A Is for Alpha Male (7 page)

How in
the hell
had he pulled that one off?

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there’s more to Danny than meets the eye,” Allison murmured.

No fucking kidding.

WHEN ALLISON AND I got back to the room that night, we took the time to do a briefing, or an abbreviated accounting of the night’s events, if you will.

As I hopped on one foot, yanking the cowboy boot off of my other one, my mom shut and locked the door, breathed a ridiculously deep sigh, and started to tell me about her many admirers from the bar.

Or maybe that’s not accurate. It was more like she started to
complain
about her admirers. Though, after hearing a rundown of fun facts about said bachelors, I couldn’t really blame her.

“So the first guy comes up to me, and he’s attractive enough, but his eyes immediately zeroed in on my breasts.”

I started to give her my opinion, but she cut me off. “I know. That’s normal. That’s not the part that really turned me off of him.”

When she didn’t say more, I looked back to see that she was busy taking off her own shoes, and unclipping the wristlet she had hooked through her belt loop.

Shaking my head, I prompted, “Okay, so what
did
the breast man do to turn you off?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, like she had forgotten what she was talking about in that pause. “Well, while he was standing there, another guy came up and introduced himself. But breast man freaked out. Acted like we were on a date!”

She shimmied her jeans over her hips, and by this point I had my other boot off and was mid collapse onto the bed.

“So he was super possessive,” I supplied, throwing my forearm over my eyes.

“Yeah, but I had literally like just met him, and he practically had a tantrum about it, acting like I was his girlfriend or something!”

“Geez, that is creeptastic! Good thing you gave him the boot.” When she didn’t say anything, I moved my arm off of my eyes, sat up, and asked, “You did give him the boot, right?”

Allison rolled her eyes with exaggerated intensity and said, “God. Yes, Haley. I got rid of him quickly. Plus, he didn’t even smell good. I mean he didn’t smell bad, but he didn’t smell good. You know?”

Oh yeah, I knew. All the best guys in books had a distinct smell that made you just want to eat them up. Or be sucked into their skin so you could set up camp there permanently. My brother smelled really good, and so did Danny.

I had gotten a good whiff when he leaned in really close to tell me to bring my books. He smelled fresh and slightly sweet, but it was natural and far from overpowering. It was like an aura of smell, strong, but hazy enough to be subtle. I didn’t know if it was something he got out of a bottle or if that’s just how his skin smelled. What I did know, was that I liked it.

Mother effing Danny.

Dragging my heavy body back up off of the bed, I trudged over to my bag and rifled through it until I found my pajamas, a little baby blue camisole and short set I had just gotten from Victoria’s Secret.

I whipped off my shirt, stripped off my shorts, and then pulled the camisole and shorts over my turquoise cheeky panties. The smell of bar lingered heavily on my skin, but I had absolutely no desire to put myself through the torture of showering and drying my hair.

Because there was no way I could just shower, I would have to dry my hair too. Otherwise I would go to sleep on it wet and wake up looking like Chewbacca, my hair matting unceremoniously on and around my face.

Instead, I would go the lazy route and just wash off my makeup. Asking my mom, “And what about the other suitors? How were they?” I made my way into the bathroom and reached blindly to my wrist to grab my ponytail holder.

Unfortunately, my searching hand came up empty, meaning I must have lost the one that had been on my wrist tonight.

It was known to happen on occasion, but it was still super annoying. My mom started talking, and she only got clear enough to understand when I cleared the door to the bathroom on my way back to my bag for another ponytail holder.

“....bad breath, a comb over, and the biggest set of man boobs I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

Jesus. I missed most of that, but I was pretty confident the ending had correctly conveyed the gist.

“Well, with any luck, Danny’s uncle will be a looker, the antithesis of creepy, smell delectable, and have all the other qualities of our list. And most certainly, I hope he doesn’t have man boobs.”

Plucking a new hair tie out my bag and heading back to the bathroom one more time, I looked up to see that, this time, Allison was following me and had already changed into her kelly green nightgown. “You’re telling me. Man boobs are scary, Haley. I really had no idea until I got that up close and personal with a set of them.”

“Really, Mom? Boob play isn’t your thing? You didn’t have an urge to motorboat them? I, for one, am shocked.”

“You are
such
a smartass,” she said as she pinched my arm.

“Ouch!” I screeched and then frowned.

Allison paid no attention to the woes of my pain, so I got back down to business, pulling my hair up in a messy ponytail and securing my lavender hair tie around it. Allison pulled her hair off of her face with a thick, white, stretchy headband, and we both got down to the routine of washing the evidence of our days away.

As I washed, I glanced superficially at all of the similar features of our faces. My mom’s hand scrubbed using circular motions, and then swiped carefully under each eye before closing them in order to get the eyelids. When I moved my gaze back to my own reflection, I noticed that my motions were the exact same, a seeming recreation of my mom’s movements.

I very rarely thought about my dad, because I was so little when he died, but it was little stuff like this that made me yearn for him. But my yearning had nothing to do with me. I wanted this for Hunter.

I know that a relationship between men, be it father and son, brother and brother, or best friends, is different from the relationship between women. But, in times like these, leaned over a sink together doing the same mindless activity, I got to see myself in the future and my mom got to see herself actualized in someone that she produced.

