? I snickered.
“With crazy glue!” she yelled at the ceiling.
“The front room looks really good, by the way. I can see how Dad’s recliner would ruin the aesthetic.”
“That fucking chair is an atrocity.”
I busted a gut laughing, because she rarely swore, and seeing her this upset was like visiting the zoo at the exact right moment, when something cool was happening, like animals escaping their pens and running amok.
A few words about my mother’s decorating:
The woman karate-chops her throw pillows. She buys new wooden things and puts an antique paint-chipped finish on them, while simultaneously buying paint-chipped things and refinishing them to a glossy newness. She knows the names of interior decorators who appear in magazines, and refers to them by first name: “Stephen and Chris said that foxes are the new owls.”
It’s a wonder my father’s beloved La-Z-Boy made it this long, albeit periodically covered in doilies and slipcovers that restricted its natural movement.
The doorbell rang. The Storms were at the door! Could the evening get any better?
Yes, yes, it could. They brought Adrian.
He walked in behind them, tall, blond, and muscular, looking like coming there that night was punishment.
“You’re here,” he said when he spotted me.
“Get used to it,” I said, still feeling sore from his comment about girls like me, whatever that meant. “I’m all over this town. I am this town.”
Adrian jerked his head and commanded, “Cujo! Take her down!”
I screamed and ran for cover in the dining room, where the table was already set for dinner.
The four of them came into the dining room a moment later, laughing merrily. Apparently they hadn’t brought Cujo, and it was all a joke.
My father came down from the attic and joined us, no mention of the chair or things that may or may not have been tossed out of the attic window. My parents were on their very best, most charming behavior. We were, after all, entertaining company. Jazz was playing on the stereo.
Maybe it was the fact my entire mouth was numb from the drinks, but I didn’t feel compelled to talk about anything at all that night. I just sat there and listened to Adrian’s mother talk about her orchids (she and my mother headed up the Beaverdale Orchid and Dandelion Wine Society), and nodded along as my father talked about how amazed he was more people didn’t lose their limbs in radio-control helicopter accidents.
Mr. Storm Senior sat through dinner quietly frowning under his copper-and-white mustache. If you ignored the mustache and the ugly plaid short-sleeve shirt, he was actually a handsome man, which was why the Beaverdale Fire Department had borrowed him from the police station to pose shirtless for their fundraising calendar project the last five years.
Now, if Adrian had been on the calendar, I would have bought a box of copies. I gazed across the table at him, admiring those cheekbones and feeling like I was seventeen all over again.
I thought I was being stealthy in my eyeball tour of Adrian, but when I was washing up the dishes in the kitchen so my mother could continue visiting, Adrian came in and said, “What’s your beef with me?”
“No beef.” I turned on the tap and started filling the sink with hot water to clean the serving bowls.
I started to feel very funny, being alone in a room with my former crush. Not funny in the ha-ha way, either.
CHAPTER 15
Adrian Storm grabbed a dishtowel from the stove. “I’ll dry,” he said. “Hey, remember when we used to use Photoshop to mess around with portraits for the yearbook? Remember how you changed my hair to black and gave me a matching goatee?”
I turned and stared up at him, the world still pleasantly soft and squishy around the edges from good food and booze.
“I completely forgot about that. You have a good memory.”
“Sure do. And I remember how you used to love bubble gum. Either strawberry or watermelon. I still think of you any time I smell either flavor.” He picked up the serving plate I’d just rinsed in the second sink and started wiping it dry, the towel squeaking on the ceramic surface. “Simpler times. Do you ever wish you could go back and do things differently?”
“Like not make bad real estate deals like you did?”
“Well, that. But I mean further back. Remember when we went to Toby’s party? We were all about fifteen, I guess. And remember when we played that game?”
“Yes.” How could I forget?
“I wish I’d fought for you.”
I swallowed hard, my throat full of something buzzing like a hive of bees.
He continued, “Who knows what would have happened, but I always regretted being such a wuss.”
“We’re too young to have regrets.”
“We’re too young to have much of anything.”
I stopped washing bowls and turned to him.
Adrian’s gaze moved from my eyes, down to my lips.
I tilted up my chin, and he leaned down. The floor beneath our feet squeaked as our weight and our bodies shifted toward each other.
Holy shit, Adrian Storm is going to kiss me, I thought.
Only he didn’t, because his mother walked into the kitchen, calling back over her shoulder to the others, “We can’t break with tradition! Two members are present, so there must be dandelion wine!”
“Mom!” Adrian said, sounding exactly like his fifteen-year-old self and making my insides get squishy. “You’re such a lush.”
Mrs. Storm pulled a bottle of hand-labelled wine from the cupboard. “I’m not a lush, I’m lush-scious.” She wiggled her ample butt.
