CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Hope wasn’t sure what had just happened, but she didn’t have the energy to examine it at the moment.
“You want something to eat or drink?”
“Newman, I’m okay, really. Stop trying to get me things.”
“I was just being nice.”
“I know you like to help people, and that’s admirable, really,” Hope said, then realized as he sat up that she maybe should have left this discussion inside her head.
“Admirable?”
The word was clipped.
“I mean, there’s no doubting your friends need you and stuff, but you have to stop sometime, surely?”
“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, and if this is your attempt at after-sex talk, it sucks.”
He was getting angry, but Hope had gone this far, she wasn’t going to back away now. Besides, it wasn’t like he wasn’t always hassling her.
“I was just pointing out that you can’t help everyone, and you are needed. So if your helping is a result of your dad’s behavior toward you, you don’t have to do that anymore.” Excellent, Hope. You should have just kept your mouth shut like you usually do. See what happens when you try to be like other people?
“And this is your professional opinion, is it?”
He climbed off the bed, and grabbed his shorts. The man had a hot body, she noted. Every muscle defined, and the really sexy ones that dipped down on both sides of his stomach and disappeared into his shorts were mouthwatering. Broad shouldered, he was a very sexy male, if an angry one.
“Why is it okay for you to dissect my life and insult my clothing choices, and yet you, on the other hand, get offended when I get too personal?”
“I’m not offended,” he snapped, pulling up his T-shirt. “And I don’t know where this crap about my father came from.”
“This is you not being offended, is it?” Hope decided not to dig any deeper into the stuff about his father.
“Look.” He pushed a handful of curls out of his eyes, and they now stood off his head in a halo. Way too cute , Hope thought. “This was nice, and I’m sorry for what I did earlier, without your knowledge, but I really think it will work out… What?”
He added the last word when Hope rose to her knees, taking the sheet with her.
“You slept with me to apologize? You bastard!”
“No. Shit! That came out wrong.”
He was rattled, like she now was. What they’d just shared had rocked him like it had her… at least she hoped it had, because she was seriously unsettled. Hope had had sexual partners, okay, only two, but still, this was off-the-scales by comparison.
“You think.”
He blew out a frustrated breath, and she wondered how they had gone from bliss to this in a matter of minutes.
“Look, just go. You’re probably freaked out because you just had sex with someone who doesn’t know a Prada bag from a grocery sack.”
“That’s insulting.”
“But true.” Hope climbed off the bed. “It’s been a tough day, what with this Jay business and then Mikey’s grandmother. Let’s put this down to momentary insanity and forget it.”
“Can you?”
“What?” Hope looked at him, and refused to acknowledge how hot he looked all mussed and riled.
“Forget what we just shared?”
“Of course,” she lied, turning away so he couldn’t tell. “Just like you do with every notch on your bedpost.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He came at her, so Hope used the only thing she had left in her arsenal… she ran. Reaching the bathroom, she slammed the door in his face and locked it. Luckily, her mother didn’t believe in flimsy, cutesy locks, as she called them. No, this was a bolt, and Hope threw it home.
“Open the door, Hope.”
“No. It’s done, we scratched the itch. Now go away, and we’ll both forget this happened.”
“Just open the door, Hope. Let’s talk about this. I don’t like the insinuation that you’re just another notch on my belt.”
She leaned against the door, and then slid down it as her legs gave way.
“Let’s not pretend I was anything else, Newman. Someone like me could never be anything to someone like you. So just go.”
“I’m not having this conversation through wood,” he said quietly. “But we will have it, Hope.”
She heard the door slam seconds later, and knew she was alone. Turning on the taps in the shower, she stood under the water and let the tears flow.
“Stay,” Newman said, holding his cards up so Buster couldn’t read them. He then picked up his beer and downed half a bottle. He couldn’t get the memory of Hope out of his head. They’d had sex three weeks ago. Hot, and extremely pleasurable sex. Why couldn’t he move on? Even the beers he was downing like water weren’t helping. They were just making him meaner.
Since that day in Hope’s bedroom, they’d pretty much avoided each other. On Newman’s part, that was because he’d had no idea how to deal with whatever the hell this was between them. She tied him in knots, there was no other way to describe it. She wasn’t like other women, and didn’t fall into the Paul Newman handbook of how a woman worked. He just couldn’t get a good read on her, and that really bugged him.
