40. Klein
“Doyou know what I mean, man?” Shane slurs the question for the third time.
Do I care about the purr of an engine in a Mercedes versus a BMW? Not one damn bit, but I say, “Yes, I know what you mean.”
Anything to make him stop talking.
We come to a stop in front of his place. He slides out of the golf cart, slow and viscous like the slime Oliver likes to make.
Shane gives walking a fifty percent effort, then abandons the attempt and lies down.
To be clear, I don’t like Shane. Never have, and that feeling has followed through the entirety of this week. My best guess is that I’ll never like him.
That’s okay. People can’t all like each other all the time.
But just because I’d rather spend time with a chipped cinder block wall than this guy doesn’t mean I’ll leave him lying on the gravel in the front of his rented house. Though I must admit, his current position suits him.
Slipping my arms under his armpits, I lift him. “Come on, dipshit.” Can’t resist the opportunity to call him a name or two while I can. I’d say it to him sober, too, but this way I don’t have to deal with that bloated look he gets.
I haul him inside, but only to the living room couch. I’m not nice enough to tuck him into his bed with warm milk and a bedtime story. Not when he’s spoken poorly of Paisley.
He sits on the couch, looking around the room with half-mast eyelids.
His head lolls back on the couch, his gaze on the ceiling. “Pretty fucking scary how someone can change, right? It’s like... like... you owe it to me to stay the same.” He runs a finger under his nose, sniffing. “Bait and switch, but in reverse.”
Pre-wedding jitters must’ve grabbed onto this guy and inserted its hooks. However, I’m not interested in being his therapist. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. Paisley is waiting for me, and if tonight ends like last night, it means the opportunity to show her how quickly I’ve become obsessed with running my hands over the small of her back and tracing her tattoo with my tongue. It’s my new favorite pastime, and I’ll destroy anybody who gets in the way of it.
“Yeah, weird how people change when you think you know them. Sorry that’s happened with Sienna, but?—”
Shane levels a bleary one-eyed gaze at me. “Paisley. Not Sienna.”
Ok, now he has my attention. “What about Paisley?”
He tosses his hands in the air, slumping down when they fall back to his lap. “She’s different. She’s fun now. She’s fun-ny. She wasn’t either of those things when I was with her. She was there, but nothing colorful. A background person. I needed more.” He sighs. “And now she’s more.”
I could challenge each statement he has made. I could cite examples to contradict him. But in the end, he’s very drunk and I very much don’t care what he thinks. “Agree to disagree,” I offer amicably.
“You must remember,” Shane insists. He raises a pointed finger and stabs at the air between us. “You knew her back then, too. Not very well, probably.”
It would be beyond satisfying to hear the thwack of my hand up the side of this dumbass’s head, but it wouldn’t get us anywhere. The pen is mightier than the sword, so it must also follow that a verbal assault is more lasting than physical. I take a seat on the coffee table in front of Shane. He looks like shit. “As the ex, it’s your right to remember Paisley as the person you believed her to be.” Not that she was what this idiot thought she was, but I digress. “And it’s Paisley’s right to be whomever she wants to be in reality. You get to remember her as you perceived her. She gets to go on to be whatever she wants on the road to becoming whomever she wants. Make sense?”
Shane’s eyes drift closed. “Clear as mud.”
I leave him there on his couch, possibly passed out. I did the nice human thing already. I made sure he got inside, but he probably would’ve been served a much needed slice of humble pie if he’d woken up in the morning with gravel indentations in his cheek.
Here’s the thing: I wasn’t the lucky bastard who dated Paisley for three years, and I get the feeling I knew her far better than he did. Paisley was never simply there. Shane was, and still is, too shallow and self-involved to see. Paisley wasn’t a background character. She was the whole damn story. A complicated plot, interwoven with subplots. A riveting main character. Internal conflict mixed with shifting goals.
Shane was never man enough to read her story.
But me? I’m immersed in it. Forget slowly diving in, I’m already lost in her pages. I was hooked on page one, sentence one.
Do I have a favorite book?
Sure do. The tale of Paisley Royce.
And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t end in a happily ever after.
Paisley is waitingup for me. Cross-legged in the center of the bed, wearing a gray jersey T-shirt of mine. Her face, free of the makeup she wore to the rehearsal dinner, is dewy with her nighttime moisturizer.
