Chapter 3
Chapter Three
When she got back from the day’s work, and the day’s ill-advised swim, Lila showered, and stared at herself in the mirror for a long time, but couldn’t shake the intensity of what she felt coursing through her veins.
She didn’t want to go to sleep, not feeling like this.
She was way too familiar with what that was like.
But the trouble was... Nolan. Nolan’s ass. Nolan’s everything.
If she went to bed like this, then she was going to fantasize about him.
It was like giving a mouse a cookie.
She had been given a look at all that, and now that she had been given that, she wanted more of it, and if she went to bed wanting more of it, then she was going to want to pleasure herself to thoughts of it, and that was just something she couldn’t cope with. Not right now.
It brought her mind back to her twenty-first birthday.
She could remember Nolan laying her down in the bed, and looking up at him. Could remember doing everything she could to put a blatant invitation on her face. The drunk leading the drunk.
And then he had dropped her, like she was a sack of potatoes. Like she was a venomous snake, even. Then had gone over to the couch like he was trying to stay safe from her advances.
That had humiliated her so badly. She had been invariably meaner to him ever since. Like it was his fault that she had made such an idiot out of herself. And it wasn’t. It was only hers.
But the whole swimming-around-in-underwear thing had been... It had been a really bad idea, first of all.
Beyond that, it had just been... Strangely humiliating and titillating in ways that she didn’t even want to begin to think about.
She had seen his ass. She was never going to get over that.
She’d thought he was kidding, or something, and she wasn’t dumb enough to turn her back on a man that had just dunked her under the water maliciously—malicious even though she had deserved it—because she wasn’t a fool.
She had kept her eyes trained on him until he had pulled those boxer shorts right off, and she had gotten an eye full that was haunting her endlessly. When she closed her eyes — Nolan’s ass. When she opened her eyes — Nolan’s ass.
He was like a sculpture. A fine example of masculine artistry.
The lines in his back, his shoulders, the two divots right above his...
He was just so hot. It was unreasonable, unreal, and she could have gone her whole life without seeing that.
Maybe he had a small penis. She wondered that.
Because it would be quite the thing to spend her entire life lusting after the man only to discover he had a little dick.
The trouble was that Nolan didn’t possess small dick energy.
Not that she knew anything about those things in practicality.
That could just be a vibe. And so, she could hold on to hope, couldn’t she?
The hope that he was perfectly gifted in every way except that one.
The hope that he was a promise with no real follow-through, which meant that she wasn’t missing anything.
There was that, and there was also the fact that she was marinating on what he’d said about his family.
How could his mom have done that? Just abandoned him like that. Gotten clean and sober and started a new life and just left him with a grandmother who had never been all that interested in him. It wasn’t like his grandmother was cruel. She wasn’t.
Lila had gone over there a few times. She’d had a little bowl of hard candy. Butterscotch and candy with a strawberry wrapper that tasted funny. Or maybe it had just tasted funny because she had been eating it in a house that was saturated by nicotine scent.
When she’d let them come over, she’d always had Kool-Aid to give to them, and it was a nice memory, as far as Lila was concerned.
But his grandma hadn’t been all that interested in spending time with any of the kids. She had just put those treats out and gone on watching her soaps. There was a sort of fierce independence to her that Lila had kind of liked.
She wasn’t the usual type of old lady.
Wasn’t soft or doting.
There was a hardness to her, something self-contained and independent.
But Lila had figured that if she could live to be that old, she would just please her bad self too.
Just like Nolan’s grandmother.
But she supposed it was kind of like the way she felt about her mom.
There had been times when she was good. And if you only saw her on visitation, you might not have as much of a chip on your shoulder as the rest of the Grayson siblings did.
So maybe that was kind of how she saw his grandma. Maybe he saw her mom that way.
She wanted to stop thinking about Nolan.
Right now, she was just swimming in self-loathing, at least, the part of her that wasn’t awash in her need for him.
Maybe it was time to do something irrational. Not with Nolan, of course, but something irrational for herself.
She had gone on a couple of dates, and never even kissed the guy she had gone out with. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she just didn’t try hard enough.
