“Hey,” she said, twisting in her seat when I shut the door. Aw, hell. She was wearing glasses. I hadn’t seen her in glasses since she was thirteen, but these weren’t the chunky, thick-lensed sort she had back then. “I saw some cold cuts in the fridge. I thought we could make sandwiches for dinner…” She tipped her head to the side and blinked as I fought to focus on what she was saying once I’d realized she was talking. “Unless you’ve already got plans. I’m sorry, I didn’t even think—”
“No,” I blurted, cutting her off. “No plans. Except you. Tonight.” Fuck. What was wrong with my brain? She was just so damned cute. White shorts and black tank, barefoot, thin blue-framed glasses outlining her dark eyes, hair pinned up but trying its best to escape—and holy shit I wanted to take it down. She was wide-eyed and watching me like I’d lost my ever-lovin’ mind.
“Sandwiches. Good.” I pointed across the living room. “Gotta shower.”
I turned, stalked straight into the bathroom, and shut the door. Hands gripping the edge of the sink, I stared into the mirror and took a breath. Ten weeks and she’d be back in Austin. She’d come to me because she had no one else to turn to. I wasn’t gonna try to turn that into something it wasn’t. We were friends. Like Maxfield and me.
I laughed and turned on the water. Yeah, no. Not at all like Maxfield.
Those glasses though. Fuck me.
I took a hot shower and rubbed one out to take the edge off. If I’d been imagining some other girl on her knees, water plastering her hair to her back and streaming over her face and tits while her small hands grabbed my thighs and her mouth worked me over, it might have succeeded. Instead, I turned off the water, and the itch to walk out there butt-naked, pick her up, and take her straight to my bed was even worse.
“Goddammit. How is that even possible? Hell.” I held the towel over my face, mumbling to myself like I was fucking mental.
I dried off and realized I’d come straight into the bathroom with no clean clothes. Even with the south door to the garage open all day, it was June—hot and sticky all day long. No way I was putting that sweaty shit I’d been wearing pre-shower back on, and this towel was just big enough to cover my ass and my nuts. Barely.
I swiped the dirty clothes off the floor and opened the door, steam billowing out behind me like smoke rolling from the doorway of any bar in town on a Friday night. That was the answer, right there. I needed to go out and do a little flirting, a little drinking—go out and get my ass laid.
Halfway across the living room, I looked up to see Pearl standing by the table, holding two plates piled with ham sandwiches. She’d cleared a place where I’d sat the only other time we’d eaten together, and the spot next to it. My stomach roared in appreciation, and I focused on that gnawing hunger instead of the one prowling around a bit lower.
“I’ll be right out,” I said, glancing at her face as I passed and realizing that she wasn’t looking at mine. She was staring at my usually covered-up parts. Hell, yes, baby—look your fill. Every muscle in my body flexed instinctively, each one challenging the rest for her attention.
The plates clattered to the table and she tore her eyes away from my bare torso. “Uh, okay. Sure. I’ll just be… here.” She cleared her throat, hands fluttering to pick up the few potato chips that had bounced off the plates when they’d come in for that rough landing. I didn’t get much time to gloat, because damn if she didn’t lean across the table to slide one of those plates to my spot, and damn if I didn’t apparently have a new favorite fantasy that wasn’t so different from the original.
Except this time she was wearing those glasses.
I slammed my bedroom door way too hard, stomped to my dresser, and ripped the drawer halfway out. Tossing clothes onto the bed, I set myself to breathing just like I did when I weight-trained to failure to surpass a lifting rut: Focused. On. The. Goal.
What the fuck is the goal?
I thought about her flustered face of five minutes ago. Pearl wasn’t an innocent little high school girl anymore. She was a woman, and women had needs. I’d filled a sizeable amount of those sorts of needs since I was fourteen. Truth be told, I probably hadn’t filled any but my own for the first few years, but I sure as hell knew how to fill them now.
