18. Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
I woke up the next morning in Tallulah’s bed feeling hungover. Slowly, I glanced to my right so I could drink her in. She looked like an angel in sleep. Sure, I was convinced she was the devil some of the time—only some of the time—but when she was unguarded, she looked relaxed and happy.
I was careful not to move—I wasn’t ready to wake her—and instead looked her up and down.
She was naked. I was too. Only her shoulder poked out from under the covers.
She murmured something in her sleep but didn’t shift.
Instead, she remained close to my side, her body curling into mine.
We were touching, although not on top of one another, which was good.
I was one of those people who couldn’t sleep if somebody was draped all over me.
Tallulah hadn’t tried. We’d slept close enough that I could feel her warmth. She hadn’t crowded me, though.
Pushing the images from the previous evening out of my head was hard. There had been nothing soft about it. Everything had been hard, sweaty, and out of control. Personally, I was okay with that. Was she? Did she want more? Would she regret what she’d done when she opened her eyes?
My head was all over the place, to the point where my anxiety spiked a notch.
Would she yell at me? Would she put the blame for this on me?
Should I have left? Of course I should have left.
That was a stupid question. Why hadn’t I left?
I couldn’t wrap my head around that part.
We’d been like magnets when we went at one another.
Nothing—no power on earth—could’ve torn me away from her in that moment.
Reasonably, I understood that. Still, I wanted to kick myself with a steel-toed boot.
What had I been thinking?
As if hearing the nonstop doubts parading through my mind, Tallulah opened her eyes. She was initially groggy—perhaps she felt as if she was wading through a hangover too. Alertness grabbed her after three seconds, and her eyebrows hiked as she regarded me.
“Oh, crap” was all she managed to say.
Even though the situation was serious—it didn’t get more serious than this—I burst out laughing. “Pretty much,” I agreed. And, weirdly, her reaction was enough to relax me. I took myself by surprise when I slipped an arm underneath her and tugged so she was closer.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, suspicion lining her features. Her hair was wild, to the point where I desperately wanted to comb my fingers through it, and her makeup from the previous day was smudged beneath her eyes. She still looked ridiculously gorgeous. How was that even possible?
“Shh,” I admonished her, resting my cheek against the top of her head. Why did it feel so right to have her in my arms when we both knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything about us was wrong?
“You should shush,” she muttered, although she didn’t pull away from me.
Instead, she traced her fingers over my chest. Unlike so many of the other men in Las Vegas, I didn’t do the waxing thing.
I kept my chest hair neat and trimmed, but I didn’t go in for the whole hairless monkey aesthetic. It felt unnatural.
“It’s weird you have hair,” she said out of nowhere, catching me off guard. Could she read my mind? “You’re like the only guy in Vegas with a hairy chest.”
“I very much doubt I’m the only guy in Vegas with a hairy chest,” I argued.
“Under the age of sixty, that’s totally true,” she countered.
“That’s a gross exaggeration.”
“It’s true,” she insisted. “Have you even seen the guys at Hunk-O-Mania?”
Was she being serious? “Why would I be looking at the guys at Hunk-O-Mania?”
“Why not? You’re not one of those dudes who is scared of seeing other dudes naked, are you?”
“I don’t believe ‘scared’ is the right word. I simply have no interest in seeing other men naked.”
“What about women? Do you go to the female strip clubs?”
“No, that’s not really my scene.”
“Why?”
Was she really curious? Was this her attempt at awkward conversation? Or, more likely, was she seeing how far into discomfort she could push me?
“Because whatever free time I have goes to working on my art,” I replied, opting for honesty. “That’s just a waste of time to me. I don’t know how to explain it. I appreciate naked women.” I glanced down at her and smiled smugly. “Obviously, as you well remember from last night.”
She pinched my flank. Hard.
I laughed and squirmed but didn’t push away from her. “I get lost in my head sometimes, I think.”
Rather than make fun of me, she nodded. “That’s the way it is for creatives. We get lost in our own heads.”