Adrian looked like he was going to die right there in my parents’ kitchen, yellow dishtowel in his hand.
After she left, I said, “Two members of the Beaverdale Orchid and Dandelion Wine Society are present tonight, so she’s not wrong.” I got back to washing the dishes, head down to avoid any awkward kiss-like movements. “I like your mom. She’s cool.”
“Um. Yeah! She’s only the best mom ever, except for maybe your mom.” He took a platter from my hands, careful not to touch me, and wiped away at the platter fastidiously. “So, are you curious about that movie they’re shooting here? Is that why you were out in the bushes at Dragonfly Lake that night?”
My cheeks grew warm with fury. I wanted to tell him everything, just to crack that look on his face.
“Well?” he asked.
“If you must know, I was having sex with Dalton Deangelo. Me and him. Bigtime. Naked and everything, stuffing body parts in each other’s faces.”
“Sorry I asked. No need to be sarcastic.”
“He’s coming to my house tomorrow so I can ride him like a pony.”
Adrian chuckled, still not believing me. “So I guess you’re not available to go for a bike ride with me?”
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“You could check back Sunday, but I’ll probably be too sore from all the hot movie star sex.”
Adrian stared down at me in amusement.
I added, “In the vagina area.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with the concept. Are you flirting with me?”
“Never.” I shook my head. “That’s something fun girls do.”
Adrian kept staring down at me. He really was tall. From that distance, did I look smaller to him than to other not-so-tall guys?
“I thought I knew you,” he said.
“And?”
He shrugged and reached into the soapy water, moving in on my washing job. “Maybe the truth is nobody knew you, because you always had your nose in a book.”
“And you always had your nose up Chantalle Hart’s perfect heart-shaped ass.”
He grinned, and the little scar below his lower lip where his piercing had once been glinted and caught the light of the fixture over the kitchen sink.
“You still love her,” I said.
“I wouldn’t call it love. Just a silly infatuation. It’s better to want something you can’t have, because human beings are never satisfied. The wanting is better than the having.”
I gave him a little hip-check to jostle his mood, which was taking a turn for the goth. “Serious much?”
“You should have seen the house I had, at the peak of my business. Four thousand square feet. A clover-shaped pool in the back yard, as blue as a tropical sky. And I still wasn’t satisfied. You’ll never be as lonely as you are in four thousand square feet of dissatisfaction and envy.”
“Who were you envious of?”
“The neighbors had better parties.”
“You always were moody. You probably need more sunshine, Mr. Pale.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“That’s okay. If I start to sound like my mother, just smother me with a pillow.”
He laughed and gave me a sidelong look, his pale blue eyes looking down his aquiline nose at me. Adrian Storm had been cute in high school, but now that he’d filled out and wasn’t so scrawny, he was breaking my brain. He looked like a cologne ad in a magazine. Was that a fold line running up along his chiseled cheekbone? Could I just peel it back and inhale the scent sample?
“What are you smiling about?” he asked.
“I could never tell you, because you wouldn’t stop laughing.”
He pulled out the sprayer wand from the edge of the sink and aimed it at my midsection. “Tell me or you get the hose.”
“Hmmph.”
He blasted me with lukewarm water—one short burst that rendered my pale blue T-shirt translucent across my lacy D-cups.
“Tell me what’s so funny,” he repeated.
“You look like a cologne model,” I said, holding up my hands to protect me from another blast.
He raised his eyebrows, salaciously looking at my damp peaches. “And you look like the winner of a wet T-shirt contest.”
I crossed my arms over my wet chest. “Gross.”
“Wow. That shirt is really see-through when it’s wet.”
“If you keep looking, I’ll have to send you an invoice for the peep show.”
“You know I’m broke, right?”
“I’m sure you’ve got some assets hidden somewhere.” I moved my gaze down his chin, then down his chest. He wore a green T-shirt, and the effect of the cotton fabric on his lean, wide chest was that of an inviting grassy park. The kind you want to roll around on. My gaze moved further down, to his jeans, and that enticing, mysterious area around his fly. Oh, goodness me, it was a button fly. Perhaps it was the extra layer of thick denim, plus the bulk of the buttons themselves, but something about a button fly on a hot guy made my mouth water.
From his muscles to whatever was behind those buttons, Adrian wasn’t without assets at all.
While I was distracted, Adrian pulled his phone from his pocket and got ready to take a picture of me. “For later,” he said.
I leaned forward like a pin-up girl, pushing my boobs together with the tops of my arms.
The phone’s tiny flash went off.
I gasped. “No you did not! Delete that right now.”
“You can hardly see anything,” he said, laughing and holding the phone up out of my reach. “I swear, it’s mostly your face.”
I gave up on trying to get the phone from him, since his reach was twice the length of mine. We stared at each other, both of us grinning stupidly.
