One Plate of Fries
Dixie entered the only place in this town she missed, Pat’s Pub. She took a seat in her favorite booth and ordered a plate of fries and an iced tea. She stopped ordering cola after high school when she started taking an interest in her future. If she wanted out of this town, she was going to have to work for it. Parker taught her that much. It didn’t matter how much money a person made, if they were trapped, they were trapped, and she had been stuck for too long.
The ten year reunion was the only reason she was back. She graduated from a different school and a year later, but her uncle Bob worked for the prestigious academy Parker attended. Bob was one of the few men she grew up around that could hold a job and support his family. She envied her cousins for that. Bob was also a really generous guy, so Dixie was always welcome. When she called last month to check in on him, he told her about the preparations at the school to host the reunion.
It was a chance she was willing to take. If she could only see Parker one more time, she would… tell him to get on social media, something. She honestly didn’t know what she was going to tell him; just that knowing he could be at that reunion had made it worth the trip to get a chance to say…anything. It would be worth enduring all of the other potential people she could run into.
Her anxiety about this whole plan was at an all-time high. She had barely bitten into the first warm fry when he slid into the booth across from her.
“I can’t believe you’re here.” He was genuinely happy to see her and his smile set off a powder keg of sparks throughout her body. Before she could say hi, he was already talking again. “I just got into town. I was hoping I would run into you, but I didn’t know…then I was passing the pub and thought…Dixie, I…I’m just so glad to see you.”
Instead of being cool and casual about it, she was flustered and wound up. “Get a social media account for crying out loud.”
He leaned back against the booth, a bit stunned. “No.”
“What? Why?” She never understood why he was so damn secretive about his life. All of it.
“I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of a bunch of people I had to tolerate when I was growing up having a front row seat to my life. I don’t want online friends. I don’t want to see holiday pictures of people I don’t know or worse, don’t like. If I’m not on the list to get a card, then we aren’t friends.” He reached for a fry and she pulled the plate away from him. “What?”
“I don’t get a card. In fact, after your junior year of college, I didn’t even get a number.” She was really mad at him for that.
He leaned in and pulled the plate to the center of the table before picking up a fry and popping it in his mouth. Parker from high school, hell Parker from her twenty-first birthday, would have cowered, blushed, and apologized. It was both startling and a major turn on. Of course, Parker had always turned her on.
The waitress stopped by and he ordered an iced tea. Dixie tilted her head and assessed the man before her. He had more hair on his head. It was no longer cut to the standards of the private school and probably the habit of that haircut his first years away. He was in a hoodie and jeans unlike the khakis and button downs she was more familiar with. Even the last time she saw him, he was still a little more like the boy she knew than the man sitting in front of her. Impatient she asked, “Well?”
“You moved and you didn’t send me a forwarding address. Mine isn’t the only number that changed, but I did send you a letter, and my number, and I got it back with return to sender on the envelope and a note on the back stating I should and I quote, fuck off.” He grabbed several more fries and stuffed them in his mouth.
That was all news to her. She would have to ask… “Oh my God.”
“What?” He winked as if he was responding to the call for a higher power’s intervention.
She glared at him, but let a grin slip. “I was so mad at you for so long and I have been stalking you via the internet for the last five years only to learn today that one of my idiot relatives returned the letter. Probably my mother.”
He nodded. “makes sense. You said she hated me.”
“She did because she had no idea all that time I was with a Chadwick and I couldn’t seal the deal.” She groaned.
“She didn’t know you very well, did she?” He chuckled, but something darker lurked just below the kidding. He was really different and still the same. She wondered if that is what he was thinking about her.
“I moved out, I moved on, and I stopped paying for rent, utilities, and everything else I had been chipping in for or covering since I got my first job at thirteen.”
He nodded. “I figured. I just didn’t know where to find you. I’m not saying I never plugged your letters into a search engine, I’m just saying I wasn’t brave enough to hit enter. So go ahead, Dixie, tell me all the things I don’t want to hear right now. Make this the place that has been the most memorable and enjoyable of my life become the place that haunts me with would have’s and should have’s.”
“You’re eating way too many fries.” She started there.
He chewed that over and nodded. “And?”
“And I’m not sure what you are expecting me to say, Parker.” She tried to study him a little closer, what was he looking at, and what was he looking for? His eyes kept searching her and then she realized it was a constant attempt to look at her hands, her left hand. “You want me to say I’m married? I have two kids and a dog?”
