And she was in sitting in Hottie McHotterson’s truck after a shockingly enjoyable day spent with him at church and bingo, arguing about erotic chocolate sauce, her vagina and her mother.
Beyond bizarre.
“People don’t just eat the sauce,” she added softly, not sure why she was enjoying goading him quite so much.
They’d never had an adversarial relationship before. Mostly he’d ignored her. When and if he’d taken notice of her existence, it was mainly as his kid sister’s mouthy little friend, the one who always got her gum stuck in her hair—she’d left her unfortunate bubble-popping habit behind in high school—and always had some random statistic to fling at him when he was washing his car during that completely un-fateful summer they were neighbors.
He’d been a boy on the verge of manhood and quite eager to demonstrate it by losing his shirt, and she’d been an awkward eleven-year-old wearing a maxi pad the size of the morning newspaper and trying to figure out why he caused such weird fluttering sensations in the pit of her stomach.
Surprisingly, early menstrual periods did not bring with them any bursts of knowledge on the opposite sex or clues what to do with the sudden influx of hormones that had swarmed her body seemingly overnight. She’d gone to bed one evening thinking of Chase just as Cass’s older brother. She’d woken up wondering if she’d really caught him with his hand down his cargo shorts when she’d spotted him lying in a lawn chair beside his parents’ pool.
And if so, had he been enjoying himself? And could she watch?
“Did you masturbate when you were lying next to your parents’ pool?” she asked, biting her lip when he wrenched off the radio.
“Excuse me?”
She tucked her hair behind her ears and blew out a breath. Open mouth, insert both feet. “The summer after I moved in next door…I saw you lying out one morning. No one was up yet but me. And you. I didn’t realize it was you in the chair and not Cass until I was in your yard.”
“Yeah, we look an awful lot alike.” Sarcasm laced his words as he hung one of his super-sized wrists over the wheel. “Her long red hair was so similar to my short blond.”
“You had a ball cap on,” Summer protested. “I couldn’t tell for sure from behind, not until I—”
“What?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“I didn’t get that close.” Despite their privacy in the truck, she found herself lowering her voice. The memory was too vivid and intimate. “But I swear I saw your hand slip inside your shorts. It didn’t come back out for a while. I couldn’t see your face, but your hand was moving.” She adjusted her skirt and hoped he couldn’t hear her unsteady breathing. “I figured you had an itch.” His bark of laughter made her whip her head in his direction. “Hey, I was eleven. I’d never seen that before.”
“Sounds like you didn’t even see it then, since you weren’t paying close enough attention.”
“You were my elder,” she said faintly, then felt like a complete dumbass when he turned piercing dark eyes her way and pinned her in place with the force of his stare. It was like being hit with a virtual baseball bat right to the forehead.
“Remember that, slugger.”
He didn’t speak again until they were at the Yardley city limits. They’d stopped for a quick dinner of roast beef sandwiches, fries and coke floats, which she slurped loudly every few moments. Each time he glanced at her, obviously amused, and said nothing.
It was really sort of creepy.
When he did decide to talk, she couldn’t say she appreciated his choice of topic. “How long have you been performing in the city?”
She gripped her plastic cup tighter. “A while.”
“Months? Years?”
Why did she feel as if she’d been caught, well, watching him touch himself? Singing for money wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. So far it hadn’t been much money, and she certainly didn’t have oodles of fans, but things were improving. Like any business, building an audience took time.
“It
’s been under a year since I had my first show in a coffeehouse in Queens. But I did some gigs up north first. Way up north.”
“Lake Placid? Plattsburg? Buffalo?”
“Canada.” Lowering her head, she sucked hard on her straw to avoid his death glare. “It’s really not that far away in the scheme of things.”
“Maybe not, but it is a foreign country.”
“Well, yes, technically.”
He cursed colorfully under his breath. “You said Cass didn’t know you were singing. Have you told anyone?”