It took a beat but then I saw the huge mosaic lizard tiled into the side of the garage. I didn't know how we'd missed it before. Must've been the subtle desert colors and the fact it spanned the entire wall.
"That's one of my ongoing projects," Rita said. "I call him Mr. Darcy. He's not done yet. Big fellow. Pain in the ass but I'm hoping he's worth it in the end."
"Black cherry," Gary called through the open door.
Audrey clung to me, whispering, "Get me out of here."
chapter thirty-one
Jude
Today's vocabulary word: unfiltered
The elevator doorsopened at our floor and Audrey executed a ballet leap out of the car. She didn't wait for me, instead twirling down the hallway in a series of jumps and pirouettes.
At least she was going the right direction.
I found her moving through a sequence of dance steps near our door, her shoes abandoned a few feet away. "You miss it," I said as I fished the key card from my wallet. "Dancing, that is."
She extended her leg up until her heel met the wall and then leaned into the stretch, her body open like an unfolded paper clip. Her dress bunched around her waist. I wished I could say I looked away. That I didn't stare at the light pink panties hugging her hip or stretching between her thighs.
It was only when I felt her staring at me that I finally met her gaze.
"I do miss it," she said, a loose smile on her face, "sometimes."
I held the door open. She ignored it and I couldn't get away from the sense that she was dragging my attention back to herlegs, her thighs, those obscenely sweet little panties. And I knew she wasn't herself right now. I knew this wasn't the time for me to take what I could get. But god fucking damn. "Still can't believe you gave it up."
She snorted out a laugh. "I still can't believe Padrino is a dad."
"What—no. We're not bringing that back," I said, holding out a hand to her.
"Oh, come on! It's funny. I should've thought of that at the reunion. Everyone would've been like,Wait! Padrino's a dad? My mind is blown!"
I swung a glance down the hallway. I didn't want to do this out here anymore. My head was a fucking carnival show and if anyone came down here and saw her like this, I'd have to kill them. Obviously.
"Hilarious," I said, hooking an arm around her waist and hauling her into the room.
"You know, it's not a bad nickname," she said, fully invertebrate and giggling as I parked her on the bed. "Compared to—what did they call me? Antacid? Padrino is a nice step up from Antacid."
The asshole heirs at our prep school had a thing for nicknames. It was a practical necessity when most of these guys were born saddled with names that stretched back six generations.
But they were still assholes and the nicknames didn't let anyone forget who held all the power.
It started with a fake sneeze andBuh-less-me—a spin on Bellessi that was about as sharp as soup—but it didn't catch on. Too much theatrics for guys who never actually had to form their own thoughts.
They mixed it up and moved on toBless me, Father, for I have sinned—another fail. Too long, too cumbersome. And I atethe humor out of it by telling them they didn't know the first thing about repenting for true sins.
In that sense, it was my fault that it shifted toPadrino—godfather—and that it stuck.
"Will you tell me about him?"
Audrey sat on the bed, her hair tousled and her cheeks still rosy red. It reminded me of the time we drove to a hill outside the city to watch a meteor shower in the middle of the summer. We'd had a blanket, some beer, and the stars. I told her I loved her that night. That I'd never love anyone else the way I loved her. That the only future I wanted was with her at my side.
At the time, I hadn't been able to imagine anything coming between us. Nothing we couldn't deal with. It was amazing how naïve we'd been. I always thought I was too jaded for naïveté but here we were.
There was no denying that the plans we'd made for life after high school probably would've cracked under the weight of the real world at some point. But that didn't meanwewould've fallen apart. I refused to see that as an inevitability. There was no one scrappier than this spoiled society girl of mine and I lived to prove people wrong.
But the part that bothered the hell out of me was that we didn't even get the chance to fuck it all up and fall to pieces. Not when her parents shoved her into a gilded cage, shipped her to California, and then sold her off to the highest bidder. They knew what they were doing. They'd probably had it planned since the minute they met me. Or maybe it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with controlling her.
