“Thank you for driving me.” I look for some sign of what’s going on in his mind and finding the door shut.
“What time should I pick you up?” He reaches out and I lean away, staring at his hand. “Chill, Bailey. You have a piece sticking up.”
“Oh…okay.” He’s trying to be helpful and I treat him like he’s a festering case of the bubonic plague. How embarrassing.
I lean in and he sets about gently brushing down each and every one of my stray hairs, so gently I can barely feel him picking apart the knots. I can feel his breath on my skin. Fresh from a shower, I can smell his shampoo. My scalp tingles and goose bumps break out on my forearms. Lord give me strength.
“Don’t worry about it. I can catch a ride home.”
Finished, he leans back. Simon walks past the Jeep then, squinting into the headlights that are aimed right at him before he enters the building. I glance over and find Reagan staring after him, expression flinty.
A little odd but I cast it aside until he says, “From that guy?” He tips his head at the closed door behind which Simon disappeared, his voice sharp.
“Who, Simon?” I say, thoroughly confused as to why he looks pissed all of a sudden. Between the question and the expression he’s wearing, we’ve passed the little odd threshold and are well into a lot odd territory.
“Is that his name? Skinny-pants guy? He looks like he uses rock crystal deodorant and writes lyrics in his spare time just to impress chicks.”
Uhh…
My brows jack up to my hairline. This conversation has gone way off course, like…made a sharp left into funky town.
“Okay…oookay…” I don’t know what else to say. I’m a little taken aback. I open the door, get out, get my crutch situated. “Thanks for the ride, Reagan. I mean it, really.”
Reagan
Am I going anywhere? Hell no. And the shady dude is not driving Alice home. Luckily for me, I have my advanced chem textbook with me, my iPad, and notes. I spend the next hour and a half holed up in the quiet comfort of my car, studying for an upcoming exam and get more done than if I were doing it at home.
By 9 p.m., bodies start pouring out of the building. I spot Alice walking between a pixie with light pink hair, a collection of tats, and a few piercing––and Shady Sean. Their feet stop when they spot the Jeep. Two curious stares directed at me. His more aggressive than curious.
Nah, bro. Not on my watch.
I’m not going to make a scene. That wouldn’t be cool and Bailey would get the wrong idea. And I like her. We’re friends. Good friends, I’d say after Saturday night. I don’t want to do anything to screw that up. Shady dude, however, is now on notice.
She looked so low-key sexy laughing at the Santa Ana winds blowing her hair up that I almost leaned over and kissed her. It took everything I had to stop myself. Talk about a gut check. Yeah, that would’ve gone over real well.
And this only days after we agreed to be friends. And it had to be done. She had that look in her eye and I was seconds from pushing her down on my bed and fucking her till we both fell into a coma, consequences be damned. And there would’ve been a whole bunch of them. It did surprise me, though. How readily she agreed. My first impression of her that night was that she was into me. Though in hindsight it may have been wishful thinking.
An image of Alice laughing, little white teeth showing, floods my brain and I get a semi. Damn. This is the wrong time and place for this to be happening. With no other way to remedy the problem, all I can do is shift and adjust my sweatpants. Lesson learned––I need to get laid and soon.
Alice turns to the other two, says something I can’t hear, and they move in opposite directions: Pink-haired girl to her Prius in the parking lot, shady dude down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. He eyeballs me as he walks past the Jeep.
Atta boy. Keep walking, shithead.
“You’re still here?”
She looks confused, cute and confused. “Bailey, you look confused. When I give someone a ride I don’t dump them off in front of a strange building and burn rubber out of the parking lot.” Those big brown eyes of hers blink. I sigh. “You might find this hard to believe but I don’t like to see my friends wind up on the side of a milk carton.”
“Have you been here the entire time?”
I hold up my iPad. “Most productive hour and a half of studying in a long time. I’m nailing this chem test. Get in.”
The confused look hasn’t left her face yet. Nonetheless she gets in the car.
“You hungry?” I bite down on the inside of my cheek to school a grin that I don’t think she’d appreciate. “’Cause I’m starving.”
She shrugs. “I could eat.”
Alice
“Hope you like seafood,” Reagan mentions as we get out of the Jeep in front of a restaurant called Neptune’s, a cute open-air restaurant made to look like a shack with picnic tables and a very long line of people waiting to order.
