I had started shaking, hadn’t I?
I looked at the neon lights of the Olive Garden, and the happy families and couples going in and coming out of it.
“Can we just go home?”
His stone hard features softened, and he nodded. “Of course.”
Chapter 33
My hands still shook by the time we made it back home, and Raphael gently took the keys from my grasp and opened the door for us. He went in first, turning on the lights and walking through the house.
I know it was stupid, but having him here really did make me feel better.
I followed him into the kitchen and watched as he filled my coffee pot and started a fresh pot.
“You hungry?”
“No, not really.” It was hard just to take a deep breath. I didn’t want to think about eating food.
“You haven’t eaten in five hours,” he said. “I know you have some frozen waffles in here somewhere.” He pulled my freezer section open and rifled through the half eaten tubs of ice cream, and boxes of Toaster Strudel.
“In the back behind the orange crème pops,” I said, sitting down on one of the stools around my floating island.
Five minutes later I had coffee and perfectly toasted Eggo waffles, smothered in melted butter and real maple syrup.
Raphael ate with me. I couldn’t imagine he could eat like this and keep his rock hard physique.
Maybe he exercised?
He rinsed the dishes and stacked them in the dishwasher, and then turned it on.
I went up stairs and changed into a pair of pajamas—these were a dark blue, and had Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh on them. I didn’t think Hello Kitty would understand how I felt, but the pessimistic donkey would. I just knew he would.
When I came downstairs again Raphael had his suit jacket off, hanging from the bottom banister of the stairs. He was sprawled on my couch, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, his long, muscular arms stretched out over the back of the couch.
The TV had a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer flickering on it. It was the episode where Faith rolls into town, being chased by an ancient, gargantuan vampire that wanted to rip her to shreds.
“How did you know I love Buffy?” I slid onto the couch and tried not to lean into him, but he was there, and I was still shaking… and it was my couch!
“I didn’t. I’m just a big Joss Whedon fan.”
I snorted. “Got a big boy crush, huh?”
He laughed silently, grimacing. “You’ve got this fantasy of me being gay, don’t you?”
“Well,” I finally gave in and leaned into him. He was warm and strong, and strangely soft in all the right places. I didn’t know muscle could be soft. “You did do a pretty good impression of one at the party.”
“I was taking one for the team.” His arm wrapped around me and he pulled me closer. His scent enfolded me, and I sighed as I rested my head on his chest. His heart beat slow and steady.
“Sure looked like you were.” Okay, that was a cheap shot.
“So you liked my sexy dance?”
I pulled my head up and shot him a hard glare. “Whatever dance you were doing, it certainly wasn’t sexy.”
“Really?”
I batted my eyelashes at him. “You couldn’t even hold his attention for three minutes, remember?”
He growled. “He was a double agent. Didn’t matter how sexy my mad dance skills were, he was on a covert mission.”
I had to laugh. Covert mission. Where did he come up with this stuff?
“You did look really good tonight,” I said, breathing in his deliciousness.
“Didn’t look too bad yourself.”
I looked up at him, and his face was bathed in the ambient light coming from the television. He was so handsome, so damned sexy.
Oh, what the hell.
I reached up and placed my hand on his cheek, and pulled his face until he was looking down at me. Slowly I raised up, closer, closer, until I could feel his warm, sweet breath on my lips.
I leaned in and kissed him. His lips were soft, so soft, and his mouth tasted cool and spicy and otherworldly good. I moved closer and deepened the kiss, entangling my arms around his neck, pulling him into me.
I laid back and pulled him on top of me. He was hard, I could feel the long, thick shaft of his sex against my thigh.
And then he sat up, pulling his lips from mine, leaving me gasping for him.
What the hell?
He looked down on me and brushed a wayward lock of my hair from my forehead.
“I don’t think we should go any further right now.”
Why the hell not?
“Don’t look at me like that.”
I grunted as he pulled his body away from mine. “Touchy.”
He was up on his feet, covertly trying to adjust himself so I wouldn’t see his hard-on.
“You know that if we went any further tonight we’d both regret it.”
I just scowled at him.
“Think about it,” he said patiently. “You’re fresh out of a relationship,”—if you could call what Jake and I had a relationship—“and you just had a run in with a psycho ex-boyfriend.”
Okay, it did sound pretty bad. “But in the plus column I stopped shaking.”
He looked down at me with those dark, heated eyes, his thick, soft lips spreading into the naughtiest smile ever. “Believe me… you’d be shaking by the time I was done with you.”
Oh my…
Oh my, my…
Someone knocked on my front door.
I closed my eyes and swore. I should have turned the volume up on the TV. Bette surely could hear every word we’d said. I was going to strangle her if she was on my porch with a video camera.
I got up and trudged to the front door, opening it heedlessly.
My world just fell away.
Jake stood on my porch, a shy grin on his face, smelling of soap and an undertone of grease. Suddenly there was only him and me, standing all by ourselves at the end of the world.
Was it possible that the man had gotten even better looking in the last two weeks?
“Jake,” I breathed, and then realized I was standing on my front porch in my pajamas. I crossed my arms self-consciously over my chest. “Why are you here?”
