I hung up with the restaurant and picked up my landline phone again to dial Lola’s number.
Turns out old habits die hard and all that, and since the moment I’d stopped texting Lola about her needing a rescue, I’d completely lost track of what I’d done with my cell phone. I also didn’t really understand all the fancy “smart” things about it and had instead used my old system for locating the number for Marlowe’s—a menu, buried under a stack of other menus, in my junk drawer.
Considering that I was way better with words than numbers, it surprised me how well I’d remembered her number. I guess mooning over it for the first couple of nights after I’d entered it into my contacts and talking myself out of using it all the time had paid off.
Who am I? This is pathetic.
“Hello?” she greeted between the first and second ring, and just like that, I forgot all about questioning why Lola made me feel the way she did and how much I couldn’t understand it. Instead, I laughed, a picture of her face conjuring perfectly in my mind.
“Phone was in your hand, huh?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” she confirmed.
“It’s that bad there?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice dropped in volume and changed tones—this one consoling. “I completely understand.”
“There’s an emergency here. And according to the restaurant, it’ll be ready to come to a head in about twenty minutes.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, feigning shock. “Are you sure you can wait that long?” she asked in a near panic. Chuckles rolled continuously like waves in my chest.
“I’ll leave now,” I offered.
“But I’m here with my friends—”
I understood immediately what she was getting at, and my chest puffed out in confidence. There was nothing I could handle better than distracting a group of people from an awkward encounter by making it even more ridiculous. I reminded her of the same. “Don’t you worry, LoLo. This is your best friend Reed you’re talking to.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
“Looking forward to it,” I told her honestly, and she hesitated.
I waited, and it was worth it when her response finally came. “Me too.”
My hand paused before leaving the receiver as I hung up the phone. She hadn’t argued with me or herself about our friendship status.
Maybe it’s just because her friends are there?
I shook my head to clear the questions and moved—into my room to grab a pair of socks, to the chair at my desk to swing on my jacket, and over to the door to pull on my boots and grab my keys and wallet.
It was a short walk down the block to my old Toyota Corolla that I never used—I preferred walking and public transportation on a daily basis because of the entertainment value they provided—and thankfully, it started up on the first crank—something it didn’t always do.
I actually knew quite a bit about cars. A little pang of a memory sounded in my chest—rebuilding the engine to my dad’s 1967 GTO with my friend Brandon while our other friends were at parties in college. We’d had our share of beer while we were doing it, but I wasn’t about getting wild. And neither was he. We didn’t fit. We didn’t conform.
At least, not until graduation. As my dad liked to put it, Brandon had matured. He had a steady job and a steady family, and I hadn’t talked to him in three years.
I wonder what he’s up to?
But tonight wasn’t the time to employ my mechanical skills, and it wasn’t the time to get lost in old memories.
I had a woman waiting on me, one whose friendship was still alive and growing.
Lola’s group wasn’t hard to find when I got there—it was the rowdiest table in the place. Three men hovered over the seated women, flirting and inserting themselves into their night mostly seamlessly. But there was one flaw in the stitch, a tiny thread popping when it should have laid flat: Lola.
In a half-seated, half-crouching tiger, she had her right leg hooked back at an awkward angle, and her toe dug into the floor. She looked like she was ready to bolt.
I hadn’t personally met Jen or Abby yet, but Lola had spent part of our time in Golden Gate Park earlier that day telling me about them. Perky. Pseudonormal. Intelligent, talented, and pointedly organized. The way she talked about them made them seem like one person most of the time, but I knew they had to have some differences once you skimmed below the surface. I already knew enough about Simone not to bother.
“Lola!” I called as I approached the table casually, hoping to give her tense muscles some reprieve.
“Oh, my God!” she yelled—and I do mean yelled—as she jumped up to standing. Her cute little pumps made her legs look six miles long, and the short hem of her T-shirt dress didn’t hurt either. It floated just below the curve of her ass. “Reed! I’m so sorry about your sister’s…uh…cat…uh…Mr. Sprinkles’s death,” she mumbled, picking up her bag from the table and clutching it under her arm so she could be ready to run.
I laughed outright as I stopped in front of her. “It’s terrible, huh? Poor Mr. Sprinkles taken way before his time. I felt like I barely got the chance to get to know him.”
