Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (4 page)

 "Okay," I said. "Fine. Hit me."

 "It's simple. What happened was our man Robert ran into a little difficulty with an old friend and this led to a certain need to expedite the uh...the redistribution of certain assets. Do you follow?"

 "No. Try that again. This time in English."

 Steve glanced round and lowered his voice. "Okay. Bob got arrested for beating the shit out of someone in a bar fight down at the Fuzzy Duck. Basically he needed to hide his weed-growing operation before the police showed up at his house and found the goddamn place smelling like the inside of Bob Marley's sock drawer."

 "And you said you'd take care of it?"

 Steve looked shifty. "Some of it."

 "Some of it? Hence the psychotropic jungle in my fucking house? How did you get mixed up with that maniac in the first place?"

 "It doesn't matter," he said, taking a napkin from the dispenser to polish his glasses. "You're making things needlessly complicated. The fact is that Bob couldn't just ditch the stuff in the compost - it's too close to harvest. You know how much those hydroponics set-ups cost? And you have to buy every little bit separately and cover your online footprint because the police have geeks who are paid to look for these things..." He sighed. "Look, just don't sweat the small stuff. It will be gone before you know it. We just gotta dry it out, sell it on, take our cut and kick back to Bob."

 "We?"

 He held up a hand. "Don't flip out on me, Clayton. This kind of merchandise, this kind of quantity, I'm talking ten grand each."

 "I don't care," I said. "What the hell is wrong with you? You make enough money unloading used cars. Is this because you spent those two weeks in July marathoning
Breaking Bad
? Have you got delusions of druglord grandeur or something? Do I have to write a strongly worded letter to fucking Netflix or something?"

 "It's merely a brief business association," said Steve. "Nothing more. I was thinking of you."

 "Me?" I was thinking of strangling him when the waitress came over to top off my coffee. She fetched an extra cup for Steve and I sat back wondering where the hell it had all gone wrong. I could have blamed the moment my Achilles tendon went pop and put paid to a football scholarship, but things hadn't been that bad when I graduated High School. I had vocational training and with the housing boom everyone had needed carpenters. And then the economy went foom. Yeah - that hadn't helped.

 "I fucked Heather's mom," I said, sinking deeper into self-pity.

 Steve gave me a strange look and so it all came out - how I was slowly turning into a bigger loser than my Dad, an asshole so lazy he complained if he had to lift the sofa cushions to look for the remote control, the reason we had no future beyond the dole or the army, and look how
that
had turned out. "One day," I said. "I'm going to look in the mirror and that's who's going to be looking back at me - my old man. That whole thing with Heather and her mom - that was just like the stories he used to tell. Those stories were the reason why everyone thought he was such a 'good guy'. He was a great guy, a great fucking drinking buddy. A lousy husband and a worse father, but hey - he was a blast."

 "So keep your dick dry," said Steve. "What's the problem? You're not your dad; I'm not my dad. We don't have to turn out like our parents."

 "I guess not," I said. Steve's old man would lose a battle of wits with a grilled cheese sandwich. It figured Steve had to get his fiendish intelligence from somewhere but his Mom offered no clue. Perhaps the whole slightly ditzy book-club bit she did was just a cover and she was actually a full-blown evil genius with henchmen and an underground lair.

 "It's fine," Steve said. "Bog and I will have the plant out of your way by tonight. You don't have to be involved..."

 He was pretty good about it, which should have tipped me off right away. As it was I was tit deep in self-pity and determined that I wasn't going to end up a barhopping, skank-banging waster like my Dad. My mood wasn't improved when a cop stopped the traffic and said there'd been an accident up ahead and I'd have to take a three-mile diversion. It was one of those weird little twists of fate that are supposed to pass unnoticed, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel something. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper as I moved through a tiny little tourist trap named Westerwick - one of those places where New York yuppies come in the fall, to look at the leaves and buy maple syrup and antiques.

 I'd been here before, but I noticed a shiny new sign – JONES & SON. RESTORATIONS. I resolved to look them up online when I got home. I'd never done restorations before, but these days they were probably grateful for any carpenter who knew a dovetail joint from the hole in his ass.

