by Noir, Roxie
Daniel’s eyebrows shoot upward.
“…five hundred more and don’t fucking give me that look,” I finish.
“I’m giving you the look you deserve.”
I drum my fingers on the table. I stare at Daniel. He stares back, the world’s most skeptical look on his face.
“What does Mom want me to make for Sunday Dinner?” I finally ask.
“She said something about spaghetti and meatballs, I think.”
“Is Charlie coming?”
“Yeah, she’s back in town.”
“Is Silas?”
“Ask Levi.”
I stand and walk to the fridge, opening it to survey my Sunday dinner options.
“Have you noticed that I haven’t hassled you even once about Charlie?” I ask. “Not once, Daniel.”
“I think you just did.”
I pull two packages of ground beef from the fridge and toss them in the sink.
“That’s not hassling. When I hassle you, you’ll know you’ve been hassled,” I say.
“We’ve been friends since we were like ten,” Daniel says. “Charlie is basically my sister. Screw off.”
I snort.
“Screw off?”
“Shut up,” he sighs. “Force of habit. Rusty overhead me tell Seth that someone was being a real dickhead and I got calls from her kindergarten teacher for a week. Apparently that’s what she wanted to name the class iguana.”
I start laughing.
“And she convinced half the other kids it was a good idea,” he mutters. “I was not popular at the next PTA meeting.”
“Are you ever?” I ask, hunting through the cupboards for stale bread.
Now Daniel grins.
“What?” I ask.
“I’m almost the only man who ever goes to those things, and I’m definitely the only single one,” he says. “Yeah, I’m popular.”
I find a can of breadcrumbs, which will also work, and look over at Daniel.
“Well, shit, stud,” I say. “Back to your old ways?”
“One of Rusty is plenty,” he says dryly.
“You could be smarter this time around,” I point out.
“I’m being smarter by not even going there,” Daniel says. “Crystal makes sure I’ve got plenty of drama in my life.”
“How is Crystal?” I ask.
“Same as ever,” he says darkly. “Hasn’t seen Rusty in weeks. I arrange for her to have a weekend, she cancels two days before and then chews me out for keeping her from her daughter.”
Crystal, Rusty’s mother, is not a good parent. She’s also not a good person.
“Sorry,” I say.
Daniel just shrugs.
“It’s neither new nor surprising,” he says. “Can I help with dinner or should I stay out of the way?”
I grab a head of garlic and toss it to him.
“Chop that,” I say.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Violet
“What about roses?” I ask, trailing after Adeline. “I like roses.”
She gives me an are-you-crazy look over her shoulder.
“No,” she says definitively. “Roses are hard. They’re very picky and bugs love them.”
“Ranunculus?” I ask.
“I don’t think so.”
“Hydrangea?”
“Those come from huge bushes,” she says, and stops.
We’re at Manny’s Farm Store and Nursery on Monday afternoon, thirty minutes outside Sprucevale, wandering through the wide outdoor aisles, looking at all the plants on display. I volunteered to help Adeline with a flower bed project she’s doing, and she’s helping me find something that will make the front of my ugly trailer look halfway decent.
“You’ve gotta think smaller,” she says, stopping in front of a table. “Most of the stuff in wedding bouquets is hard to grow. Here, what do you think of geraniums?”
They’re bright red with dark green leaves, short, and look kind of like a kid’s drawing of a flower.
“Okay,” I say.
“They’re not fancy, but they’re hard to kill,” she says. “They’ll do well in pots, so you can take them with you when you move.”
“Whenever that is,” I say.
I checked the listing on the lake cottage again this morning, which I do a couple of times a week. It’s still active. It’s been up for nearly a year, and no one’s bought it.
I should probably stop checking until I’m ready to actually move on it, because at this point if someone else buys it, I think I might cry. I’ve gotten very attached to a house I’ve never even visited.
“I had to spend five thousand dollars fixing the roof last winter,” I say sourly as I pick up some geraniums and examine them. “I told you that, right?”
“Yeah, that’s the worst,” she says. “I hate when you spend money on something like that. It’s not even fun. If you have to spend five grand on something, you should at least enjoy it a little bit.”
“I guess I enjoy not being rained on,” I admit. “But it sucked, and that’s five thousand dollars I can’t put toward a new place.”
Adeline is well-acquainted with my housing woes, and nods along with me.
“How about those?” she asks, pointing. “African violets. Also hard to kill.”
“Am I that irresponsible?” I ask, and she laughs.
“Only sometimes,” she says. “Did you ask Eli about the maid of honor yet?”
“Will my answer determine which flowers you let me buy?”
“It probably should,” she says.
“He didn’t,” I say. “And also I slept with him.”
“Unlike the maid of honor,” she says, grinning.
I sigh.
“I told you so,” Adeline says. “People get into elevators together all the time and don’t have sex.”
“But she was touching him!” I protest. “He made that face at me, and I think she was grabbing his butt —”
“Don’t worry, I love you even though you’re crazy,” she says, cutting me off and handing me a geranium. “Was the sex a direct result of you asking? Was it like, ‘Hey, did you bang this chick?’ ‘No.’ ‘Take me right now!’”