“Who’s this?” a guy in a suit standing right next to her interrupted before she even had time to laugh. I leveled him with a look. One I rarely employed and personally hated, but conveyed my point all the same. Step away from the woman.
“Her mortal enemy,” Jen said through a laugh at the same time I said, “Her boyfriend.”
Jen looked confused, and she wasn’t the only one. The eyebrows of the guy standing closest to Lola pulled together. “I thought you were a lesbian.”
A smile tugged one side of my mouth higher than the other as I slipped her hand in mine and did what I do best—lied.
I also couldn’t deny the surge of satisfaction I felt knowing that Lola had told these guys she batted for the other team. I had no claims to her, but it didn’t change the fact that I wanted her to give me those claims.
I sure as fuck didn’t want to focus my attention on anyone else but her.
Lola tumbled closer to me as I gave her hand a yank, but she didn’t put up a fight. I was her only lifeline, and getting out of here was way more important than a million dollars. “She was. I’ve always had a crush on her because…” I paused and gestured in a way that said, “Look at her, right?”
The guy smiled his agreement, uneasy and pissed off to be cockblocked as it was. He’d noticed the way she looked. In fact, it was the only thing he’d bothered to notice, and quite frankly, that pissed me off on Lola’s behalf.
“Well, years and years of watching her go through girlfriend after girlfriend, and she finally tried out some heterosexual porn one night when she was looking to get off.”
One of the guys’ hands went to his crotch in an effort to conceal his reaction, and I smiled bigger.
“Usually, she just got together with Jen, and they helped each other out. Right, honey?”
Lola nodded but never opened her mouth. Her eyes were wide with the effort to keep all of her hysteria inside. Jen, not knowing the joy of my friendship, didn’t engage in the same compliance.
“Uh, I don’t—” Jen started, but I cut her off.
“So she’s masturbating to guy-on-girl action, stroke for stroke, and bam! It’s like it all clicks. She’s not into chicks, after all. It’s the dicks.”
Guy One’s and Guy Two’s eyes had glazed over by this point, but Guy Three, the one closest to my Lola, still had some synapses firing outside of the head of his dick. “But she told me she was a lesbian tonight.”
I nodded as though that was completely expected. “Selective amnesia. Sometimes she forgets, but I just take her home and fuck her to remind her, you know?”
“Yeah…” he muttered, still confused. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with his proximity to my woman—let’s face it, she is—but I had to give him a little credit. He was obviously the best prospect of the three, choosing Lola as his target in the first place, and he didn’t let his baser instincts distract him to the point of becoming a robot.
Still, fuck him.
“That’s actually where we’re headed now.” I turned to Lola. “Ready, honey?”
She bit her lip and turned back to Jen and Abby. She didn’t even bother to include Simone, and somewhere deep inside, I smiled. I never understood the compulsion to pretend to be friends with someone you hated.
Oh, shit. A thought struck me like lightning. Maybe that’s what I’d forced her into with me.
It wasn’t like me not to consider both sides. But I’d been so fucking drawn to her.
I considered her closely as she leaned into me, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “Sorry, guys. I gotta go.”
No. She likes me. She has to.
“Lola! You’re leaving with him?” Abby questioned disbelievingly.
“Yeah.” She glanced at me before turning back to Jen and leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. The crotch-coverer groaned. “I am. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
Jen’s eyes were like lasers as she pointed her order. “You better call me tomorrow, Lola Sexton.”
“Oh, shit. Lola Sexton, like the columnist for the San Francisco Times?” the half-chub asked.
Shit. Time to abort. A little like a piece of gum on a cracked chair, the lies weren’t going to hold much longer.
“Let’s roll,” I told her, but she was already moving, dragging me along behind her.
“Through the bar,” I ordered. She immediately rerouted to comply.
Our food was already sitting there waiting, thanks to my buddy Freddy behind the bar. I swiped the bags while still in motion and lifted my free hand in a wave.
“Just put it on my tab, okay, Fred?” I asked, and Freddy answered from the other end of the bar with a salute.
Lola looked back over her shoulder with a laugh. “You come here a lot?”
“I told you they have good burgers and fries.”
Truth was, I knew people all over this city. Connections, acquaintances, people who owed me favors. Freddy was just the beginning.