My hands ache to touch her, to lean her back on the pillows and kiss the hollow of her throat. The look on her face tells me to press pause on my desires.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, toeing off my shoes and kicking them beside the door.
Paisley sniffs. “If you want to try kiteboarding again, tomorrow would be a good day. Turns out I’m available.”
I settle on the bed, one leg bent and the other extended to the ground below. “Something happened with Sienna after I left?”
“You could say that.” Paisley exhales a terse breath of disbelief. “She kicked me out of her wedding party.”
My head rears back. “She… What?”
Paisley, hands folded in her lap, begins to rub at the top of one hand with the opposite thumb. “That was almost my exact same reaction.”
I reach for her hands, gently squeezing to let her know I’m here for her. She didn’t want to be a part of this wedding in the first place, but she gathered up her courage, and she made it here, only to be kicked out?
“What happened?” I ask cautiously.
“Sienna thinks I still have feelings for Shane.” She rolls her eyes. I roll mine too, but internally.
“I’m going to be honest, I thought we did a damn fine job selling our relationship this week.”
“Sienna saw your account. She knows our relationship is fake.” Paisley’s eyes meet mine, flustered by the admittance. “Or was, anyway. Whatever. I don’t know.”
“Was,” I confirm.
Her smile is small, but it’s there. It’s also grateful, and relieved.
“How do you feel about what Sienna did?”
Her cheeks fill with air, like a puffer fish, and she lets it out in one noisy breath. “I felt angry at first. Indignant. Like, how dare you? Do you know what I went through to get here? And then that feeling subsided, and I felt sad.”
“Because you’re going to miss your sister’s wedding?” Will she? Does getting kicked out of the bridal party mean you’re also barred from the wedding? I haven’t a clue, and this doesn’t feel like the right time to ask. Right now is for listening.
Paisley shakes her head. “Maybe to a certain degree, but not really. It’s more that I can’t believe how quickly my family is to cast someone out when they don’t do exactly as they’re told. And then I started to think about it, and I realized it’s only me they do that to. I’m the one my dad expected to follow in his footsteps and attend his alma mater, I’m the one he wanted to take over his firm. Sienna expected me to do as she said, no questions asked.” Paisley blinks twice, staring down at the comforter until she lifts her gaze and meets my eyes. “Why? Why me? My dad did this super awful thing by cheating on my mom, and then asking me to hide the truth from her. And it’s not like he begged me to do it. He instructed me. He assumed that once he spoke, I would follow. Like a commandment.”
I’ve been where Paisley is now, staring into the reality of loved ones’ shortcomings. Nobody is perfect, but when someone’s flaws cause you harm, it hurts a little extra when you love them.
“Paisley, I don’t know your family well enough to form concrete thoughts about this, but here’s my two cents: some people are inherent manipulators, and sometimes the intention is not malicious, but habitual.” She nods, and I take that as my permission to continue. “Also, there are some people who cannot see their own shortcomings. Some people call them narcissists, some people might say they have narcissistic tendencies, or, they can simply be called selfish.”
Paisley looks at me in wonder. “How do you know all this?”
“Research for my book. It ended up helping me a lot, also.”
She smiles in a not-happy way. “It looks like I’m a benefactor of your knowledge.”
“Remember when we were in the car driving to the coast after we landed? I told you I would put you on my back and swim you off this island. The offer stands.”
She rises, uncrossing her legs and placing her weight on her knees. Her arms pretzel around my neck and she pulls me close. Nestling my nose into the dip of space at the bottom of her throat, I breathe in deeply.
“You smell divine.”
“Describe it, Wordsmith. What do I smell like?”
I groan into her skin, the sound reverberating. “You smell like you’re mine.”
She sits back on her heels, looking into my eyes. “Am I yours?”
Her beautiful eyes, her heart-shaped face, her sun-dappled freckles, they undo me. This woman, this woman.
“We joke that I came here for the cake, right?”
She nods, waiting.
“Paisley.” My fingers slip through her hair, curling around the back of her neck. Here we go. “You are the cake. I’m here for you. I’m here for your hard times, and I’m here for you as you grow as a person and I don’t know about you, but all this fake dating stopped feeling fake as soon as we landed.”