His eyes closed and he gulped. “I knew it.”
He was serious, really serious and a bit emotional. She laughed out loud. “Parker! I’m not married. I don’t have children or a dog. What is wrong with you?”
When his eyes opened she saw something she usually only saw on that particular face when it came to their bedroom escapades, determination, drive, need. It lit something inside of her that had long been snuffed out. Heat flushed through her. “Parker?”
“Dixie.” He always called her by her name, not by the nickname, Sugar. She liked that. “I really messed up as a kid, as a young adult, but not this time. I’m not messing up this time. It was a sign that you were in here, right here, waiting for me.”
“I wasn’t waiting for you.” She sure was not going to let him think that she found her way to Pat’s Pub just for him.
“It’s fate and you know it. I need you tonight, Dixie. I need you now more than ever. Tell me you didn’t come here and wish I would walk in that door. I came here just so I could sit and wish you would walk in, but you were already here.”
Parker had always been guarded with his emotions. She knew he cared for her, they loved one another as friends and that much they had admitted over the years on holidays and special occasions. Nevertheless, it had been seven years since she had last seen him and six since she had last spoken to him. She had a burner phone back then and one of her brothers had stolen it. When she was planning to leave they had trashed a lot of her stuff, including his letters. They essentially cut her off from him on purpose because she didn’t find a way to marry him and use his money to save them.
All of these emotions were rolling up and it was getting confusing again to focus and find her purpose for coming here. “Okay, I will admit that this place has a lot of great memories and those are linked to you, but whenever I come to town, I stop in here and I usually get this spot, and I order my fries, and…”
“You think about two kids from different parts of this town meeting one day by chance, rushing into the pub to get out of the rain and finding something deeper, meaningful in that friendship…Dixie I can’t believe I ever left here without you.”
She could, she actually needed him to go. That was why she told him on her birthday rendezvous, after some intense and extremely satisfying sex, that she was getting engaged. He believed her. He told her they would always be friends and he would still write. He had upheld his end of the bargain, she just didn’t know it.
“I was never engaged. I told you that so you would go and not look back. I was actually just trying to prove to myself that I didn’t need you and I didn’t really want you.” She wanted to say he would know all that if he had even one social media account.
“It worked.” He shrugged. “I went back to Florida determined to make a new life and to find someone I could marry. I found someone.”
He could have punched her and it would have felt better than those words. She was suddenly worried he would now turn this place into her nightmare instead of safe haven. “We dated. We actually lived together for about six months. I was thinking maybe I should marry her.”
She gulped and picked up the tea for a fortifying drink. Her throat was suddenly dry. “And?”
“I’m here. My father died, my mother only wants to make sure she has enough to keep herself and the pool boy comfortable for the rest of her life, and I am here. In Pat’s Pub, because it’s not just a place I could get a drink, it’s a place I could come for comfort, for fries, for iced tea without judgment that I was in a bar and not ordering a whisky. It’s the only place in this whole town that really feels like home to me because it’s the place that reminds me of you.” He looked at her then and vulnerability flashed in his expression. “I know, right. I’m being melodramatic and I have only had half a glass of iced tea and half a plate of fries.”
He signaled for the waitress and ordered something stronger. He looked at Dixie and her heart tripped. “I’m going to get drunk now. Be a friend will ya? Take me home.”
“I don’t live here.” She spoke softly, gently because her old friend was really dealing with something. She was also dealing with something, a storm of emotions she could no longer stuff down, set aside, or rationalize.
“I have a place.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He then produced a document and pushed them both across the table at her as the drinks were sat in front of him.
Distracted by the items, she read the document and looked up to find him through three shots of tequila and chasing it with a beer. He wasn’t leaving her a lot of choice in the matter. The sad thing is how much of a turn their lives had taken. He was here in her role, and she was here in his. She was together, life on track, everything in order, and he was blustering through it all and barely hanging on.
“I bet we can order a pizza to be delivered to this fancy building the same as to any hotel room, so let’s proceed to the next stop, shall we?” She was still going to tell this man all the things she had ever wanted to say to him if she got to see him, just not tonight.
***
Parker entered his childhood home for the second time that day. He didn’t seem to mind as much as he had earlier. Probably because he was a bit tipsy and Dixie was with him. “You make this whole place a hundred percent better than the last time I was in it.”