Hunter didn’t get to have these little things.

“Are you interested in Danny? Because it seems like it,” my mom said, breaking me out of my thoughts and bringing me back into reality.

“What?” I questioned, having missed most of what she said.

“I asked if you like Danny,” my mom semi-repeated.

“Yes,” I answered, figuring honesty was the best way to go. In my opinion, honesty was always the best way to go. But I made sure to add, “But I don’t know that he’s really interested in me. Regardless, I really like him platonically. I think he really might turn out to be one of my best friends. Whether I can keep all of my emotions separate remains to be seen.”

My mom finished wiping her now clean face dry with the hand towel, turned toward me, and met my eyes. Her face was serious and softly determined as she stated, “I just want you to know how proud of you I am, Haley. You have your crazy moments...well, a lot of crazy moments. But you are
such
a strong woman. Confident and classy, despite your sailor mouth, and you always but always choose honesty over a lie. Whether that be when it comes to others or even just being honest with yourself. Fiercely protective of the people you love and loyal to a fault. I am
so
proud of the woman you are. I just wanted to make sure you knew that.”

As a layer of wetness coated my eyes and blurred my vision, she leaned in, kissed my cheek, and finished. “I really like Danny, I do. There was something so natural, even familiar about him, but none of that matters. Whatever happens with Danny, I know you’ll make the best of it. And I know you’ll come out of it even more remarkable on the other side.”

She cupped my cheek with her soft, petite hand briefly, and then turned and left the bathroom.

It took me a few minutes to get my emotions under control and dry the tears off of my cheeks. When I finally made it into the bedroom, she was curled up on her side of the bed, facing my direction with her kindle open in front of her, but she was sound asleep.

Walking around the bed to her side, I gently reached for her kindle, closed the case to put it to sleep, set it on her nightstand, and clicked out the light above it.

After padding back over to my side, I pulled the covers back, climbed gently under three layers of sheet, blanket, and comforter, reached back and clicked off my light, and then blindly reached out to find my mom’s hand that was loose and relaxed on the bed in front of her.

It took me several minutes, my mind reeling about what a lucky lot in life I had gotten, but my breathing finally evened, and I fell asleep, my hand tucked gently into the one of the woman I wanted to be.

OUR MORNING HAD been pretty routine, filled by mindless gabbing and breakfast in the hotel restaurant. We decided to do that instead of venturing out because I wasn’t really sure what Danny’s plan was for the day, when he wanted us to come over, and most of all, the buffet of food looked really good.

When we got back up to our room, I was six crispy pieces of bacon, two eggs, and a piece of toast heavier, and feeling like I should have laid off the bacon at slice three.

Still, I didn’t waste any time and took out my phone to call Danny as soon as we walked back in.

He answered after one ring, and his greeting was vaguely omniscient. “Hey, Hales.”

My guess was that he knew it was me by the unknown number, but who knew. He had pretty much proven his skill as a pick pocket last night. I had no idea what else he was capable of.

A smart girl would have been scared of a guy like him.

Thankfully, I had a knack for flipping the switch to the off position on my smarts. Being stupid was
way
more fun.

“Hey Danny. You sound too chipper for someone who has a late night job this early in the morning.”

“Chipper?” he questioned in a way that made me rethink calling a guy “chipper”.

“Okay, maybe not chipper. But awake. Yeah, you definitely sound awake,” I replied stupidly.

Silence.

“Right. Listen, I wasn’t sure when you wanted us to come over so I figured I’d get a plan going early so that we know what the day is going to bring.”

He barely even breathed when I finished talking, let alone paused, but instead jumped right in with, “Come over now.”

“That sounded an awful lot like an order, Dan-o. Do you think I’m the kind of girl that does what she’s told?”

Once again, he didn’t miss a beat. “It was an order, you’re not even remotely that kind of girl, but you’re still going to come over now.”

I smiled, bit my lip, and then answered, “Well, at least you’re honest. Fair enough. Just tell me how to get there.”

I listened to him talk, spitting out four or five lefts and rights before I realized there was no effing way under the sun I was going to remember these directions if I didn’t write them down.

Therefore, I let him finish, just because I was kind of mean like that, and then told him, “Yeah, um, I didn’t get any of that Dan-o. You’re gonna have to repeat everything so I can write it down, m‘kay?”

Danny paused for one beat, and then two, and then busted his gut laughing in my ear.

He waited for me to get a pen and paper, double checked that I was ready and set and in note-taking position, and then ran through the entire set of directions again, adding in cute anecdotes like, “If you get to the bush that looks like a set of balls with elephantiasis, you’ve gone too far.”

I wasn’t sure, but I was considering going too far just so that I could see such a bush.

After I got off the phone with Danny, I spent a good fifteen minutes contemplating what to wear. I wanted to look cute of course, I always wanted to look cute. But I was also thinking about the fact that he was so adamant about a long sleeve shirt. From that, I could extrapolate that I would probably need some long pants too. But it was southern Alabama in mid-July. Translation: It was hotter than Hades. Therefore, I settled on wearing a pair of white, jean, cutoff shorts and a baby blue camisole and would just take a pair of older, worn jeans with me.