A smile that could rival the midday sun over the ocean outside our window lands on Paisley’s face. “Klein,” she breathes my name. “I wish there was a way to open up my mind and let you read my thoughts over the past week. You’d see just how perfectly you crept into my heart.” Paisley leans forward, placing a kiss on my forehead. “I like your storyteller mind, your vivid imagination, the way you see a situation and poke through it instead of taking it on its face.” Her lips move lower, to my chest, where she places a kiss on the center of the space. “Your heart is so big, Klein, and so interested in me. In being in my corner. It hardly seems like it’s been enough time, but I’ve never felt somebody’s investment in me the way I feel yours.” She rises, her lips hovering over mine. “And this mouth.” She dives in, kissing me briefly, leaving me begging for more. “Don’t even get me started on this mouth. You say big, lovely things, and you make me feel even bigger and lovelier.”
I push forward, capturing her lips with a searing kiss. “This mouth?” I ask, teasingly nipping at her lower lip.
“Yes,” she whimpers.
In one swift motion I flip us over, so she’s straddling me.
Paisley blinks in surprise, recovering, and then she’s reaching for my shorts, unbuttoning them and pulling me out. She rears up onto her knees, lifting my oversized shirt from her body, and I shove aside her underwear. Positioning me at her entrance, she sinks down.
“Ahh,” she breathes, like it’s a relief to be where she is.
For me, it is not only a relief, it is my whole world. What does it mean, this barrage of feelings? Is this the big L word, the feeling I’m not supposed to feel yet, because it hasn’t been long enough? Long enough according to whom? Two weeks ago, I read an article about a man who risked his life to save a stranger, and for the rest of the day I thought about how a person must have a basic love for humanity to do something like that.
If that’s true, why can’t I already love Paisley? Be in love with her? She’s no stranger, and I’m not only referring to the fact I’m inside her body right now. Our lovemaking does not require her to enter me, and yet, she is there, infiltrating me from the center of my chest all the way to my extremities. Shades of Paisley, throughout.
“Ace,” I say, and she nods.
“I know, Klein,” she nods, lifting her body. “I know.” Sinking. “Not yet, okay?” Hips rolling. Soft moaning.
“Roll over with me,” I instruct, and she lies down on my chest, her hair splaying out over my face.
We spin, until she’s on her back. Hooking her legs over my shoulders, I drive inside, gripping her hips and picking up the pace. Her head tips back, mouth open.
“My Paisley,” I say, watching her enjoy what I’m doing.
“My Klein,” she responds, and my heart bursts like a confetti cannon. Are we our own people? Of course. But do we belong to each other? Absolutely.
Using my thumb, I rub tight circles around the middle of her. Eyes on me, she shatters silently. Her release prompts my own, and I fall down onto her. Her nails lightly scratch over my back as I empty.
“Forgot,” I huff. “A condom.” Everything happened so suddenly. I hadn’t even thought about it.
“Don’t worry,” Paisley croons, her hands making their way up into my hair. “I’m on birth control. Plus, you know, we’re together now, so...”
I grin against the T-shirt on her body that I never want back. “Boyfriend perk?”
Her soft laugh filters down over me. “Yes.”
I know I should get up, take us both to the bathroom to get clean, but everything about Paisley is so warm and inviting, I want to stay here another minute.
“About, um,” Paisley falters. My head lifts so I can look at her. “My feelings for you are very strong. But this week is a lot on me, and the way I feel about you should have its own time. Its own place. I don’t want to share big words with other feelings. Does that make sense?”
I press a kiss to the first spot I can reach, which happens to be her heart. “Total.”
Sliding out of her, I get off the bed and offer her a hand. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like a shower. Care to join me?”
Paisley follows me in, holding my hand like she can’t let me go. When the water is hot, we step in together. I wash her hair, something I’ve never done for a woman before. She shows me what to do, how to focus on her scalp, teaching me to condition her ends.
We’re exhausted after a long night, but being in the shower together, and knowing I don’t need a condom, invigorates us. Paisley turns around, propping one foot up on the built-in shelf seat, and shakes her rear end at me.
I point at her. “Siren.”
She laughs, then goes quiet.
I wrap a hand around her mouth when she comes, and she bites down on my finger.
This woman.
I know what I’m not supposed to say to her yet.
So, when she turns around and cuddles into me while the water washes away the evidence from between her legs, I say it silently in my head.
For a guy who believes in the power of words, I have to admit, these three are superior.