I walked her out the door with a hand to her back and straight to a Mercedes at the curb. She turned surprised eyes in my direction and grabbed the handle on the door.
“A Mercedes?” she asked as I watched the door open without incident. I raised my eyebrows and bit my lip as she climbed inside and got settled.
As soon as she was in, I rounded the car, looked both ways and then crossed the street to my Corolla at the other curb. She’d been looking at her lap, but when she looked up and found me missing, the crazy way she jerked back and forth looking for me cracked me up.
Finally, she spotted me climbing into the driver’s seat of my car and scrambled for the door handle of whoever’s car she was in.
All she did was struggle for the first several seconds, floundering like a fish on land—an island it’d never been to, at that. When she finally found it and engaged the handle, she jumped out way faster than she’d climbed in.
I rolled down my window as she crossed the street.
Straight to my door, she moved at a jog and punched me right in the arm when she got there.
“Ow,” I said with a laugh, but secretly just happy it hadn’t been the jaw. “What was that for?”
“I hate you!” she yelled, but that didn’t stop her from rounding the car and climbing into the passenger side.
“How could you let me do that?” she railed. “I could have gotten arrested! What if the owner had come out and found me in their car?”
“Relax,” I consoled, still laughing. She, however, wasn’t entertained by my amusement. I reached over to rub her thigh, and she jerked away.
“Oh, come on. It wasn’t a big deal, and I didn’t say anything. You just assumed.”
Her head shot to the side, the glow from the restaurant creating a scar of light all the way from her eyebrow to the bottom of her cheek. “Because that’s where you led me!”
“I was headed this direction, across the street,” I explained.
“Well, you didn’t stop me.”
“That’s because it was funny,” I admitted, cranking the key and the car to life.
“I really hate you,” she said again, but there was no fire in her voice. Only a soft, sweet swell of affection.
I stopped what I was doing and leaned over to touch my lips to hers. She let me.
“You really don’t,” I whispered there, and the moist tip of her tongue traced along the flesh under my own.
“Ugh,” she huffed, realizing belatedly what she was doing, pushing me away and forcing her eyes open. “Just drive.”
“Your wish” —I told her honest, unguarded eyes— “is my command.”
I sat on my desk chair and smoked as Lola paced the room barefoot, grabbing a fry every time she passed the container. We’d already consumed our burgers, and apparently, having been fueled by the food, the entire evening was finally coming to a head in her mind.
“I mean, what is that?” she ranted. “Why the fuck do women do that? Why do they have to be someone else when they’re trying to impress a guy? Like, I’m just not getting it.”
I smiled, and she pointed at me angrily. “Don’t you smile at me.”
“What?” I asked with a laugh before taking another drag. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Bullshit. You’re the one who filled my head with all of this crap. Now I can’t let it go!”
Apparently, my words and perspective were doing the impossible inside her brilliant mind: making sense. I had to admit, I got a certain amount of sick satisfaction out of watching her mentally, and quite physically, battle herself over agreeing with me—Reed Luca, the devil himself—about anything.
Bringing the cigarette to my lips, I took a pull and winked before blowing the smoke in her direction. “You’re welcome.”
She lunged. I hadn’t been prepared, content to watch her pace my living room until the end of time—as it seemed she would use all of that time—but I found a way to get there quick.
Attack was her intention, but I caught her by the chin an inch from my face and held her there until her eyes met mine.
She trembled, and it all started to make sense. Lola’s anger was only a front for emotion, for arousal, and for a whole hell of a lot of agreement with me in every goddamn way possible.
She wanted me, and I always wanted her.
Neither of us needed any more foreplay. We needed connection. And we needed it fast.
“You need a release, huh, LoLo?” I asked on a whisper.
My fingertips flexed on her jaw while she took a minute to consider all of the options. Give me what I want, and get what she so obviously needed? Or run from everything because she couldn’t stand the idea of needing it at all?
It didn’t take long, just one simple reminder squeeze from my fingers at her jaw, and she nodded.
“What do you need?” I asked softly. Her eyes closed and her head tipped back, opening her throat further. I moved my lips to her ear. “What do you need?” I repeated, skimming the skin with more than my breath.
Her nerves made the column of her throat flutter.
My hand slid down her throat to the base, spanning the very top of her chest, and her eyes came back to mine. “You need a smoke?” I asked, and she shook her head.