He nodded in the direction of the dining room. “I should get back in there. Unless you want to show me your old bedroom.”
“It’s a guest room now, but my old bed is still in there.”
He gave me a wolfish look. “Pink? Four poster, with one of those frilly pink canopies?”
“Every little girl’s fantasy.”
“Every big boy’s fantasy.”
I bit my lip. Something was definitely happening in my body. The return of a kittenish, youthful lust. Miss Kitty was wide awake and feeling awfully curious.
I was still pissed at him for whatever he’d implied the night he drove me home, about how a “girl like me” could still get hurt. Whatever the fuckity-fuck that meant.
He started toward the back stairs, the second set that ran up to the second floor from the kitchen. My parents had debated for years removing them and gaining extra pantry space, but my mother hadn’t gotten her way just yet.
Adrian disappeared, his footfalls quick on the carpeted stairs. I couldn’t just let him go up there unattended, so I patted my front quickly with a dishtowel and followed him.
When I got to the second floor hallway, I couldn’t hear or see him.
“Adrian?”
I sniffed the air, surprised to find I did detect his scent. He was wearing cologne, plus he had a musky Adrian smell. I crossed the hall to the front stairs and sniffed again. No, he didn’t seem to have run back down again.
I called out, “Are you hiding?”
No answer.
My heart started to pound. Hide-n-seek always made me so nervous. The anticipation of someone jumping out of a closet at you was so much worse than the actual event.
The door to Kyle’s room was closed. I turned the handle and pushed it open slowly. This was the smallest of the upstairs rooms, and had been his nursery as a baby. My parents had always planned to move him into my old room when he got older, but whenever they broached the topic, he’d get upset. He and I went for a long walk one night to talk about it, and he told me that if he moved out of the baby room, a new baby would come. He had no reason to worry, I said, but he started to cry. That was when I delicately tried to explain what a hysterectomy was, and accidentally got myself into explaining Where Babies Come From.
The floor creaked. Was someone behind me?
“Adrian?” My voice sounded small and scared, which triggered my irritation. “Don’t you fucking jump out and scare me. You do not want a big girl punching you in the face.”
Silence.
Pulse racing, palms damp, I whipped open the bifold doors of Kyle’s closet.
Nothing but a row of little shirts and a row of little jeans. My heart briefly squeezed at the cuteness of all his plaid button-down shirts in a row. They dressed him like a mini version of my father.
I turned around, checked under the bed, and stepped softly out of Kyle’s bedroom.
I was able to check the main bathroom from the doorway, then I paused at the door to my parents’ room. There was something sacred about the room where someone’s parents made love, and Adrian wouldn’t violate that by hiding in there, would he? He wasn’t a bad boy, was he? My soaking-wet tits said otherwise. Adrian was not the good boy he once was.
I stepped into my parents’ room carefully, moving from hardwood to plush carpet. The master bedroom was the only carpeted room in the house—a low-pile pale mushroom carpet, two shades lighter than the brown paint on the walls. The king-sized bed was covered in twenty-six pillows of various sizes and
fabrics. My father had grumbled about the pillows for a while, until my mother explained there was one for every year of marriage. Then he decided it was romantic and awesome, and he helped her pick out a new one the next year for their anniversary.
The floor nearby creaked again.
I froze in place, staring at the doors of my parents’ walk-in closet. Was the sound behind me or inside the room?
I reached for the doorknob, my hand shaking.
What was that sound? Was that my heavy breathing, or someone else’s?
My fingertips touched the doorknob, slippery with perspiration. I flung open the doors, expecting to see Adrian’s lanky body amidst my mother’s dresses and my father’s full-size plaid shirts.
For a second, he was there, right in front of me, but it was just my mind playing tricks on me, using a pair of my father’s loafers at the floor of the closet plus a shadow to create an Adrian-like form.
So, he was in my old room.
“You fucker,” I muttered.
And then he grabbed me. From behind. His long arms wrapping around me like boa constrictors.
Screaming hadn’t occurred to me—not until a big hand landed over my mouth.
As he held me tight, I struggled against my muscled restraints and did the only thing I could. I bit his fingers.
Adrian released me immediately, chuckling and shaking his hand. “I win this round,” he said.
“I’m going to kick your ass!”
I came at him, fists flailing at his chest area. My boy cousins used to terrorize me and Shayla all the time, and beating them up for it seemed more logical than stopping playing with them entirely.
He backpedaled, and I kept coming at him, until he reached the foot of my parents’ bed and fell backward, but not before hooking me around the back and toppling me down on top of him.
Pillows of various sizes flew everywhere in the kerfuffle.
I struggled to get away, but Adrian wrapped his arms and legs around me, laughing.
“Lemme go, spider legs!” I yelled.
“I’ve got you in my web.” His blue eyes shone fiercely bright as he grinned up at me.