Could he ever forgive me? Would he?
I stepped back and shivered from the cool breeze that whipped in through the door.
“Christ, Hope…” he scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck and studied the wooden beams of my porch floor for a moment. When he looked up his green eyes sparkled in the glow of my porch light. “I just had to—”
He stopped talking and looked behind me. Raphael cleared his throat. “Hi, I’m Hope’s new neighbor. Who are you?”
Jake’s face turned hard, and he stood up tall and straight. “I’m Jake… I’m…”
I tried to back up into the house again. I just wanted to go to bed, not go through another show of testosterone. “Maybe we could all have lunch sometime next week.” I backed up into Raphael and he wrapped his arms around my waist.
Jake’s eyes hardened and his jaw clenched. “That’s a nice shade of lipstick you’ve got on there. Been cross dressing?”
Oh crap.
“It rubbed off. You know, when we were, well, you know.”
Jake’s head went back as if he’d been slapped. He turned and took a step towards the stairs leading off the porch, but then turned back around, pointing a finger at Raphael.
“Not him!” he groused. “You can’t be serious about him!”
I glared at him, my back straightening with ire. “And why not him?”
Jake’s eyes blazed, wide and erratic. “Because he’s an asshole, and he tried to cut down your goddamn tree!”
“How did you know about that?”
Raphael stalked out around me onto the porch, looking every inch the six foot menace he was. “I think Bette isn’t the only one who has you under surveillance.”
Jake and R
aphael slowly circled each other, their steps whisper quiet on the boards of my porch.
“I was just passing by,” Jake barked. “And I saw you with a chainsaw. Was I just supposed to ignore it and go on my way?”
Raphael stepped closer, his face turning stony with anger again. “Well, isn’t that what you did?”
“You sonovabitch!”
“Stalker asshat!”
Okay, points for creativity.
Jake took a step closer and pushed against Raphael’s shoulder.
That did it. I wasn’t going to watch two grown men fight like a couple of barbarians on my own front porch.
I turned and walked back into the house, slammed the door closed and shot the locks home.
“Hope?” Jake’s voice drifted through the locked door.
“Are you okay in there?” came Raphael’s.
I switched off the front porch light, plunging the two men into darkness, and started straight up the stairs to my bedroom.
I was too damn tired for this shit.
“Hope?” they called in unison.
I marched into my bedroom and pulled two things out of my bedside table: the rainbow Twizzlers and my iPod. I tore off a couple strips and chomped into them like a ravenous hyena, and then plugged the earbuds of the iPod into my ears, effectively cutting off the unwanted voices of the two men on my front porch.
I tapped the screen and Hazy Shade of Winter by The Bangles roared and pulsed into my head, blasting all thought from my frazzled brain.
They really were at their best in this song. It was hard core and still elegant and beautiful.
I clicked off my bedside lamp and snuggled into my Hello Kitty sheets… and then clicked the lamp back on.
Maybe tonight I’d just sleep with the lights on.
I looked to the front window that overlooked my front lawn.
Goodnight boys. It’s been fun…
Chapter 34
HAVING TWO MEN FIGHTING over you sounds like a dream come true. And until last night I’d have thought so too. But when Jake and Raphael started circling each other on my front porch like a couple of pit bulls, all I wanted to do was physically throw them both off my porch and into my azalea bushes. But since I’m five seven and on the thin side, I was pretty sure I didn’t have a prayer of doing that.
So I turned around and marched back into my house, where moments before I had been in a heated lip-lock with the gorgeous, though infuriatingly arrogant, Raphael. I slammed the door shut, threw the locks, and turned the porch light off on the two of them.
If they wanted to play Fight Club then they could just do it in the dark.
From there I went straight upstairs to my bedroom, changed into some pajamas, snuggled in to my Hello Kitty sheets, chewed on some rainbow Twizzlers and plugged the earbuds of my iPod into my ears.
Sleep should have come. I closed my eyes and listened as The Bangles slid into the Dixie Chicks, then into some Pink and even a Carpenters' oldie. But still sleep did not come.
For some inexplicable reason, though, when Train’s Ways to Say You Died came on, I slipped right down that demented water slide of dreamland, as if riding the raging rapids of the Amazon in nothing more than an ill-fitting life preserver.
At first I was just driving, my clunky old Ford Taurus taking me down the highway, Brad Pitt sitting beside me with a map of Texas in one hand, a Big Gulp slushy in the other. The radio didn’t work, but that was fine, since there was one of the girls from Twilight playing a cup in the back seat and singing that we were going to “Miss Me (her) When I’m gone.”
She was really pretty good.
Brad had clothes on… which was distracting as hell. And he kept pointing to the map and saying to turn the El Camino this way or that.
“We’re not driving an El Camino,” I said.
Suddenly Bette was in the back seat with the Twilight girl, looking gorgeous, telling the cup playing actress that she’d look better with her hair pulled up, to “Show off your lovely, long neck.”
When I looked forward again, my Taurus was now the El Camino Brad drove in The Mexican, fringe and fuzzy dice and all.