Without thinking, she decided to put on clothes instead of pajamas. She didn’t really have going-out clothes. But, the Velvet Slipper was only a notch above a honky-tonk, so tight jeans and a tank top would do. She knew that.
She pinched her cheeks and with a pounding heart she walked out of her house and got into her truck.
Lila Grayson was going to go start something. Even if it didn’t end anywhere all that salacious, she just needed to do something with this energy inside of her, needed to direct it somewhere else.
She waited for the feelings to go away, the whole drive to town, but she just kept seeing flashes of Nolan’s body. And then her heart would jump, and she would be resolved that this was something that she had to do.
She parked her truck up against the curb, and got out, rolling her shoulders back and making a beeline for the small building. It was well lit and looked like it was heaving inside, not in spite of the late hour but because of it.
It was a weeknight, but that didn’t much matter. People needed to go get their jollies somewhere, and typically speaking, it was here.
She flung open the door, and was satisfied when quite a few people turned to look in her direction.
She scanned the room. Spotted two guys that were probably in their twenties near the bar. And decided that she was going to need a shot before things really got rolling.
She went to the bar, and held up one finger. “Can I get a shot of Jack, please?”
Kip, the longsuffering owner of the Velvet Slipper who was used to every variety of shenanigan at this point, nodded, and sloshed some amber liquid into a tiny glass, sliding it her way. And then a hand reached out, grabbed hold of the glass before she could.
She whipped around, looking up, and her heart bottomed out when she saw Nolan.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
Goddamn it.
She had gone out to get away from this man. To do something with all the pent-up desire inside of her that had been boiling away for years and had nowhere to go, and here he was. And it was like everybody else in the room vanished.
“Well, it’s a small-ass town, and this is the only dive bar.”
“Indeed.” He picked the shot up and downed it in one gulp.
“Hey,” she said. “That was mine.”
“You ought to stick to soda, sprout.”
“Excuse me very much, but I can hold my own, and I can hold my liquor.”
“Sure you can,” he said. “Except, I seem to recall that you can’t hold all that much.”
“If you’re comparing me to where I was four years ago, then you are sadly living in the past.”
“Care to test it?”
She felt like he was dangling forbidden fruit in front of her. Like he was tempting her into a situation she should have no desire to get herself in.
“I’m good,” she said. “Though I am going to need another shot.” She called that out to Kip. “And you can put both of them on Nolan’s tab.”
Kip laughed. “Anything you say, Lila.”
But that was when she turned her head and saw another ghost from the past.
Darlene.
“What the hell is this? A reunion?”
His gaze followed hers. “Wow,” he said. “We only said her name the one time, it’s not like we said it three times.”
Lila snorted. “Yeah, she does have that kind of undead quality about her.”
The bartender slid a shot toward Lila, and she took it. The fiery liquid going down easily, making her feel warm. It was nice to feel warm from something other than Nolan.
“What are you doing out here?”
Nolan leaned against the bar and turned toward her.
“I don’t know. Just drinking. Am I not allowed to do that?”
“You’re allowed to do whatever you want. You just didn’t mention this earlier.”
“And neither did you.”
“I decided spur of the moment. Figured I’d go see what there was to see.”
That was probably code for hooking up.
Her muscles tightened across the tops of her shoulders, and she felt mean and like she had no right to. Because she had come out to see if she could find a guy to at least make out with. And if Nolan had come out to do the same...
What if it was because of her?
What if it was because he had seen her in her underwear?
No. She wasn’t going to go there. That was foolish and stupid.
And she could still remember him dropping her on the bed, confirmation that no, Nolan did not have any kind of secret yearning for her, no matter how much that deep, girlish, childish part of herself wanted to believe so.
With that burning a hole in her gut, she decided to turn and order another shot, but before she could, Darlene spotted them.
She smiled at Nolan, like she was happy to see him, and slipped their direction, giving Lila a bright smile to match the one she gave him.
“Well, hi,” Darlene said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“There’s really only one bar like this in town,” Lila said, paraphrasing what she had already said to Nolan, but with far less patience.
This woman had about two seconds to do what she needed to do and get on her way or Lila was going to explode all over her.
She was mad at Nolan.