“I do. But I’ll try anything,” I tell him as we take our place in line.
Skepticism crosses his face, closely trailed by bewilderment. “You’ll try anything?” he repeats. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a girl say that.”
The arched, disapproving brow cannot be helped. It’s an automatic reaction when men get stupid. “Welcome to the twenty-first century where shit like that no longer flies. I didn’t peg you for a meathead.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m not, believe me. Nothing’s hotter than a woman that knows what she wants and goes after it. But I honestly have never heard a woman say she’ll try anything, especially when it comes to food.”
I shrug, satisfied with his answer. “Why not, right?”
“Why not?” he repeats. He’s back to disbelief. “That’s another thing girls never say. You’re full of surprises, Jersey girl.”
“What’s the harm in trying? I mean…you may never get another chance. Carpe diem and all that stuff.”
He shoots me a strange look. I’m about to ask him what it means when the person in front of us steps aside. It’s our turn to order and we both go for the fish tacos, Reagan’s meal three times the size of mine. He hands the guy behind the counter a fifty-dollar bill and when I argue and try to hand him money, he body-blocks me and murmurs, “I don’t like eating alone. You’re doing me a favor.”
I highly doubt it, but I’m too tired to argue.
Carrying our food, he leads me to a table on the outer edge of the lot and sits on the tabletop. “Up here. You’ll see why.” When I’m slow to move, he smiles down at me and pats the spot next to him.
I get up on the table next to him, park my crutch against the side, and what I see next takes my breath away. A galaxy of flickering lights spilled against a patchwork of midnight blue and gunmetal gray. From our modest perch, we have a perfect view of the darkened coastline.
“Wow.”
“I know. Almost as awesome as it is during the day.”
“I’ll have to come back with my camera,” I say and bite into my fish taco. Eyes rolling to the back of my head, I moan. “Almost better than sex,” I mumble with a mouthful and wipe the sauce that drips out the corner of my mouth with my napkin.
“If food is almost better than the sex you’ve had, then you’ve been having it with the wrong people.”
Uhhh…Am I discussing my sex life with him? No. Not happening. Should I tell him I haven’t been having any other than with myself? Definitely not. I let his comment slide away nice and easy. Silence is my friend and I embrace it. The inevitable strange awkwardness happens for a while, but I ride it out until he ends it.
“Why did you say you may never get another chance earlier? That was kind of dark.”
I shrug casually. Little does he know there’s nothing casual about this topic for me. “We all assume we have a long life ahead of us, but you never know.”
His face twists, so I elaborate.
“My mother died at twenty-nine of ovarian cancer.” His face falls, his taco suspended in mid-air and all but forgotten in his hand. “My grandmother died of the same thing at forty…” I made peace with the knowledge that life is fragile and temporary long ago. It hardly fazes me to discuss it. “Time is a gift, not an entitlement.”
He puts down his taco and swallows, face wrecked by sympathy for me. Sympathy’s the one thing I have no use for.
“I’m sorry,” he says in a low raspy voice.
At fifteen, Nancy sat me down and explained that it could very well be hereditary and I would have to get regular checkups. It’s then I decided that I wasn’t going to waste one precious minute––whether there were a million of them or less. That I wouldn’t let an expiration date hanging over my head rule my life.
“It’s why I live my life without shame or regret. As long as I’m not willingly hurting someone else, I do what pleases me.” I take another huge bite of my taco. “Eat what pleases me.” And smile around it. I’d like to add fuck who pleases me but that would be a lie.
Staring at my mouth, Reagan reaches out, and before I have a chance to move away, he wipes a spot of sauce from the corner with his index finger. Then he sticks the same finger in his mouth and sucks it clean.
“You’re my hero, Jersey.”
I just about die.
Chapter 14
Alice
“Am I picking you up tomorrow from the library or your dorm?” Reagan asks without even bothering to glance up, his attention fully on my camera bag. He’s already diving into it, investigating its contents, before I can answer.
We’re parked on the bleachers by the indoor pool, practice having finished only twenty minutes ago. I shift in my seat, raise my Leica, and look through the viewfinder.
Life is stranger than fiction. It really is. Five weeks ago I was alone in an unfamiliar place. The less than proud owner of a junker that was more trouble than it was worth, and a sprained ankle.