The Twilight girl was now sitting between Bette and a big haired Julia Roberts. Julia sat back, her arm hanging out the car window, sunglasses coolly covering her eyes, and she was singing along with the Twilight girl… her reedy, squeaky voice out of tune yet still adorable.
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel as they sang another chorus of the song.
Everyone waved and Brad panted like the most adorable golden retriever on earth, as we sped past a powder green 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible parked by the side of the road.
Darla and Bette waved back at us.
Huh?
I looked in the rearview mirror and Bette was still there, trying to get the Twilight girl to give the cup a rest.
There was a clang like the sound of the gavel on Law and Order.
Julia slid her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and looked at me through the rearview mirror. “This is your stop.”
Clang, clang, clang!
###
I woke to a bedroom filled with golden morning light, the smell of a gentle breeze floating through the window… and that damnable clanging.
I crawled out of bed, my head pounding in time with the clanging as if I was hung over, and trudged over to the bedroom window where the horrific sound was coming from.
I peered out my window and saw Bette wielding a sledgehammer against a dented, mini fridge size safe. She swung—CLANG—she cursed and wound up for another swing.
CLANG.
This had to be a dream still…
Chapter 35
Jake
I showed up on Hope’s porch a little after seven thirty. The sun was up, the birds were chirping, the little squirrels that lived in the trees were nattering away—all of them probably laughing at me.
I mean, how pathetic was I?
I’d broken up with Hope, right? And yet here I was again, staking out her porch like a creepy stalker. I should have been heading to work, but instead I was standing on her porch, knocking.
Damn, I was pathetic.
But just seeing her, being close to her for that brief moment here on this porch last night, it had reignited all the feelings I’d been trying to forget I had for her. All I’d wanted right then was to grab her, pull her to me, and kiss her until we both forgot why we weren’t together anymore.
But that hadn’t happened.
No, that muscle bound, asshole neighbor of hers had been there too, inside the house with her, and from the rumpled appearance of his clothes and hair, and the smudge of lipstick on his lips, he’d been doing more than checking her doors and windows.
I’d gotten so damn angry. I just wanted to punch the huge bastard. Yeah, he was probably three/four inches taller, and outweighed me by twenty pounds, but I wanted to knock his perfectly straight, white teeth down his throat.
Hope was mine…
I stood there on her porch, remembering how it had felt to think that last night, moments away from throwing a punch at the asshole. It had been like a surge of electricity zapping my chest, my heart pounding, thudding like the bass drum at a Metallica concert.
I knocked on her door again. I was going to be late. I’d never been late for work before, but I couldn’t not try and talk to her… I just couldn’t.
“Back again?”
I turned around and there stood Hope’s asshole neighbor: too tall, too handsome, and wearing a tight fitting muscle shirt that showed off his bulging biceps and some seriously wicked looking tattoos. He was smirking at me as he leaned against the porch railing.
I hadn’t even heard the asshole coming.
“Don’t you have a home?”
He smiled even wider and nodded next door. “Sure do. It’s right over there.” He stood up straighter and folded his hulk-like arms over his chest, trying for intimidating. “How about you? Don’t you have a home?”
I took a breath to say something…
But there was a scraping sound, and then a bang.
No not really a bang… maybe a clang. It was the kind of sound you associate with car crashes.
The asshole neighbor and I blinked at each other, and then started to move toward where the sound seemed to have come from.
Once we rounded Hope’s porch, on the side closest to Bette’s house, we stopped and stared at the medium sized steel safe that lay on its side n Bette’s driveway. I looked up and saw a window on the second floor of the house was open, the breeze pulling a lacy white curtain out to flutter in the morning breeze.
The front door to Bette’s house swung open and she sauntered out, dressed in a pair of very short cut-off jeans—I think they’re called Daisy Dukes—a low cut white t-shirt, and a sledgehammer slung over one shoulder.
I shook my head. Maybe I was still asleep, dreaming.
Bette waved at us and headed back toward where the safe was lying. Her curly red hair was pulled back in a bun, wisps of it sticking out here and there. She even had a pair of white sneakers on instead of her usual stiletto heels.
Bette kicked the safe over so that the lid faced the sky.
She set the sledgehammer on the concrete of her drive way, pulled on a pair of gardening gloves, then spread her feet in a solid stance before grabbing and heaving the sledgehammer up over her shoulder again… and then back down on the safe’s lid.
CLANG!
I watched, fascinated, as she swung that sledgehammer down on that unfortunate safe over and over again. I knew she had an amazing body. Full, curvy, and exciting to look at… but she was wielding that damn hammer like she was freaking Thor. Not a bit wimpy.
And the light that was filling her eyes as she pounded her aggression out on that safe: Deranged.
I didn’t know whether to be turned on or to cover my junk with a protective inch thick metal jockstrap.
Chapter 36
Hope
I pulled on some jeans, grabbed an old cardigan that usually hung on my bedroom door—but was for some reason lying on the floor—and some slip-on sandals. I ran downstairs, flung open my front door, and beat feet down onto my front lawn, turning to go over to Bette’s…
Love Him: A Love Him, Hate Him, Want Him Novel Page 25