Sometimes I passed on the market and met them for lunch. Other times, when I was open housing or pretending my best friend’s brother wasn’t quartered in my apartment and conquering my pussy, I skipped altogether. In my mind, my absences in recent months weren’t noteworthy until Andy, Lauren,andTiel all made it clear they wanted to see me today.
And I did miss spending time with them. I didn’t understand how to make friends with adults until Lauren decided to teach me. Shy was the last thing anyone would call me, but after high school and college, it was really difficult to find friends. I wasn’t especially good at it then, but without the structure of schooling to force people into social situations, I was stuck walking up to someone in the coffee shop and saying, “Hey, we ordered the same beverage. Shall we explore other commonalities?”
Growing up with brothers also meant I was less skilled in the area of female bonding, and working in a male-dominated field only compounded that situation. I didn’t have much practice from childhood, either. Things were different when I was little, before my mother died, but there wasn’t room in my life after.
But now I had these ladies, and they were expecting me for lunch. They didn’t know that I had a demanding boy in my bed, and though I was occasionally desperate to unload this story on someone who could tell me what to do with all these wildly contradictory feelings, it was better leaving certain things unsaid.
I wasn’t looking to keep secrets. Yeah, in the beginning, I didn’t see any reason to bother Lauren with this, but that was when it was one night…and then things got messy and complicated, and it ended. And now—whatever this was, wherever we were in this loop of sex and insults and ocean-wide affection that I wasn’t ready to address—I needed more time to make sense of these pieces. Even if I wanted to tell Lauren, why would I drag her into this chaos? There was no golden future for Will and me. This thing wasn’t going to work out. Our lives were rooted on opposite coastlines. And I knew he’d leave again soon. My best guess, based on his complete lack of open communication, was that he’d be heading back to base after San Diego. I could cope with the continuous cycle of deployments and the heart-numbing fear they delivered, but that didn’t change the fact that Will’s life wasn’t in Boston. That wasn’t something I could ask of him, and leaving here wasn’t something I could offer.
We had this morsel of now, and I didn’t want to share it.
I was blow-drying my hair when Will edged into the bathroom. A towel was slung around his hips and beads of water sparkled on his chest, and there was nothing wrong with that picture. Nothing at all.
“There’s someone here for you,” he said.
My eyes traveled the hills and valleys of his abs, and I asked, “Should I interpret that to mean you opened the door like this?”
I gestured toward the towel. It was the biggest one in my linen closet, but it still didn’t cover all that…girth. It peeked open mid-thigh and, if he moved the right way, showed off a bit more.
“It looks like you’re having impure thoughts, peanut.”
Very impure. “No, I’m just wondering why you’re using a hand towel when there are plenty of bath sheets. Is this an illusion to make your dick look bigger? Oh, and don’t talk to strangers when you’re ninety percent nude. My neighbors already give me the side-eye, and now they’re going to think I’m shooting porn in here or keeping a sex slave.”
He rolled his eyes and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “The door?”
I walked past him, patting his damp chest, and eyed the scars on his shoulder. They covered his back and arm, too. I noticed them last night, and they didn’t look any less awful this morning. Long, jagged cuts traversed the rise of his collarbone and down his back, and there were dents and divots where smooth, strong skin once existed. It was worse than the flesh wound, much worse, and I wanted him to tell me what happened.
“We should get some vitamin E on that,” I said, eyeing the raised, red lines that looked recently sutured. He grumbled something about real men not needing vitamin E.
“That’s right,” I said. “They just grab their nut sacks and will themselves back to health. Let me know how that turns out for you.”
When I approached the entryway, I expected to find a delivery requiring my signature or a kid selling Girl Scout cookies. I didn’t expect my future sister-in-law.
“Oh, hi,” I said, shooting a fiery glance at Will. “How are you?”
Tiel looked between me and Will, a goofy grin on her face. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything…”
I pointed at Will. “You mean him? No. Ignore him. He’s not actually here, and therefore you’re not interrupting anything.”
“Right, right,” she said. We all stared at each other for a bizarre moment before Tiel held her hands out as if she finally remembered why she dropped by. “I drank the biggest cappuccino ever and now it’s all in my bladder and since I was in this neighborhood I figured I’d stop in because Sam has me convinced that public restrooms are a breeding ground for all kinds of grossness and they probably are, but seriously, should I just not pee ever? No, that’s ridiculous, so I stopped here. Can I use your bathroom?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said. I gestured toward the hall, glaring at Will’s glistening chest and the towel barely stretching across his thick thighs. His eyes followed Tiel as she darted into the bathroom, pinging back to me in question. “Sam’s fiancée.”
“Isn’t Sam the preppy one?”
“Yes,” I said. “And would it kill you to dry your chest?”
He ignored me. “And that’s his fiancée?”
“Yes,” I repeated, brushing the water away. It was also a fair excuse to fondle him.
“The same one? From last winter?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So everything worked out after the near-death experience,” he said. “He turned out okay, they got back together…the world didn’t end?”
I ran my fingers over the beard that was coming in on his jaw. I couldn’t stop touching him, as if I was starving for the feel of his skin under mine. “Yes, Will. Everyone lived happily ever after.”