“It’s weird that we’re both into art.”
“Not so weird. Art is one of those things everybody has an opinion on. They might have the same opinion we do, or love it the way we do, but art can’t be ignored.”
It was an interesting take. “I guess that’s true.”
She fell silent for a few beats, then she sighed. “We should probably talk about what happened last night.”
She wasn’t the type to ignore the problem.
She got right to the heart of matters, which I appreciated.
“Yeah.” I dragged a hand through my hair and stared at her ceiling.
Her apartment was passable by Las Vegas standards.
That wasn’t saying much. She’d gone out of her way to make it homey, putting little artistic touches here and there.
Her building was safe enough, but the neighborhood outside was not. It wasn’t where I wanted her to live.
Of course, I didn’t have a say in the matter.
“What are you thinking?” I asked when she didn’t say anything.
“I’m thinking that it was probably a mistake.” She sent me a rueful smile. “It’s not that I didn’t have fun or anything. It’s just…” She didn’t have to finish. I felt the same way she did.
“Neither one of us is in a place where we can do a relationship,” I volunteered.
“Yeah.” She sighed. “I’ve always had a weird thing for you, ever since middle school. It was probably best that we scratched the itch. The tension should ease now.”
“You sound like a therapist.”
She snorted. “That’s not funny.”
I tickled her because I couldn’t help myself. “I think it’s a little funny.”
“Nope. No way.” She vehemently shook her head. “It’s not funny in the least.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I tickled her one more time, then closed my eyes. Only then did the true breadth of her words register. “Wait. You had a crush on me in school?” I gave her a considering look.
“Oh, don’t.” She wrinkled her nose. One of the things I liked best about her was that she didn’t play games. She didn’t bat her eyelashes and try to use feminine wiles to get her way. She didn’t talk in a baby voice and try to cajole favors. She was who she was, and I happened to like who she was.
“I’m being serious,” I insisted. “I had no idea you had feelings for me.”
“Not feelings,” she corrected. “It was a crush. It wasn’t even a full crush. It was a crushlet.”
“Ah.” That made me laugh. “Well, I had a thing for you too.”
“Oh, right.”
“I did. I liked seeing you in my art classes. I liked watching the way you interacted with everybody. You never fell all over yourself to impress the jocks. You were just Tallulah.”
“Um, I don’t know what high school experience you’re remembering, but you were a jock.”
I made a face. “I was not a jock.”
“You were on three teams, if I remember correctly.”
“So you’re saying that your crush was big enough to monitor what sports I participated in. Duly noted.”
She rolled her eyes but didn’t respond.
“I always kind of hoped you would go out for cheerleading,” I admitted, enjoying the game. “Not only would that have forced you into one of those short skirts, but I imagined scenarios where we would end up on the bus together at night, on the way back from the game, and we would talk.”
“Talk?” she challenged on a hiked eyebrow.
“I don’t know what high school fantasies you had, but mine did not involve doing anything sexual on a bus.”
“Oh, see, I had plenty of those fantasies.” She grinned, warming to the topic. “In my fantasies, we took a bottle of my mother’s Boone’s Farm, sneaked on the bus, and turned it into a little apartment.” She looked wistful.
“You didn’t think the school administration would notice that?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t always the smartest kid.”
“Oh, that’s not true.” I shook my head. “You were extremely smart. You just never let yourself believe it.”
“Is that why you stood me up for prom?”
I froze, confused. “What?”
“Prom.” She looked resigned more than anything else. “You know, senior prom. We were supposed to go together.”
“I don’t… I’m not sure…” I worked my jaw and collected my thoughts. “Tallulah, I never had any intention of going to prom.”
Her eyes flashed with annoyance. Another emotion was there under the surface too. It was frustrated vulnerability. “Then why did you ask me?”
“I didn’t.”
“You did so!” Her voice ratcheted up ten notches. “You told Becky Carpenter that you wanted to ask me but were too nervous, so she asked me. She made all the arrangements and everything, only you never showed.”