She’s grinning. I’m blushing.
“I never said take me right now,” I tell her. “And there were more steps to it than that.”
“Well, I don’t have to be at work until seven,” she says. “Come on, your foray into mature adulthood has earned you a look at the begonias while you tell me what it’s like to boink a Loveless.”
I give Adeline the rundown while she decides which flowers I’m equipped to handle. I can’t tell whether her flower choices are made based on the story I’m telling her, but they might be.
“…so we just decided to be friends with benefits,” I conclude.
“Are you friends?” she asks, one eyebrow raised.
“I don’t know. We’re something,” I say, leaning against the cart and looking down at the flowers inside: a few easy ones for me, and then the pretty, dramatic ones for Adeline’s flower bed. Apparently she’s earned the difficult flowers, presumably by being incredibly mature.
“We obviously can’t date,” I say, still looking down. “You need to at least like someone to date them, right?”
“Usually,” she says.
“And I don’t like him, and he definitely doesn’t like me, but we have a lot of chemistry —”
“Bowchicka.”
“— so why not just do the part that works and not the part that doesn’t?”
She brushes her hands against each other, getting dirt off.
“If we dated we’d just get attached and hurt each other sooner or later,” I say, still defending myself. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation that didn’t end with one of us angry. You can’t date someone like that, it’s ridiculous.”
“And it’s well known that sex rarely leads to attachment,” Adeline says.
“Not with Eli,” I say. “We don’t even —"<
br />
“— Like each other, yeah, I heard,” she says, one eyebrow raised.
“Exactly,” I say. “Do I need dirt or anything for these flowers?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Violet
“The smoked chicken isn’t bad, but obviously, what you want is the pulled pork,” Eli says. “You like spicy?”
“I do.”
“Get the jalapeño hush puppies,” he says, nodding at the menu over the counter. “If you think you can take it, anyway.”
“Of course I can take it,” I say, even though I have no idea if that’s true. “What else is good?”
“The mac and cheese is eh,” he says, tilting one hand side to side. “The cole slaw’s just average, the collards are all right…”
He trails off, reading the menu. There are no printed menus at Ace in the Hole Barbecue, only the big plastic one over the counter that looks like it’s been there since the 1970s. Half the stick-on letters are black, half are red, and there’s a variety of different colors represented. The interior is entirely unfinished plywood, and it seems to be a design choice, not an accident of laziness.
Eli swears that this is the best barbecue in a three-hour radius. He also swears that we won’t run into anyone we know, since we’re forty-five minutes outside of Sprucevale in Grotonsville, which is several towns away.
It’s Thursday night. He’s slept over every night but Sunday.
We both order at the counter: I get the hush puppies, Eli gets baked beans, we both get the pulled pork.
“You folks together?” the cashier asks as he rings me up.
“No,” I say, just as Eli says, “Yes.”
The cashier just looks up at me expectantly.
“We’re paying separately,” I tell him, already handing over a twenty.
“Really?” asks Eli.
“Yes, really.”
“I can’t even take you for barbecue?”
The cashier quietly takes my twenty-dollar bill and makes change. I look at Eli like he’s lost his damn mind.
“Why would you take me for barbecue?”
“Because you had a shitty day and I’m trying to be nice for once?” he says. “Because barbecue was my idea so I figured I’d be paying for it?”
“This isn’t a date,” I say.
Even though I’m about ninety-nine percent sure we’re going to have sex later.
“No one said date,” Eli says.
“The last time someone else offered to pay for my dinner I ended up washing dishes until midnight,” I point out. “Fool me once, et cetera.”
I don’t like this. I don’t want to feel beholden to Eli. I don’t want to feel like I owe him anything, like he’s got some advantage over me that he could hold over my head.
I don’t want to give Eli an edge, ever, for any reason. With sex, everything is even: we both want and we both take until we’re an exhausted heap in my bed. But out here, in the real world where there are manners and clothes, it feels different. It feels like I need to be on my toes.
“How would that even work at a place where you pay up front and then get your food?” he says. “I’m not going to jump out of a window after I pay, I’m going to eat my damn barbecue.”
The cashier clears his throat, holding out my change. I attempt a smile in his direction and take it from his outstretched hand.
“I’m just saying, I haven’t had the greatest experience with men paying for things lately,” I say, taking my number and stepping aside so Eli can pay for his meal.
“Besides,” Eli says, ignoring my last statement and taking out his wallet, “I can’t imagine you being any more of a pain in the ass than you already have been, so I wouldn’t even have a good reason to jump out the window.”
“Wow, I can’t wait to share a meal with you,” I deadpan, and Eli laughs, taking his change and grabbing his number.
“Besides, I’m pretty sure you’ll sleep with me,” he says as we walk away from the counter.
I pretend he didn’t say anything. We sit. The topic changes. We talk food. Eli goads me into predicting how long the couple from last weekend is going to stay married (I say a year, he says nine months).
