Clearing off her coffee table was an interesting challenge. Every book was propped open with index cards, paper clips, ribbons, or pens, one layered over another, and they appeared to live in an ecosystem I was helpless to understand.
She needed some fucking shelves.
Eventually, I carved out space for the Spanish take-out and stationed several oddly-shaped velvet pillows on the floor while she finished packing. Her kitchen was crammed with a random collection of colorful tools and appliances, and she would have benefitted from decent cabinetry. I popped the cork on a bottle of Rioja as she emerged from the bedroom in black yoga pants and a camisole.
I stared at the bottle in my hand, desperate to remember whether Lauren liked red wine, let alone this variety, and came up empty. “I picked up a Spanish red. Is that okay?”
She stared at the glass for a moment, her lip caught between her teeth and she shrugged. “Uh, sure.”
In other words: no, it wasn’t okay.
I handed her the glass and gestured to the tapas. “Any strategy here?”
“Little of this. Little of that.” She snatched up a stuffed Medjool date and groaned in delight when it hit her tongue. My new favorite sound.
I dug into the shrimp with cascabel chiles while Lauren scooped paella onto her plate. “I didn’t expect everyone to show up in my office today.”
At least Angus hadn’t made an appearance.
“You work together. I’d assume they stop by all the time,” she said around another date. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
Twisting the stem of my wine glass between my fingers, I polished off the contents before going in for a refill. “Yeah, but it’s always like that with them. My siblings, they aren’t even remotely normal. To be honest, Lauren, it shocks the shit out of me that you haven’t kicked me to the curb yet.”
“So you want to talk about it?”
I turned to face Lauren and stroked her thigh. “Why aren’t you furious? Why aren’t you inventing new reasons to disappear on me?”
She was focused on composing the right distribution of paella flavors on her fork, and for all I knew, ignoring my question and devising ways to sneak out of her own apartment in the middle of the night. I downed another glass and watched her paella-eating technique for several bites. The wine was turning down the volume on my annoyance with Sam and Riley. Lauren in a tissue-thin camisole—braless—was helping, too.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry about Riley. And Sam. I should have thrown them both out.”
I refilled my wine. Emptied it in two gulps.
Lauren plucked the glass from my fingers and set it aside before straddling my lap. She grabbed a fork and the container of paella from the table, and bit into a chunk of chorizo. She hummed and bobbed her head from side to side, and I watched her debating with herself.
“I could tell you a story about my brothers, and how they decided to interrogate my high school spring formal date. I mean rendition-level interrogation while surrounded by my dad’s gun collection. But I’m leaving tomorrow and we moved mountains today so I want copious amounts of wine, tapas, and nakedness, and very little serious storytelling.”
“Let me tell you what I heard just now: your brothers are manically protective of you and they have guns.”
It was a reminder that, in everything we shared over the weekend, Lauren told me hardly anything about herself. I knew her body—every last inch of it—and her specifications for Trench Mills, and some other offhand personal details, but I never stopped to ask whether her brothers were going to pull a black hood over my head, hogtie me, and toss me in the ocean after finding out what I did to their baby sister.
These seemed like important questions.
“So yeah, Riley’s even more of a creeper than you, but when you think about these things, these little annoying things, they don’t matter because they’re the people we have, and we don’t get them for very long. We need to take them as they come and accept the crazy ways they show their love.”
My brows lifted and I trailed my fingers up and down her thigh. “You’re not scarred for life because Riley watched me grope you,andhe heard me narrate the whole thing? Twice?”
“Not scarred for life,” she laughed. “And Sam is comedy, right down to the weird socks that don’t really go with the look, but work because they’re weird.”
The wine was obscuring her words. Had to be. That was the only way she’d say she was good with Sam skeeving all over her. “Just to be clear, you tear into me when I text you to make sure you’re alive but you have no problem with my douche canoe brother staring at your tits for five solid minutes? You’re okay with that?”
“It’s good for my ego for beautiful boys like Sam to stare at my tits, but if you want to talk about this for even one more minute,” she stood, inching her camisole up her torso and over her head, “you have to talk about it while I sit here naked.”
Her shirt sailed to the floor, and though I wanted to ask about all these velvet pillows and the girly, feel-good determination quotes plastered on her fridge, and the probability of her brothers snapping off my testicles and feeding them to sea otters, it could wait.
It was time for me to lick my naughty schoolteacher until she screamed.
*
