I pressed a hand to her back, pulling her against me. She hummed softly, tilting her forehead against my shoulder, but her hands pushed against my chest. The unspoken protest broke me from the urgent desire to reclaim her mouth and body up against the bathroom door, and I nodded with disappointment, stepping away to grab my keys, while she grabbed her purse.
“I’ll take a raincheck,” she said, coyness spicing her voice, and her fingernails grazed over my arse.
“Ya ever have sex in a restaurant bathroom?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows, as we left the apartment and I locked the door behind me.
Her cheeks turned the color of ripened strawberries, and she shook her head. “You realize who you’re talking to, right?” She bit her lip, eyes combing over the length of my body. “Why? Have you?”
“Not yet,” I said, bending to press my lips to hers before descending the steps.
“What?” she called after me, surprise lacing her voice. She ran to keep up with my stride. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll be cashin’ in that raincheck later, is what I mean,” I said, opening the car door for her.
She gasped, pressing a hand to her chest. “Sean Kinney,” she said, feigning the shocked Southern Belle. “I do believe I’ve ruined you.”
“Or maybe,” I said, unable to resist kissing her once again before she slipped into the car, “maybe, ya fixed me.”
The rehearsal dinner was about as lackluster as I remembered Patrick’s being.
I went through the motions of walking down the makeshift aisle with Naomi’s Matron of Honor on my arm, stood to the side of Jules as he ran through the Cliffs Notes of his vows, and I pretended to hand over a couple of rings. Later, as I walked back down the aisle with the Matron of Honor, I caught Lindsey’s eye. Her lips curled into a small smile, and to my heart’s surprise, she blew me a kiss. I grinned, and ask me if I cared at all that I was blushing.
At the end of the aisle, Miss Matron separated from my arm to meet with her husband, and Lindsey came to stand at my side.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” the wedding planner said with a few rapid claps of her manicured hands. “You’re a great group. I just love it when people know what they’re doing and follow directions. And thank you, thank you, for not being drunk. My God, it makes my job so much easier.”
She ran through the rest of the details, and we nodded along like good little children. Then, at the tail end of the ordeal, Jules and Naomi discussed some reception plans with her, while the rest of us settled into folding chairs.
“Sean,” the Matron of Honor said, and I was instantly embarrassed for not taking extra care to learn her name, “I didn’t know you were married.”
She was making small talk, I know, but I chose to dig deeper into the comment. She saw something in us. She saw what I did.
I looked down at Lindsey’s hand, interlocked with mine, and I squeezed tighter. “Ehm, I’m not married.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, hand resting over her chest. “I’m sorry. You just … I just assumed.”
“Babe, this is why you don’t assume things about people,” her husband reprimanded gently. “Sorry,” he said, apologizing for his wife with a light wave at us.
❧
Later, in the car on the way to the restaurant, Lindsey scowled. I asked what was wrong.
“That guy in there, apologizing for his wife.” She shook her head. “That’s the type of shit Jack used to do with me, when we’d go to his little lawyer dinners. I’d say something that was deemed unintelligible by one of those snooty bastards, and he’d just shoo me away and apologize. It made me feel like he was saying, ‘Oh, sorry about my dumb girlfriend,’ and the group of them would laugh, like, oh, ha-ha, women are so stupid.”
“I didn’t think shite like that existed outside of movies,” I answered honestly.
“Yeah, well …” She shrugged, looking out the window. “My dad never treated my mom that way, or at least not that I realized, but it is the world I grew up in. A rich world, where women don’t work and men treat them like they’re stupid.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have a job?”
Lindsey’s head drooped. “Actually, I’ve never worked a day in my life.” I quickly realized she was embarrassed. She had stepped into a world where it was commonplace for women to hold down a job, and there she was, someone who had played the spoiled rich kid for her entire life.
To spare her the embarrassment of making me feel even more working class than I already had, I quickly added, “Ehm, Mam never worked either.”
“Really?” she asked. “She never wanted to?”
“Well, Da always made good money. Not rich money, but he was an investment banker, so we were comfortable. My parents could afford for Mam to stay home and raise us. It’s what she wanted to do. Some people, what they want as their job, is to make sure the dinner is on the table and the kids aren’t killin’ each other. There’s really nothin’ wrong with that.” I glanced over at her, saw her hands working in her lap. Her teeth worked her bottom lip. “What, ehm … What do you wanna do?”
She sighed with a heavy shrug. “I don’t know.”
“There’s never been anything you had an interest in? Anything you’ve always dreamed of doing?”
Lindsey gazed out the window, down at the lines now boxing her in. “I didn’t really have room for dreams.”
“There had to be somethin—”
“Did you always dream of selling mattresses, Sean?” she asked, turning to me with a hard, scrutinizing gaze. “Or did you just do what you felt you had to, to get by?”
The funny thing was, before that moment, I had never thought about it before. I had graduated college with a Bachelor’s in English, a Master’s in Business, and not a single clue as to what to do with either one of them. I did know I wanted to stay in River Canyon, near my family, and when Harold’s needed a salesman in the furniture and mattress department, I jumped on it. I didn’t love it, didn’t have a particular passion or even a fondness toward selling feckin’ mattresses, but I certainly didn’t hate it. It was a job, it was a paycheck, and I stuck with it. Not for lack of ambition, but lack of want for anything else, and at twenty-nine, I was made floor manager.