We talk about whether Montgomery is wearing a toupee. We talk about whether that’s his real accent. Eli tells me his theory that Montgomery is actually a New Yorker who saw Gone With the Wind one too many times and decided to come try it out for himself.
The food comes. We dig in, and for once Eli’s right: this place is great.
“Or maybe,” Eli says, pausing with his barbecue sandwich held in front of his face, “he’s got that accent so he can be shitty to his employees and it still sounds cultured and genteel.”
I dunk a hush puppy into barbecue sauce.
“Does it sound genteel?” I ask. “Usually, when something gets screwed up and he’s giving me hell for it, it just sounds shitty.”
“I wonder if we could get him to crack,” Eli muses. “Do something that makes him drop the act and go back to his carpetbagger accent. What?”
“Did you just say carpetbagger?” I ask, a hush puppy halfway to my mouth as I give Eli a look. “Are you ninety? Did you time travel here from the 1870s?”
“People say that,” he protests.
“They don’t,” I tell him, biting in.
“My granddad did.”
“I’m pretty sure that only proves my point,” I say around a mouthful of hush puppy.
“Fine, we do something that makes him reveal his yankee accent. Better?” he teases.
“Maybe we start talking with ridiculously over-exaggerated Brooklyn accents,” I muse. “See if that gets him to switch.”
Eli grins, laughing, and I can’t help but grin back. He’s handsome as hell even here, in a hole-in-the-wall with a dot of barbecue sauce on his chin.
“He’s going to think we’ve had strokes,” he says.
“Well, we have to study,” I say, like it’s obvious. “We’ll practice for a few months first, really nail it, and then one day —"
“I’ve got better things to do than practice a Brooklyn accent just to see if my boss is faking it,” he says.
“Like what?” I tease.
Eli’s sticks his thumb in his mouth, licking the last of the barbecue sauce from it.
“Take me home and I’ll show you,” he says, grinning, his dark hair flopping over his forehead, his eyes ablaze.
It’s unfair. He’s sitting here, at a tiny table in a hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint, eating off of paper plates, and he’s so sexy that if he wanted to bend me over and do it right here, I’d probably say yes.
Seven billion people in the world, and Eli Fucking Loveless is the one I can’t help myself around.
I lean forward, across the tiny table, and grab his wrist. I close my eyes and bring his fingers to my mouth, sucking the barbecue sauce off of them, running my tongue along the rough pads.
When I finish, he looks at me, that feral look that I’ve gotten so familiar with in the past few days. I flick my tongue over a fingerprint one more time, my core already heating up.
“That was weird,” he murmurs, his voice low and rough. There’s another couple on the far side of the room, but I don’t think they’re watching us. At any rate, I don’t know them, so who cares?
“You liked it, though,” I say, smiling.
He slips his hand into mine. Tingles rush over my skin because we’re in public, because I like the way everything he does feels, because Eli feels like driving a pickup truck too fast over a narrow bumpy road, like every swerve and jostle might be the one that does me in.
“You gonna take me home or what?” he asks, the pad of his thumb rubbing over the back of my hand, even that small amount of friction causes heat.
“You’re driving,” I point out.
“Think we can make it?”
The smile. The half-hitched one that makes his eyes light up, the one that makes him look rakish and dirty and everything I thought I didn’t lik
e in men.
“I think we better,” I say, and stand up.
We toss our trash and tell the owner thanks. Eli opens the back door for me and we practically run across the gravel parking lot to his Bronco. When he opens the passenger door for me, his hand is already on my ass and he turns me around to face him.
“You should wear this skirt more often,” he says, pressing against me, my back against the seat, both of us standing between the open door and the side of the car.
“Don’t tell me what to wear,” I say.
He bends down, kisses me. It’s slow but rough, needy, his erection already throbbing against my hip. He pulls back and bites my lip as he does, leaving me breathless.
“It was just a suggestion,” he says lightly, his eyes sparking. “I know better than to tell you what to do.”
He kisses me again. Harder, his hand digging into my hip. Behind him are the lights of the Ace in the Hole, the road beyond that, this spot anything but private.
I kiss him back. I can’t help it. I slide one hand around his waist, feeling the warm muscles under his skin, and pull him into me.
One hand on my thigh, Eli tugs at my skirt, finding the hem, his fingers slip beneath it.
I put one hand on his chest and push him away.
“We should go,” I whisper.
He just grins, moving his hand higher.
“Eli.”
“Your house is forty minutes away,” he says. “That’s an awful long time.”
“So drive fast,” I say, sliding one finger beneath the waistband of his pants.
“I can’t drive that fast,” he says. “Besides, nobody’s out here.”
“Eli,” I say, my hand moving down.
Somehow, it finds its way to the bulge in his pants, his grip on me tightens.
“You can’t say my name in that tone of voice while you’re grabbing my cock,” he says, sounding absolutely wicked. “You know that, don’t you, Violet?”
“Think of it as a preview,” I say, squeezing.
He shuts his eyes and groans quietly.
“For what’ll happen once you drive me home,” I tease.
“I’ve got tinted windows.”
We kiss, slowly. His hand moves up my leg and I squeeze his cock again.