Pity welled inside of my chest. “Becky Carpenter asked me to prom, and I told her I wasn’t going.”
Tallulah looked as if she was going to argue further, and then she stopped. I could practically hear the gears in her mind working.
I chose my next words carefully. “I didn’t know that you and Becky Carpenter were friends.”
“We weren’t.” Tallulah rubbed her forehead. “She was one of the girls who always got digs in about my mother.” She closed her eyes, grief lining her face. “I’m such an idiot.”
“No.” I shook my head. Her feeling bad about herself was going to make me feel wretched. “This isn’t on you. Becky was a terrible person.”
“She must have picked up on my crush on you.” Tallulah wouldn’t look at me, her gaze focused on the ceiling. “She was totally the type to try to embarrass me like that. I used all my savings to buy a dress and then only got to wear it for two hours. That’s how long I waited.”
I wanted to find Becky Carpenter and lock her in a storage room for a few days. “I’m so sorry.”
Tallulah adopted a brave face. “You didn’t do it. In fact, it turns out that I’ve been holding a grudge against you for thirteen years and you didn’t deserve it.”
I still felt guilty. “I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was a stupid teenage dream. What are the odds that you actually would’ve wanted to go with me?
” She slapped her hand over her face. “Ugh. I’m so freaking stupid.
The only thing I had going for me that night was my mother had taken off and hadn’t shown her face in a week.
She never knew, which meant she could never make fun of me. ”
I wanted to find Sharon and lock her in that room with Becky. Because that wasn’t an option, I rolled so I was on top of Tallulah and wrestled her hands away from her face.
“Again?” she demanded, her face red and her eyes glassy. “I thought we agreed it was a mistake.”
“It was a mistake,” I confirmed. I felt that deeply, although not as deeply as I felt something else when I looked at her. I would have to file that away to think on later. “I need you to listen to me, though.”
“You don’t have to be on top of me for me to listen to you.”
“I need you to look at me.”
She let loose a dramatic sigh. “What is it?”
“If I was going to ask anybody to prom, it would’ve been you.”
Surprise and mistrust crossed her features. “You never even talked to me.”
“That’s because I wasn’t comfortable talking to people back then. That’s one of the reasons I’m such a big proponent of therapy.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips. “Well, thanks for that, I guess.” She didn’t move to climb out from under me.
“I’m sorry you went through that because of me,” I insisted.
“It wasn’t your fault.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, bad things happen. Robin actually taught me that because I spent the better part of my teen years thinking that if I was a better kid, then my mother wouldn’t want to leave me constantly.”
My heart ached for the child who had been forced into adulthood at such a young age. “Prom was never going to be my thing. It was too many people. If I could’ve gone, though, I would’ve wanted to take you because you were the only person I could just be quiet with back then.”
She seemed to consider it. “I guess that’s a compliment,” she said finally.
“It was meant as one. As for this…” I gestured between the two of us. “I’m attracted to you,” I admitted. “I am, and it’s not something that’s easy to fight. I am not in a place to give you what you deserve, though.”
That made her smile, although it was tinged with mischief. “Do you think I’m in a place to give you what you deserve? I’m a freaking mess. I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I’m floating from thing to thing.”
“We’re both messes,” I said. “Maybe someday when we’re not both messes…”
“Maybe,” she agreed, although she didn’t sound convinced. “Let’s chalk it up to hormones and let it be.”
“Do you think you can do that?”
“Sure. Can you?”
I wasn’t as certain. I’d give it my best shot, though. “Absolutely.”
“Great.” She studied my face. “Although, since it is the morning after, we can do it one more time and count it as the same incident. That should definitely get it out of our systems, right?”
I laughed at her innocent expression. “Weirdly, I was thinking the same thing.”
“I know. I can feel your thing against my thigh.”
My eyebrow hiked. “So … just one more time.”
“Yup, and then we’ll go back to being former high school classmates and coworkers.”
“That sounds like a good plan to me.”
It was a good plan. Would I be able to carry it out, though? That was the question.