Some people are content with their day-to-day. The menial jobs they keep, to pay the bills and buy the groceries. Their little apartments above diners and the occasional dinner with family. Some people don’t need fantastical positions at a law firm or the gradiuer of mansions.
That was me.
I had been happy. I had been content. But there I was, with my elbow against the window ledge of my used truck and wondering if it was good enough. If I was good enough. Good enough for the woman who had been with a lawyer in a fancy house.
“Sorry,” she said after a few long moments of mind-babbling silence.
I shrugged, my shoulders taut with strain. “Nothin’ to be sorry about.”
She shook her head, sifting a hand through her hair. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“What doesn’t matter?” I asked.
“All of this,” she replied. “All of this shit.”
I arched an eyebrow, glancing at her. “What shit?”
“Jobs. Dreams. None of that really matters in the long run, right?”
“What?”
The silent seconds slipped by with the lines on the road, and I glanced over to her. The color and warmth of her dark eyes had changed, shifted to a cold black. Tired and sooted. I had to wrench my gaze away, back to the road, before I could spiral within them, losing myself to the soul-damning abyss of that stare.
“I, ehm—”
“It’s too quiet in here isn’t it?” she asked lightly, and I turned back.
The eclipse had passed, the sun was back out, and she reached over the center console and turned the radio up as though it had never happened. She scanned through the stations I had programmed into my satellite radio, until she came across a song on one of the coffeehouse station
s.
It was familiar; those lyrics, that melody. I vaguely remembered it as something Mam listened to while cooking dinner or cleaning the house. An old song from my past, now reinventing itself to perfectly match the heart-rendering situation I had stumbled into. All because some woman posing as a man named Jack needed a mattress.
I glanced at the screen: “Feels Like Home” by Bonnie Raitt.
Mellow. Romantic. Melancholy.
Perfect.
And as those lines dashed by, and Bonnie continued to croon about previously lonely lives and finding your home in the heart of someone else, Lindsey laid her hand over mine.
❧
“I’m gonna save the real speech for tomorrow, but someone just stuffed a mic into my hand, so I might as well say somethin’, right? So, ehm … Naomi, thanks for makin’ an honest man of this guy. The relentless flirting and creepy winks were gettin’ old and I was ready to tell him to find another wingman.” I raised my pint glass. “Good luck tomorrow, you two.”
As I tipped the glass back and the Guinness began to pour down my throat, Jules was pulling me into a drunken hug. Lindsey scrambled to grab my drink before the dark liquid could splash everywhere, and I flashed her a quick grateful smile as I allowed myself to be consumed by Jules’s bear hug.
“I love you, man,” he said, clapping my back heartily before squeezing me tight.
I squeezed him back. “I love you too.”
He cleared his throat and released me from his hold. A thumb swiped quickly under one eye as he shook his head. “You guys want drinks? You want drinks, right? Wine?”
“Wine?” I asked Lindsey, glancing down at her.
“He’s driving,” she said to Jules with a smile. “But of course, I want wine.”
“Your wish is my command, Rapunzel,” J said with a fumbled bow, and I sat back down next to her, sliding my arm across her shoulders. “Seanie, you sure man?”
“Nah, I’m still drinkin’ this,” I said, raising my pint, and he walked away to grab the wine bottle from his betrothed.
“You guys are adorable,” Lindsey whispered in my ear.
I laughed. “Yeah, we’ve been bromancin’ hard since kindergarten.”
Jules handed her a full glass of wine. “Can I just say that, after tonight, you two are officially my favorite couple? Good Lord, you are going to make the most beautiful blonde babies.”
“You’re drunk, arsehole,” I said, shaking my head.
“Yes I am,” he confirmed boisterously, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t call a mother-fuckin’ fairytale when I see it.”
Fairytales and fantasy.
All fake.
My hand gripped my glass as my heart tightened around my imaginary relationship.
My temporary girlfriend.
Lindsey looked up at me, passion searing holes through her fathomless eyes, skipping over the terror in mine. She pressed a hand to my cheek, turned my head, and kissed me. Hard, slow. Her tongue was alcohol and sex, and my head spun with zero desire to push her away, despite the shards of despair slicing through my already wounded heart.
“Remember that raincheck?” she whispered to me, and I tried to calculate just how many glasses of wine she’d had throughout the night. “I’m not afraid.” Her hand wrapped around mine, pulling it into her lap. She pulled the long skirt of her dress up, let it bunch around her waist, and she pressed my fingers between her legs. “And I’m not wearing underwear,” she giggled into my ear.
“Jesus Christ,” I groaned, swallowing down those jagged pieces of misery. “Yeah, I feel that,” I said with a light laugh, looking around to see if anybody was watching as my fingers lightly stroked underneath the table.
“Oh my God,” Lindsey moaned a little too loudly, and I laughed as I leaned against her.
“Shh,” I whispered into her ear, reminding her that we weren’t back within the confines of my apartment.