“That’s your sixth.”
“What?” Newman looked at Jake, who wore his hat pulled low over his eyes.
“That beer is number six. You usually only have four.”
“I have more than four!”
“Nope,” Tex said. He had a Texan bandana around his head. The man never missed an opportunity to show his true colors. “We get drunk, you stay sober, them’s the rules, bud.”
“Who made those rules!” Newman felt his anger rising.
“No one, it’s just always been that way, no matter how many times we’ve tried to get you drunk.”
“True that.” Buster raised his bottle. Newman couldn’t see his eyes because he wore dark glasses.
“You gonna play a card, pencil dick, or wax on about nothing,” Cubby said peering through one eye. The other he’d closed so he could concentrate. He’d had more than six beers. His sheriff’s cap was on backward, which declared he was off duty.
“You’re an officer of the law.” Newman glared at him. “You should be the one to drink less.”
The eye turned his way.
“Give me a break, I look after you wieners every day.”
“It’s your thing, Newman. No one means anything by it,” Patrick McBride said from the kitchen. He wore the faded pink cap that his children had once given him, as he had every poker night for the many years they’d been having them. He and Declan were cooking hot dogs.
“Even I know that, bud, and I haven’t been here all that long.”
Newman looked at Brad, who was squinting at the cards in his hand.
They’d been playing for several hours, and for once it was Jake who was winning.
“She said that.”
“Who?”
“Hope.”
“What’d she say?” Tex asked.
“I have to be in control all the time. Which is BS. Plus, she said I need to help people or some shit.”
Silence settled around the table, and his friends all tried to look busy. Not easy, when they were holding cards and sitting still. Beers were lifted, and chips crunched. No one looked at him.
“Whose turn is it, for fuck’s sake?” Tex said, sounding desperate.
“Yours, you loser,” Jake replied.
“Damn sad about Mikey’s grandmother,” Brad said. “Nearly broke my heart seeing him crying like that. Gonna be tough for those boys.”
“We’ll get him and Connor through,” Declan said from his kitchen.
“Are you all really ignoring what I said?” Newman stood and slapped his hands on the table. “Because I didn’t think that was how this friendship stuff worked?”
He was feeling unreasonable, a rarity for him. Newman was usually everything that was reasonable. He could be mean, even intimidating when the moment called for it, but he was rarely unreasonable.
“What’s the problem here, pretty boy?” Buster said, lowering his glasses to look at Newman over the top. “You want us to tell you you’re a control freak who has a really decent side to him, because he’s the first man we go to when we want help?”
“Couldn’t have worded it better.” Jake raised his bottle.
“I’m not a control freak.” Newman took the bottle Tex had placed before his brother, and drank. “I like order, nothing wrong with that.”
“You are not serious?” Cubby looked at him. “You don’t even walk out your door without a diary note telling you where you’re going.”
This produced howls of laughter.
“I thought I was relaxed?”
The anger had gone as quick as it had come. They were his friends, and he had no right to be angry, even if he disagreed with them.
“You appear relaxed,” Tex said. “All that running about at night, and loping through town like you have all the time in the world. But you never really go anywhere without a purpose, Newman.”
They knew him better than he knew himself. It was a humbling thought.
“She said I help people to feel needed.” He said the words before giving them too much thought, and realized this mistake when he saw the knowing looks around the table. Maybe he should have stopped at four beers; the seventh was loosening his tongue.
“Who?”
“We’re not really playing that game, are we, Cub? I mean, not after Tex saw him kissing her in the Roar,” Buster said.
“She says it’s a throwback to my childhood.”
“Is it?” Jake asked gently.
Newman shrugged. “Maybe.”
“So you gonna stop doing shit for us now? ’Cause that’ll probably break my heart,” Buster said. “I was going to ask you to run the shop next Tuesday.”
They were all laughing seconds later.
“Issues,” Brad said. “We all got them. The hell is ironing them out so you get to be some semblance of normal.”
They all lifted their bottles to that piece of wisdom from the youngest among them, and then the hot dogs arrived and everything else was shelved… for now.