I’d met her ex. No way that dickweed satisfied her regularly, if ever, but she’d spent four years in college after I’d obliged her with eliminating her virginity. My teeth clenched at the mental image of her with the sorts of college guys who came here during spring break and over summer vacation. Ninety-five percent of them were varying degrees of pretty-faced, muscled, rich, arrogant fuckers, and that was being generous. There were some, like Maxfield, who were honest about what they wanted—going after girls who wanted the same. As much as I hated the thought, I hoped she’d found a few guys like that instead of one after the other who’d be all smooth-talking and attentive just long enough to get into her cute little shorts.
Not helping.
If I didn’t have to stick my face in the freezer multiple times a day for the next ten weeks, it would be a damned miracle.
Pearl
When Boyce exited the bathroom and sauntered through the living room and past the kitchen, I stood there staring like I’d never seen a guy in a towel. A towel that could win a prize for being the smallest bath towel ever made.
The question I’d been about to ask—something about whether mayonnaise or mustard or what he wanted to drink—melted into a mushy puddle at the bottom of my brain. My last comprehensible thought was, Holy mother of God. Eyes on the floor and unaware of my ogling, he rubbed his short hair dry with a hand towel. Every rock-solid muscle of his right arm, shoulder, and pec expanded and contracted with the effort, forming shifting arcs and sharp lines that rearranged the landscape under those familiar freckles and the droplets he’d not yet toweled away.
An Internet search for unfair could include a GIF of him in that moment and a link to a biological explanation of the riot that occurred inside my body and the mental chaos it triggered. I couldn’t speak or move or form a single judicious plan to make it stop. As he drew closer, my traitorous mind projected a full-fledged fantasy behind my eyes.
Without pausing or stopping or asking permission, he would turn and walk straight to where I stood gaping and take the plates from my hands. “We’ll eat this later,” he’d say, placing the food on the table. Sweeping me into his arms, he would walk to his room and drop me on his bed, where my clothes would obligingly slide away with a few strategic pulls of his fingers. He would yank the damp towel from his hips in one movement and thrust into me in the next, his mouth seizing mine in a searing kiss—lips enveloping, tongue plunging inside, stroking deep and hard—
“I’ll be right out,” he said, snapping me from the spell I’d fallen under. I dropped the plates to the tabletop, scattering chips everywhere like a total goofball. Gathering them, I refused to meet his eyes, certain he would see every pathetic craving I’d nurtured since I was too young to know what those cravings meant.
Minutes later, he emerged from his bedroom clothed in shorts and a white T-shirt, and I crunched one chip after another and pretended to read.
Slathering a layer of mayo on his sandwich, he said, “Thanks for making supper,” his voice uncharacteristically soft. The gentle pitch poured over me, warm and hypnotic.
I forced my lips into a relaxed smile and risked a quick glance up. “Thanks for providing the ingredients.” Hoping he couldn’t read my mind, which was threatening to resume my erotic fantasy in slow motion, I stared back at the page and highlighted a random line, unsure what it even said.
“Yep,” he said, carrying his plate to the living room and turning the television on, volume low.
Eventually, the words on the page in front of me organized themselves back into intelligible details and data charts, and my rational thought processes returned.
“Sure you won’t take the bed?” Boyce said, breaking my concentration. The television was off and a glance out
the window showed it had grown full dark. My laptop time read 10:21 p.m. “I feel like an asshole handing you sheets for the sofa.”
My neck popped as I stretched for the first time in two hours. I took the sheets from him and stood. “I would feel like an asshole bumping the person who’s sharing his home with me out of his own bed. I’ll be fine.”
He stared down at me. “You sure you’re fine?” he said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about the sofa.
I nodded, my throat too full for words to escape. I’d stopped checking my phone an hour ago. This was real. I was on my own. When I’d first left home for college, it had taken some adjustment being away from Mama, away from my home, Mel, high school classes, everything and everyone familiar—including Boyce Wynn. Unlike my dorm suitemates, I’d gone home for the weekend three times before Thanksgiving break. My classmates seemed so much older and more experienced, so ready to be all grown-up. I just wanted to go home. My third trip home, I’d laid my head in Mama’s lap and told her I didn’t want to go back. I knew what she’d say and knew she’d be right, even if I didn’t want to hear it.