My hand flexed at the bottom of her throat, squeezing slightly as I brought the cigarette to my lips one final time.
Dropping the butt in the ashtray to my right, I asked her again. “What do you need?”
The tip of her tongue rounded the rim of her lips and left them wet in its wake, but an answer still didn’t come.
“You gotta tell me,” I told her, knowing that I wasn’t just speaking for her. I was actually buzzing inside, coming apart from the inside out with the need to know how to please her.
She leaned forward and raised the volume on the already playing music on my laptop. “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails was just starting. My pulse sped up to throb in time with each beat.
Pushing back to standing, Lola had the same idea but on a grander scale, moving her body to the music and removing one piece of clothing at a time. Transfixed, I didn’t move from the chair—couldn’t. I was a captive of her movement, a prisoner of her provocation, just watching as she littered the floor of my living room with article after article until there were one hundred percent more clothes on the floor than her body.
My own body awakened at the sight and the feel of the moment. It wasn’t just watching her, and it wasn’t just skin. Lola’s eyes looked harder, and her breath came and went in bigger gulps. There was a cloud around us, powerful and noxious, something we made by looking into each other’s eyes and seeing more than the color.
Slowly, so fucking slowly it hurt, she sucked her middle finger all the way into her mouth and back out again. Down, down, down her body, she left a trail of moisture until it met her clit. A pause. And then one perfect strum.
I had to force myself back into the chair.
“Me or you, Lo?” I asked, and she moaned, playing with herself.
Oh, fuck.
My ass left the chair, and she noticed. Her eyes met mine with a shake.
“Uh-uh-uh. Sit back down.”
Difficult as it was physically, I did as ordered. Because this moment was bigger than anything I could conjure in my mind and bigger than Lola realized in her own.
Her body went back to dancing, her eyes went back into her head, and her hand went back to her clit. Each movement was deliberate and measured and close to snapping my control.
I slapped at the desk blindly, searching for my pack of cigarettes—because, holy fuck, I need another one.
One hand played with her nipple while the other shoved a finger inside, and I wanted to die. Die because I was in heaven, and I was in hell, and Lola was the sexiest, most erotically confident creature I’d ever encountered in my whole entire life.
Sweet Jesus.
She built the pace as the song climbed and moved her breast-fondling hand down to her clit. In and out, in and out, strum, strum, strum.
I was literally going to come in my goddamn pants.
She gasped once, twice, and the song demanded she get there, forced the issue, building and building and then holding it there until I thought I’d lose my goddamn mind.
All at once, the tempo dropped from the top of the cliff, and she went too in one big rush, moaning and crying out with an intensity that made me snap the cigarette in my hand right in two.
The hot ash end fell right in my lap. “Shit, shit! Fuck!”
Unbothered by me and my jumping hysteria, she slid her hands to her throat as she breathed and rode from one end of her climactic wave to the other.
I put out the burning end and stared. She was magnificence in one tiny, confident package. Something deep in my chest ached to tether itself to her and this moment.
Her head came forward, and her eyes came to mine—and then she stalked me.
I couldn’t do anything more than sit there as she leaned into my body and put her lips to mine. Not deep, not inviting—just a teasing touch.
“That,” she declared as she pulled back, smug satisfaction written in every line of her face. “Was a sexual act just because I felt like it.”
My head jerked.
“Sex can be just sex.”
She found solace in her decree, but all I found were lies. Lies to cover all of the things she was actually feeling, and lies to make herself feel validated again. Lies to find truth in all of the things she spent her time telling the people who read her column. Lies to find truth in all the discrediting things about our relationship she was telling herself.
My eyes narrowed as she backed away and picked up her clothes, donning them in order.
When I finally got my voice back, she was at the door.
“You’re wrong,” I told her, my voice steady as a steel beam.
She turned, one eyebrow raised in question.
“That was our most emotional experience yet.”
“It wasn’t,” she protested easily, turning the knob, but I crossed the room quickly and stopped her with a hand on the door and my chest at her back.
Lips to her ear, I said everything she already knew. “It was.” It was trust and intimacy, and it was both of those things on a level most people are never blessed enough to comprehend. “And, Lo?”
She turned only slightly to look me in the eye.
“It’s just the fucking beginning.”