“I’ll be there later tonight.”
Drew pulled away, a promise in his words and in his eyes. He took my hand and kissed my palm before walking away without another word. He slipped back into the group of men he had been with before, like I wasn’t even a thought. He laughed and grabbed for a glass that was in front of him, one he probably had before I walked into the bar.
It wasn’t until I was walking out and saw the girls waiting in the jeep, that I realized Drew hadn’t asked for my phone number but wanted to know where we were staying. He said he would be seeing me later, but we had no way of getting ahold of each other. I was torn with trying to decide what it meant, but the more I thought about it as I jumped into the car and Celeste started the engine, the less I cared.
I could play along with his no strings attached game.
Iput on the last of my night creams before I slipped on the tank top I was going to sleep in. I was grateful that Celeste had booked us all separate rooms, her way of saying if she was going to get laid, we weren’t going to be standing in her way. For me, it just meant I got the whole king-sized bed to myself.
I walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge and looked over at the clock on the bedside table. It was eleven and there was only an hour left of my birthday, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was that Drew hadn’t shown up yet. I had prepped myself the whole night that I could do the no strings attached game, but I knew in my heart that wasn’t going to be the easiest.
I got attached too quickly, and others saw it as a fault, but I saw it as loving with my whole heart. I lay down on the plush bed and stared up at the ceiling, wishing sleep would just take me, rather than my head thinking more about Drew.
I’d never thought about a man this much, especially not one I had only spent maybe twenty minutes with.
A light tap came from the window off to the side of the room. I scrunched my eyebrows together in confusion, since I was on the second floor of the bed-and-breakfast, so it wasn’t like anyone could climb up to my window. The sound came again, and this time I got out of bed and went to inspect what was causing it.
When I pulled the curtain back, I was graced with the image of Drew standing below my window in the garden. I could barely see it, but he had his hand fisted and was mid throw when another pebble hit the window in front of me. I pulled the curtain all the way back, revealing myself fully to him. He dropped the rest of the rocks that were in his hand and waved for me to come to him. I looked back at the clock, seeing another minute pass by, and I knew I didn’t want to miss another one with Drew. I held up a finger to him, letting him know I would be a minute.
I already had a tank on, even though I no longer had on a bra, so I grabbed a pair of my cut off shorts and slipped some flip-flops on and made my way out of the room. I tiptoed down the hallway and to the front door, where I opened the door and closed it as softly as possible.
When I turned around, Drew was already standing there with a giant grin on his face. His eyes were raking up and down my body, but they stopped and I could hear his breath catch when they landed on my chest and I knew he realized I wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Where to, Romeo?” I said softly, throwing the jab at him for taking the cheesy route of throwing rocks at my window to get my attention.
“Follow me.” He didn’t wait for me to follow like he asked. Instead, he reached for my hand and pulled me along after him, toward a beat-up blue pickup. I eyed it up and down, trying to figure out what place in town would allow someone to use this as a rental car.
“Where did you get this rental?” I asked as he opened the door to the truck and helped me inside.
“It’s not a rental. It’s mine.” He said it with such assurance as he buckled me in and closed the door, coming around to the driver’s side. “I don’t fly, so I drove this down from Maryland.”
“You drove from Maryland?” I screeched the question out as he put the truck in drive. I put my hand over my mouth; it wasn’t like me to have outbursts, but what crazy person drove to Myrtle Beach from Maryland?
“You say that like I shouldn’t have.”
I watched as the grip he had on the steering wheel loosened and his whole body racked with laughter at my outburst. Besides throwing rocks at my window, it was the first time I had ever seen him as anything but an alpha male.
“Whatever you want to do, but driving in this death contraption probably isn’t the smartest.” I looked around the inside of the car, and even though it was clean, you could tell there was wear to it, from where the leather seats were peeling and the floorboard was almost a light grey from how worn it was.
“I’ll keep driving Shirley, like I have been for the last fifteen years, until she dies on me,” he said matter-of-factly and another laugh escaped me.
“Shirley? What are you, forty?”
“No, thirty-nine.”
My laughter stopped immediately at the mention of his age. I hadn’t even been thinking of how old Drew was, but he definitely didn’t look almost forty. I shifted in my seat, turning toward him, letting my eyes rake over his body as he drove us to an unknown location. He kept his eyes forward, but I could tell something was going through his head, because where he had a grip on the steering wheel, his knuckles whitened. It was the same tick I had seen in the bar earlier, but this time I couldn’t tell if he was turned on or mad.
I kept trying to think over and over how to tell him that I didn’t care about his age, but I didn’t know how. I knew I was always attracted to older men, but Drew was on a completely different level. He didn’t act old, he acted mature, and I think that’s what was turning me on, not just his age in comparison to mine.
“We’re here.” Drew finally spoke up and he placed the truck in park and exited the vehicle.
I hadn’t realized we had pulled onto the beach until I was exiting the truck.
We were the only car there, but he had parked the vehicle facing a house with the bed of the truck facing the ocean. There were no lights on in the house, or on the beach for that matter. It was deserted.
“Are we allowed to be here?” I whispered to him, like the person a few houses down could hear me. I watched him unlatch the back of the pickup and when I finally got a good look inside the bed, I could see blankets, pillows, and a picnic basket.
“The man I closed on a building with today owns this house. He only uses it for when his children come to town, so he’s letting us use the beach front for the evening.”