 When I got back, the plant was almost gone, replaced by a dustsheet covered in a huge pile of weed. "It doesn't seem to be drying out," said Bog.

 "Has Steve been by?" I asked.

 He shook his head. I was pissed by this point and went stomping into the kitchen to call Steve. That turned out to be a mistake; I found myself thigh deep in the fucking floor. "Bog!" I yelled. "Bog! Get in here."

 He peered out from behind the curtain and for a moment looked confused; I was a lot shorter than he was used to me being. "Dude, what are you doing down there?" he said.

 "What's it fucking look like? Pass me my phone."

 I dialed Steve. "Okay, you evil bastard," I said. "You win. I'm in. Turns out I need a new floor."

 That was how I ended up that Saturday night in Burlington, trying to sell weed to drunk yuppies. Turned out Steve was not the drug kingpin he thought he was and in fact had precisely no fucking contacts whatsoever. Worse, when Bog took Steve's brilliant advice of drying the 'product' in the microwave he set fire to a good half pound of the stuff, which led to a certain amount of panic before Steve announced we could adulterate it with catnip and nobody would be any the wiser. Except maybe cats.

 I watched Steve go to work on a couple over by the bar. The girl was flipping her long dark hair back from her shoulders while Steve yelled in the guy's ear, probably talking him out of something - monogamy, sobriety, heterosexuality, his pants. Neither me nor Bog knew exactly what greased Steve's pole, but he had some New York friends who were pretty touchy feely with him and who would maybe be into some kind of freaky three-way scene of Steve's fiendish devising.

 The girls here were model thin and beautiful, the kind who wouldn't look twice at someone like me when surrounded by guys with trust funds and Rolexes. I thought my virtue was safe until this one girl bumped into me. She was short where the others were tall, and where the other girls had bodies like Victoria's Secret models, this one had a little meat on her bones. She looked kind of lost, kind of angry and kind of like she didn't belong; she looked like I felt.

 "You look like you could use a drink," I said.

 She tiptoed up and shouted in my ear over the music. "Forget it. If I need anything right now it's a shirt."

 She was wearing a short black skirt and a draped halter-top in some kind of velvety material. She hugged her bare upper arms as she spoke and for some reason I just knew someone else had dressed her. Just like I knew that the brown hair hanging poker straight down her back was never meant to hang like that - it was already curling up. I gave her my shirt and she looked at me with an odd mix of pity and gratitude. She said her name was Lindsay and she had the most amazing eyes I'd ever seen; at first glance they looked so brown they were almost black, but when the light hit them for a brief moment I saw they were a kind of toffee, topaz color, flecks of chestnut brown raying out from where her pupil shrank.

 "I can't ditch my friend," she said, when I asked her if she wanted to get the hell out of here, and just like I knew someone else had put those clothes on her I knew that deep down she wanted to.

 "You don't have to," I said. "Wanna go blaze one in the parking lot?"

 At first I thought maybe she was just cold. I turned the car heater on for her as she huddled deeper into the seats. "I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to sit in cars with strange men," she said.

 "I'm not strange," I said, lighting up and passing her the joint. "I'm eccentric."

 "Bullshit. The word eccentric modifies like two words in the entire language - 'English' and 'millionaire'." She took another deep drag and held it in her lungs. "Since you're neither," she said, exhaling. "You're just plain weird."

 I was beginning to see why she didn't quite fit the mould. "How do you know I'm not a millionaire?"

 She gave me a sidelong look that said it all.

 "You leave my car out of it," I said. "It's old, but it works."

 "I never said a thing about your car," she said, giggling as she passed the joint back. "Anyway, it's nice. You know what they say about guys who drive expensive cars." She waggled her pinkie finger and said "Com-pen-sating," in a singsong voice that told me we were smoking the stuff that wasn't cut with catnip.

 "Is that good news for me?"

 "Sure. At least, I hope so."

 "You hope so?"

 "Yeah. If you're a stripper then you'd better have something to show 'em, right?"