I glanced around, checking the location of the various guests. Checking to see if we had a clear getaway to the restroom. Jules caught my eye, and as my most trusted sidekick, he threw his arms into the air as though I had just scored a killer touchdown, and I knew I had his blessing to get laid at his feckin’ rehearsal dinner.
“Come on,” I said in a low voice.
“W-what?” She looked to me, her eyes glassy and dilated with arousal, and I laughed.
I stood up, hoping the black pants would do an efficient job at concealing the evidence of my arousal, and I grabbed Lindsey’s hand just as she pushed the length of her dress back down. Her cheeks were rosy from the alcohol, her eyes glimmered with excited inhibition, and I pulled her toward the door of the party room. I heard Jules’s mother behind me ask where I was going, and Jules simply saying, “He’s showing his girlfriend where the bathroom is.”
What are best friends for?
Walking down a hallway, Lindsey pulled me into the ladies’ room. A sitting area sat opposite the stalls, and I pointed at it.
“You get a couch?”
She nodded. “Yeah, fancy places always have couches in the bathrooms.”
I shook my head. “Not in the men’s room,” I said incredulously. “Why the hell do you get a feckin’ couch?”
Lindsey shrugged. “To sit and do our makeup?”
“To sit and gossip,” I countered, my eyes fixed on her.
“To sit and complain about our men,” she teased, her tongue wetting her lips.
“To have sex on?” I laughed, lifting an eyebrow.
Backing into one of the stalls, she spread her arms and said, “I think that’s why these stalls are so freakin’ huge.”
I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. “We don’t need a lot of space for that,” I growled and she laughed, reaching out to grab the collar of my shirt as she shook her head. I locked the door, hardly able to comprehend what I was about to do. This wasn’t the sort of thing Sean Kinney would ever imagine himself doing, but there I was, pushing her against the wall of that oversized bathroom stall.
Her fingers flitted down to the waistband of my pants, undoing the button and zipper as I took the condom from my pocket.
“You came prepared,” she said, her teeth grazing over her bottom lip.
“It’s in my nature,” I said in a growl, ripping it open as she did the honors of pulling my erection from my boxers.
Now ready and equally desperate, I groaned as her hand gripped the back of my neck, and I was kissing her. Tongues tangling with her back pressed against the wall. Bunching her long skirt around her hips, hooking one long leg around my waist.
The door to the bathroom opened, and I pulled my mouth from hers.
“Shit,” she mouthed, and I held a hand over her lips and slowly pushed inside her. Her eyelids closed, moaning behind my palm.
“Shhh,” I whispered into her ear, as her hands began to pull at my hair, and I took her neck, bathed it with my kisses and tongue, ignoring our intruder in the stall adjacent to ours.
“Mmfph,” Lindsey said behind my hand as I gradually gained speed, tipping my head against her shoulder, trying desperately to suppress my own urge to moan or say something.
Then, I felt Lindsey’s teeth sink into my palm and I pulled away, shocked and about ready to burst. “Ya feckin’ bit me,” I hissed at her with a low chuckle as the sink turned on.
“You’re trying to stop me from enjoying this,” she whined, clawing at my shirt. “I want this whole fucking restaurant to know what my boyfriend is doing to me.”
My hips stopped moving and I looked into her eyes, with my mind so far away from hearing our intruder as they left the room. She smiled, tightening her legs around my waist, and urged me to continue, to not stop, to keep going, and I did. Bringing us both to orgasmic bliss without a care of who might catch us, because to hell with being afraid.
Because she had called me her boyfriend, and I had never felt so alive.
CHAPTER TWELVE |
Best Men & Better Women
Saturday
I awoke with a cold dread draining the blood from my veins. It was replaced with a lead-heavy reluctance to continue with the day, knowing what waited for me on the other side of midnight.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
The limousine was set to pick me up at noon, and so by eleven-thirty, I was all suited up and set to go. Lindsey straightened my tie, still wearing my t-shirt she had slept in, and she smoothed her hands over my chest. She kissed the center of my sternum between her hands, and she inhaled deeply, slowly. Humming wistfully as she closed her eyes.
“You smell so good,” she said on a sigh. She tipped her head back, dark eyes seeking to fade into the blue of mine, and smiled. “You look even better. I feel lucky, knowing I’ll be there with the best looking guy in the place.”
“It’s the least I can do,” I said, leaning down to touch my brow to her forehead, “since I’ll be there with the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Go write that poem you promised me,” she said, pressing her hands to my cheeks, and kissing me softly. “I’ll see you later.”
“Every second will be a slow death until I’m with ya again,” I said, hand pressed to my chest in dramatic fashion, and I meant every word.
“Get out of here, Romeo,” she said, and kissed me again before pushing me toward the door.
There was nothing sweet about our parting—only sorrow—and I imagined that kiss as being one of the last. They were running out, all of our kisses, and I wondered how many I could pack into the night ahead? How many I could steal? How many during dinner, during dances, during quiet walks through the grounds? How many?
Not enough.
It could never be enough.
❧
The group of us stood alongside the limo like a bunch of awkward prom dates, flowers pinned to our lapels and all.
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