She looked around and nudged the bag he had left at the door with the toe of her pink high heel. His eyes traveled the length of her leg, noted the fit of her black wrap dress, and settled on her boobs in an obvious manner he couldn’t stop if he tried. She cleared her throat and his gaze lifted quickly to her eyes. Those soft golden brown eyes of hers hinted at humor and something else. “I dropped my bags off earlier.”
“Come sit down. You look a bit wobbly. You’re still not much of a drinker, huh?” She offered him her hand and he took it. The moment their fingers met, his world settled into place. He had been running from his life, his inheritance, his family name for so long because he was ashamed of the way his family lived. They hadn’t always been scrupulous scoundrels. His grandparents were upstanding citizens, fair business owners, and if they had been scandalous, he never knew. When his Pops passed, his Nana went to Sweden, to be with her siblings. She had been disgraced by her son’s actions and dealings.
He followed her to the plush couch and they sat down. He was an open book tonight and she hadn’t asked for this chapter of his life, but she was about to hear it. “I’m pretty sure they only had me so I could inherit the business and the wealth. So they didn’t have to give it away to someone else. I think they wanted me to be like them, Dixie, but I can’t stand either of them. The way they lived…did you know that both of my parents had affairs? Both of them. I didn’t realize it when I was younger, what was going on, but then I got older and when I really knew…I started hating them.”
He felt the roll of emotions surge through him and he got up and found the decanter of whisky. He poured himself a drink and offered her some. She shook her head no, so he tipped his glass up and swallowed the liquid down. He poured another and wandered back to the couch to sit near her. She was watching him intently, curiously, cautiously.
“I would never do that…” He needed her to hear those words and to believe him. “Everyone says you grow up and become your parents, but I am not going to do that.”
Her serious expression lifted as her lips tilted in a smile. “If anyone understands that becoming your parents is a myth, it’s me. I mean, I’m not on my fifth kid by as many fathers, right? I’m not working the system to avoid working a legit job because any day now one of these schemes is going to pay off. Parker, if anyone understands that we make our own choices in life, it’s me.”
“It’s always you. It’s always been you.” It was faster than he wanted to admit it, but it was the truth. She didn’t seem to pick up on it. His eyes closed and his heart seemed to settle rather than get amped up. He let his head rest against the couch then he felt the tingling sensation at his temple.
“Come here.” The fingers pushed into his hair and guided him closer. He moved until his head settled right where, in his mind, he belonged, against her heart, listening to the steady thump of it as she stroked his hair. “It’s okay, Parker.”
It took him a moment to realize that he was crying.
***
Dixie put a blanket over him and looked down at the man sleeping on the sofa. She knew he hated his family, but it didn’t change the fact that they were his family and one of them was dead. Loss, grief, it doesn’t always look the way people expect it to. She took some time to explore the posh living conditions and understood how a kid could get lost in this place. It wasn’t kid friendly. It was barely museum friendly. There were some amazing art pieces and rugs and furnishings that could remain and with an adjustment here and there, this extravagant dwelling could become a home.
She opened a door to what was obviously Parker’s old bedroom. This looked like the right mix of quality and care. The furnishings were solid, lifetime stuff, but the bedding was all about comfort and while it was still quality, it didn’t seem stuffy and displayed like the other bedroom she had seen. That place looked like it was ready for a magazine shoot. This one looked…inviting.
She found one of his old t-shirts in a drawer and pulled on a pair of thick socks and settled into the idea that she was going to be there for the night, not at her hotel. She didn’t tell her family she was in town. With any luck, they would never find out.
Parker wasn’t the only one with family demons. She had long resolved not to compare their lots in life. From any perspective one could be worse or better than the other, but in the end, the only difference was the money. They both grew up in families that didn’t really understand them or want them as they were.
Sometime in the night, a very large, warm body found its way to bed with her. Soon after, she found herself snuggling up to him. His arms around her, she couldn’t deny that everything she wanted was right there, in this bed with her. The thought was so startling and so alarming she tried to move away, but his grip tightened, his thigh pressed forward and between hers bringing her closer, tighter against him.
“Parker?” Her lips were at his neck, pressing, opening, her tongue exploring the flesh there before closing again.
“Do that again.” He flexed his fingers and moved so that she had better access to him. A need rushed thorugh her, a hunger she only felt when she was with him. A possessive urge so strong she had run from it when she could no longer call it puppy love. Now, they were grown, they were fully adult and there was no reason to deny herself this pleasure any longer.