 She was flirting with me but I couldn't very well tell her to knock it off and toss her out of the car; after all, this had been my idea. And she was cute - really cute. Someone had painted her up as carefully as a doll, but where her lipstick had worn away I could see her lips were every bit as full without it. Some girls wear their make-up thick as masks, like they're terrified the world will see who they really are, but with her it was like the mask didn't fit and kept slipping. I liked the glimpses of what lay beneath - the cinnamon flecks in her eyes, the wide bridge of her nose, the brown hair that kept trying to spring back into curls. Did she have freckles under all that make-up? And did they carry on down to her arms and the tops of her boobs?

 "Just so we're clear," I said, trying not to think about what her tits looked like. "You're talking about my dick, right?"

 "Yep."

 "Okay," I said. "I thought that's what you were talking about."

 She leaned back in the car seat as her buzz settled in. "Wow," she said, softly, tipping her head back. Her neck and chest were pale in the dark and her tiny skirt rode up. Her thighs were shiny with some kind of fancy panty hose. "Haven't done this in a while."

 "Do you smoke up in college?" I asked, not daring to look at her. I guessed she had to be a college girl.

 "Once or twice."

 "Where do you go?"

 "I don't. I graduated."

 I wanted to touch her legs. They were so weirdly glossy. Was it Lycra they used or something? "Let me guess," I said. "English Major?"

 She nodded. "I come off as that aimless, huh?"

 "No. I was gonna say sophisticated. What with your dick jokes and all."

 She laughed. "Hey, nothing wrong with dick jokes. Shakespeare was a big fan."

 I offered her the last toke. She shook her head and sank lower on the seat, making her skirt hike up even further. "You made it soggy," she said, as if we'd known one another forever. "Shotgun me instead."

 I didn't know if there was even enough left to do that, but I was sure as hell going to try. I put the joint the wrong way around in my mouth; I could feel the heat of it above my tongue. She turned to face me, her mouth open to receive the smoke, her bared neck white as the moon. I snapped my fingers and she breathed in the smoke from my lungs, mouth to mouth.

 The joint was burning my tongue. I took it out of my mouth and crushed it out in the ashtray. As I straightened back up to flop into my seat my hand kind of landed in the gap between her legs. I was going to pull back but she said 'No,' and grabbed my wrist, so that we were back where we'd been before, only this time she was not only close enough to kiss but I could feel the heat of her against my hand.

 "This isn't fair," I said.

 "What's not fair?" she said, her breath touching my lips, her amazing eyes almost black. She moved her hips barely a fraction of an inch, but it was enough to break my resolve. I cupped her in my hand, her underwear just a thin wisp under the nylon. I saw her throat work as she swallowed.

 "I'm a man," I wanted to say. "I'm a pig. Don't you know we can't control ourselves? Didn't your mother tell you we only want one thing?"

 But I didn't say anything like that; my brain was too fried. Instead I tore her stupid panty-hose open. For a moment I wondered if I was going to get slapped or learn more than I ever wanted about the price of women's hosiery; her eyes were like nothing on earth. Then she mouthed one word - "Please," and it was the work of a second to push her tiny little thong aside and push inside her. She felt like heaven itself.

 "This isn't fair," I said, even as she rocked her hips back and forth against my hand. Our foreheads were touching but we hadn't even kissed yet, which for some reason turned me on all the more. "Because I really want to fuck you."

 I could feel her muscles shiver inside and it was hopeless - I was doomed to be a man-skank for the rest of my days. My thumb found her clit and I rubbed it with slow circles that made her shudder. Her mouth fell open and for a moment she hung there, gently fucking herself on my hand, panting into my open mouth. I kissed her then and felt her moan echo in her throat. "So fuck me," she said.

 Chapter Three

Lacie

Courtney wasn't surprised that night when she caught up with me and found me sans panty-hose, nor was she surprised when I told her I'd slipped in the parking lot and laddered them so bad I had to take them off. It was one of the slight advantages of being me; nobody was ever disappointed in my appearance because I could never stay neat for long.

 "You'll freeze," she said, as if a thin layer of nylon and Lycra had ever done the job of protecting my legs from the elements. "Do you want to go back to the hotel? Because I was getting kind of bored anyway."

 I knew she was being polite - she was probably far from bored - but I did want to leave. I didn't want the guy to catch up with me and start talking phone numbers and first names. For the first time in my life I'd done something really and truly reckless and I didn't want it turning into something mundane.