I was naked and soapy, and he was sleeping.
The Ritz in the Quarter was insane. I felt a world away from my parents’ house and the stained tub and the dishes that Beth washes and dries and everyone lets lie on the counter for a day before Beth puts them away.
I wasn’t going to sit in that fancy-ass room while he snoozed in the bathtub. I needed a night out, but I didn’t want a night alone, either.
I moved away from John, making sure he didn’t awaken. It blew my mind that the tub was big enough for me to sit on the other side and rest my chin against the lip of the tub, feet spread out, and still I wasn’t touching John’s body.
The emails from earlier scratched against my mind as the bubbles thinned over the cooling water. I thought I left the life-sabotaging bullshit from my peers back in Texas. I dealt with two full years of shit and made it out of Fort Hood and to New Orleans only a little stained. I couldn’t think of anyone who would waste their time sending me fake emails, except maybe Bell Gardiner? That girl with her tiny waist and long black hair would totally be vindictive enough to do that. And petty enough. She hated me for no reason other than my relationship with Shia, if you could even call it that. I thought it was sad the way girls turned on each other over boys instead of allying together. Bell Gardiner was a little too old to be sending fake emails, but she still wore white eyeliner, so I couldn’t put anything past her.
Bell Gardiner could have Shia King. From the day he left Louisiana for his first humanitarian trip, I had convinced myself that I didn’t want anything to do with his green eyes or the beautiful tawny brown of his skin. I didn’t care that he thought Bell Gardiner was better than me. John Brooke was certainly a better match for me than Shia. It shouldn’t have been a competition.
But it was. Shia was probably fucking Bell Gardiner while I sat naked in lukewarm bathwater with a snoring boyfriend.
A snoring boyfriend who had just graduated from West Point, at least.
Shia was probably on top of Bell Gardiner, promising her the same shit he promised me.
“We’re going to travel the world together, Meg.”
“I can’t wait for our future, Meg.”
Once he even told me that he couldn’t wait to tell his mom that we were together, and I even believed him.
I had visions of us holding hands, walking the streets of Mexico City, eating fresh fruit from street carts. He never believed that I would leave with him, and that’s what corroded our relationship, his refusal to believe that I would leave my mom and sisters to travel the world with him.
As I looked over at John Brooke asleep in the bathtub, I still wasn’t sure if Shia was right about me.
Shia King was pushing himself into my mind from wherever he was, and it was messing with my head. I was lucky to be here in a huge, expensive hotel suite with John Brooke, soaking in a tub in the center of the French Quarter. Poor John, he was so tired, and I was being the worst kind of bitch by thinking about Shia.
I moved back to John and reached between his legs. He was soft for a few seconds, but when John stirred awake, so did the rest of him. His eyes flew open and his body jerked a little before he remembered where he was, then he closed his eyes, rested his head on the lip of the massive tub, and let me play with him.
I started slow, with my hand tight around him, moving from top to bottom, and I felt his hands on my shoulders, turning me around. His mouth found mine immediately and he moaned through our lips.
“Touch me,” I said into his mouth.
His hands were timid as they explored my breasts, and his fingers completely avoided my nipples, which drove me insane. I couldn’t tell if he was doing it purposefully to wind me up, but I wanted to believe he was. I didn’t know how many women John had slept with, but I definitely knew I wasn’t the first.
His hands slid down my torso until he stopped between my legs. I was panting. He was groaning and so, so hard in my hand. I was losing myself in the rhythm of his kiss, his hand between my legs, pushing in and pulling out. Climbing onto his lap, I wrapped my arms around his neck and lowered my body onto his again.
John’s eyes closed as he entered me and I sank down on his length. He was so thick, even though not that long, and I felt my mind drifting into the familiar state of desire.
24
jo
“Do you want a coffee?” Laurie waved for me to follow him into the kitchen. “Decaf or regular?” he asked, taking my getting up as an answer.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a box of coffee pods. As a barista, it made me roll my eyes, but the pods were nothing compared to the decaf offer.
“Decaf?”
He nodded.
“Decaf isn’t even coffee.”
He popped a Dunkin’ Donuts pod into the machine.
I rubbed my temples in a dramatic way and walked closer to the instant-coffee machine. “Your blatant disrespect for the bean is killing me right now.”
Laurie threw his head back and his hair was all over the place. “Hey, not all of us can be a barista extraordinaire.”
“You don’t have to be a barista extraordinaire to not want to drink coffee-flavored water,” I teased.
He set two mugs out on the marble counter. One had a penguin on it, and the other had the saying NAMASTE IN BED inside the outline of a sun.
I pointed to the mug. “Nice.”
He was the kind of boy who had quirky coffee mugs but drank decaf. He made no sense to me, but I liked the contradiction he was.
Once our “coffees” were ready, I followed him upstairs to his bedroom. I could smell his room before we even stepped through the doorway. His familiar homey smell coated my senses and immediately relaxed me. It was weird the way that worked.
“What cologne do you use?” I plopped down on the couch he had inside his room and put my feet up on his old oak coffee table. He’d told me it was from Spain and his mother had paid a fortune to ship it across the sea.
“I don’t know actually.” Laurie got up and walked over to his dresser and grabbed a little glass bottle.
Instead of asking me why I wanted to know, or giving me a weird look, he read the name of the cologne. I had never heard of it, and his accent made it sound even more exotic and expensive than I’m sure it was.
Over his decaf coffee, he continued telling me how he felt about his dad’s sending him away to live with his grandpa, who didn’t understand the way young men work. Laurie was a lonely yet social being. He confounded me.
“Do you miss your dad still?” Laurie asked me when he sat down. “Or are you used to this life now?”
“I miss him still. I don’t want to ever be that used to this life that I don’t miss my dad anymore.”
Laurie chewed on his bottom lip and asked me if I thought it made him a bad person to not miss his dad. I told him no, that if he was a bad person, he would never have asked that question in the first place. He took that in and we sat in silence while we finished our drinks in a peaceable calm.
Hanging on Laurie’s wall were old movie posters in no apparent pattern at all, held up with red tacks. The movies on the posters ranged from the original Planet of the Apes to Almost Famous. As with the other parts of Laurie, I kept trying to find the common thread among them, something that would solidify at last what kind of person he was.
Laurie stared at me while I looked at the posters. I could feel his eyes on me, though I wasn’t uncomfortable, which itself was a little strange.
“You hungry?” he asked eventually.
“I’m always hungry.”
He stood up and reached for my hand, and I hesitated for a second before I let him take it and lead me out.
On the way down the grand staircase, Laurie pointed to a row of family portraits on the walls. They were all in different frames of the same size. One of the frames was made of dark steel and had a picture of a row of men in uniforms. Not that everyone was dressed in Army green, though; some wore Navy white, some Air Force blue. At the end of the row s
tood a little boy, Laurie, the only one in the picture who wasn’t dressed in a military uniform. Dressed in a black T-shirt and ripped blue jeans, he couldn’t have been older than twelve. A thick mass of blond hair covered his forehead, and he wasn’t smiling.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” he said in a taunting voice, and I examined the rest of the pictures while we finished the walk downstairs.
Near the bottom of the staircase were a few yearbook-style photos of more men in uniforms.
“How often do you see your mom?”
He shrugged. “It’s been a while now, but since I moved to the States, I usually see her once every six months. Christmas and summer break.”