She pushed against him until he rolled to his back. She climbed on top of him and started at his neck, moved up to his jaw, then to those lips. He had the most perfect lips in the world. Full without being large, soft without being weak. This all felt good and familiar, empowering, intoxicating.
When he wrapped her up in his arms and rolled them, she was surprised, a bit panicked to be honest. Dixie had always been the one in control of these situations with him and the two other men she had slept with in her lifetime. Control in the bedroom arena was a real issue for her. “Parker.”
He kissed her jaw then her neck. “You’re wearing my t-shirt. Do you have any idea how many times I went to sleep thinking of you in my t-shirt? Ever since the swimming incident.”
Her panic stalled as she laughed about that. It wasn’t so much a swim as it was a fall into a pool and he had taken off his shirt to cover her. It was before she had mastered the high heels, but not before she had mastered the effect of short skirts. His t-shirt was mid-thigh, longer than the skin hugging fabric of the clothes she had on.
“Stilettos.” She gasped out the word as he opened his mouth over the fabric and her nipple beneath it. His tongue teased and she couldn’t believe the reaction her body had to that. With ever tormenting, tantalizing touch, she relaxed her mind further while her body wound up in an all new way.
He slid lower, pushing the hem of the shirt up to reveal her navel. The thing about sex with Parker, or anyone for that matter, was that she had always choreographed the events. That meant she often enjoyed herself, but she enjoyed the power over them even more. As his tongue slipped into her navel, she felt the grip on those reigns loosen. She was going to let him do this. Something she had never let anyone else do before.
Gentle hands moved, fingers gripped the panties and slid them off. He kissed her ankle, licked her leg as he moved closer to the uncharted territory at the juncture of her thighs. He sucked, teeth scraped against her thigh. His name escaped her lips and that was all the encouragement needed.
Growing up in a house full of brothers and a loose mother had made her ashamed of being a woman more than she wanted to admit. She had felt guilty for being a girl, being the oldest, and not being the kind of girl that could take advantage of a man with this very weapon. It limited her sexual experiences.
She became more than aware that Parker had obviously been with other women as his tongue danced across her clit and made it difficult to be anything but aware of him, his mouth, his fingers pushing into her, and the expertise in which he was testing her reactions. Somehow, her hands found their way into his hair, pulled him closer as her hips lifted against him, in time, until she was standing before a lake on a cliff of rocks and ready to jump.
The orgasm took her with such force when she landed in the water it was as though she was drowning in the sensations. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything other than let it carry her down before the pulsing shot her up through the waves and she gasped for air.
She had barely climbed back onto the metaphorical shores when a broad head pressed against the swollen, slick flesh of her pussy. His intrusion was a combination of pleasure and discomfort as she adjusted to the new sensations.
Before she could say anything other than a few moans of pleasure, he was kissing her, pulling her arms above her head to clasp them in one of his hands. Her heart began to race, a panic tried to set in. He kissed, rocked, and she was more than aware that this was not just Parker having sex with her; this was him taking her, claiming her, possessing her.
His lips moved from hers long enough to adjust her leg and groan as she gasped from the new angle’s impact. “Parker.”
“Come one more time, Dixie. I’m almost there, come once more for me. I need to feel it one more time.” The grip on her hands tightened and she squeezed his fingers with hers. The new angle gave him freedom of his other hand and he circled her clit with the pad of his thumb until she was running to that ledge this time, leaping before she got to the ledge. “Fuck yeah.”
She had never heard him curse before. He leaned in and kissed her lips as he came inside of her. She realized then there was no condom, no boundary between them except the t-shirt that was pushed up above the breasts he moved his head to kiss, lick, suck as the last thrusts of his hips settled.
If she had any questions about his intentions prior to the sex, the fact that he laid on top of her, still in her, shifting only slightly so as not to crush her with his weight, spoke volumes. His hand brought one of her to his lips. “Dixie, I’m sorry I passed out earlier.”
“I think I can forgive you.” She moved, shifted and he rolled with her until she was settled on his chest and along his side in a much more comfortable position. “I can breathe again.”
“Me too.” He stroked her hair.
“What?”
“Me too. I feel like I’ve been suffocated for so long and now, here, you. It’s like I found the source of oxygen.” He squeezed her tighter to his side and she let that sink in.