“You don’t mean that, mija,” she’d said, stroking my hair off my face. “You’re a little younger than everyone else. That’s all it is. I’m here whenever you need me, but you don’t want to miss this opportunity. Take that brain of yours and go do what you’re meant to do.”
She was right that time, and by second semester, I’d acclimated.
This time she was wrong.
• • • • • • • • • •
Sleeping on that lumpy sofa was one step above sleeping on the floor, and my discomfort was exacerbated by nightly dreams about my roommate. I prayed to God I didn’t talk in my sleep.
I fell into Boyce’s daily routine, not having much choice since my location on the sofa put me smack in the middle of it. He woke early every day and went out the door in shorts and sneakers. I’d feigned sleep as he crossed the dark living room, but quick window checks the past two days told me he was going into the garage. An hour later, he’d come inside to shower, change into jeans and steel-toed boots, make coffee, and wolf down a breakfast that would have hit my maximum daily calories in one go.
I joined him at the table this morning after pouring a cup of coffee into one of a dozen mugs imprinted with fishing wisdom. This one read “A bad day FISHIN’ is better’n a good day WORKIN’!”
Still groggy, I nibbled a piece of toast. “Do you work for an hour and then eat breakfast?”
“Not working. Lifting. Got a bench, barbell, a few plates, and some dumbbells out there. It’s the best time to work it in. Too tired by the end of the day.” He shoveled another bite of eggs and sausage into his mouth and flipped through a stack of paperwork. His hair was still damp.
“Hmm,” I said, staring into my coffee as if my imagination hadn’t just lit up like the bioluminescent phytoplankton that sometimes invaded the gulf during fall and winter nights.
I started guiltily when someone knocked on the front door.
Boyce frowned, backing his chair away from the table. It wasn’t even eight a.m. “You expecting anybody?”
I shook my head, and he stalked to the door and jerked it open, blocking the doorway. His shoulders lowered and he exchanged a subdued sentence or two with the person on the other side. He nodded and shut the door partway before crossing back to me.
Mama, I thought.
“It’s Dr. Frank,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk to him—”
“No. I’ll talk to him.” I braced myself before going to the door, but seeing the concerned face of the only father I’d ever known splintered my resolve. “Hi, Thomas.” I swallowed and blinked at the burn in my eyes.
He opened his arms and I stepped into him. “You okay, little girl?”
I huffed a tearful laugh. Little girl. “Yeah.”
After a moment, he patted my shoulder and we separated. “Listen, I know your mama put her foot down. But I bought you that car, and I have a foot too.” He gestured toward the drive, where my little red GTI sat. I almost ran outside to hug it.
If this was their idea of manipulation, it was downright cruel. After three days without it, I missed my car. Having transportation would make my life a hundred times easier, but that didn’t mean I was caving. “I’m not changing my mind. I’ve made my decision.”
“I see that, honey, and I’m not asking you to.” He scratched his chin, clear blue eyes inspecting me closely. “But can I at least ask how much this decision has to do with that boy?” He nodded toward the interior of the trailer. “Or the other one?”
They’d known nothing of my relationship with Boyce, and what they knew of my ex was that our parting was unpleasant but I’d gotten over it quickly. “Nothing. My breakup with Mitchell wouldn’t scare me away from something I wanted to do, and Boyce has only ever encouraged me to do what I want to do.”
“I see. And your decision reflects a desire to be a marine biologist, not just a desire to not study medicine? Because there are other alternatives—”
“It’s what I want to do, Thomas. And medicine isn’t. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me.” He chuckled. “I’m not that easily insulted.”
“Mama’s still angry though.” I wanted him to contradict me but knew he wouldn’t.
“She can be a bit… obstinate.” He arched a brow that said she and I were two peas in a pod. “But it’ll work out.” He took my hand and pressed my key ring into it. I couldn’t help noticing that my house key was on it as well. “I’ve got a few postsurgical appointments this morning. If I could hitch a ride to my office, I’d appreciate it.”
Throwing my arms around his neck, I whispered, “Thank you. Let me get dressed—I’ll be out in ten minutes.”
When I got outside, he and Boyce were standing at the mouth of the garage, hands in pockets, talking. Looking my way, Boyce angled his head in a single nod and disappeared inside the garage.
As I pulled into the street, Thomas said, “I take it you and Boyce Wynn are… closer than your mother and I knew?”
I nodded, my face warming at the type of connection I was allowing him to imagine between us, but I wasn’t in the mood to make excuses about where I was sleeping. Or not sleeping.
chapter
Sixteen
Boyce
“Dude, your girlfriend is hot.”
That wasn’t something I’d ever expected to hear from a female employee—if I’d ever contemplated the idea of a female employee. If I had contemplated it, let’s just say she wouldn’t have been anything like the girl watching my roommate of seventy-two hours climb the steps to the front door.
Pearl had pulled up five minutes ago and parked her little import on the gravel drive next to my TA. She’d grabbed her backpack from the backseat and waved a hand as she crossed the yard, glancing back at Sam before turning toward the trailer. We hadn’t discussed my employee, and this was the first day she’d arrived home before Sam’s dad arrived to pick her up.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“What’re ya—blind?”
“I was.”
I said no more, hoping Sam would return to tightening lug nuts with that torque wrench. We’d wasted five minutes bickering about why she couldn’t use the pneumatic wrench to do it. (Because you need to learn how to tighten them using exact measurements first—by hand, I’d said. But the pneumatic is faster, she’d whined.) I finally stopped arguing with her and just stared until she started applying some elbow grease.
“Well, that’s cryptic¸” she said, arching one blond brow.
“My roommate is not up for discussion. Neither—as I’ve already made plain—is my sex life.”
“Or lack thereof.”
“Shut it.” Man. Silva must be laughing his ass off over pawning this kid off on me. “Tell me what you do if the threads are oiled instead of dry.”
She rolled her eyes so hard her head followed the movement. “Reduce the t
orque.”
“Good, genius. By how much?”
“Um, fifty percent.”
I laughed and she scowled. “Not unless you want this guy to lose his wheels heading down the highway and come back to cuss you straight into the gulf, if he comes back at all.”
“Hey, y’all need something to drink?”
Sam and I both turned toward Pearl’s voice. She was holding two cans of Pepsi.
“Thanks!” Sam said, smiling. The hell? With that blond hair poking in every direction, her face looked like a happy cartoon sun. I hadn’t known she could be happy. “I’m Sam, by the way.” Or friendly.
Pearl handed each of us a can and smiled back at Sam. “I’m Pearl. So Sam—you’re Wynn’s new employee?”
“Provisional employee,” I said, popping the top. “She’s got one more day to prove herself. I’m still on the fence.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot toward each other like magnets and her mouth tightened into a knot. If she’d had laser vision, I’d have been sliced up one side and down the other. Leaning halfway out of her chair, she plunked the can on the concrete and put all her effort behind that torque wrench, fighting to keep from smarting off to me in front of Pearl.
Pearl caught my eye with a tiny shame on you shake of her head and that damned smirk I’d do almost anything to set off.
I tipped the can back with a quick wink, taking a long swallow to hide my grin from Sam.
• • • • • • • • • •
In clearing out Dad’s room, I’d discovered things I’d forgotten he had and things I’d been unaware he had. Time-pressed to empty the room, I’d tossed anything worthy of keeping into a box I put aside for later inspection. Between Pearl moving in and Sam showing up, I’d forgotten about the box and my appointment with Mr. Amos until it popped up on my phone’s reminders.