Seeing is Believing (25 page)

TURN THE PAGE FOR A PREVIEW OF ERIN M
C
CARTHY’S NEXT EBOOK

True

COMING IN MAY 2013 FROM INTERMIX!

NATHAN’S APARTMENT WAS ON MCMICKEN STREET,
off-street parking only. Tyler’s car was a rusted-out sedan, at least twenty years old, with a maroon door that stood out in stark contrast to the white car.

“It’s unlocked,” he told me as he stepped into the street.

So I pried open the passenger side and climbed in, shivering, crossing my arms over my chest. I checked for a seat belt, but there didn’t seem to be one, and so I just sat there, stiff, my rain boots shuffling through a pile of discarded fast food bags and Coke cans. I didn’t know what to say to Tyler. I wanted to thank him for rescuing me. Because that’s what he had done. I wasn’t sure I could have gotten away from Grant on my own.

I forced myself to glance at him, but he was just looking back over his shoulder as he pulled out of the spot. He had a strong jaw and a little bump in the center of his nose that I had never noticed before. With his sweatshirt swallowing him, and in profile, somehow he looked younger, less intimidating than when his tattoos were on full display and his dark eyes were staring at me, inscrutable. It gave me the courage to say, “Thanks.”

My voice came out like a hoarse whisper and I cleared my throat, embarrassed.

“No problem,” he said. “You can’t walk through this neighborhood by yourself at night. This fucking hill alone would kill you if the ghetto rats didn’t.”

Whether or not Straight Street got its name from the fact that it was virtually a 90 degree incline or not, I didn’t know. It was definitely unwalkable, even during the day. But I wasn’t talking about him giving me a ride, though I was grateful for that. “Yeah. But thanks for . . . Grant.” I didn’t want to get more specific than that.

He turned now, and I was sorry that he did when he gave me a look that I couldn’t read. “Sure. If you find yourself in that situation again, punch him in the nuts. But you can do better than Grant, trust me.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure if it were true or not, but I did know that I would much rather be alone than have those wet, narrow lips anywhere on me, and that demanding grip on my arm, the back of my head.

“I mean, you’ve waited this long to have sex, you shouldn’t waste your virginity on an Oxy junkie.”

So he had heard me talking to Jessica and Kylie. I gripped my purse tighter in my lap, that churning sensation in my stomach starting again. The car was heaving and bucking as it struggled to make it up the steep hill, and the engine whined as Tyler gave it more gas. The street was empty, most of the houses darkened since it was after two, and I suddenly felt as trapped in the car as I had in the apartment. I didn’t want to talk about this with Tyler. Or anyone.

“Oxy?” I asked, to buy time. Dodge and weave when the subject was uncomfortable. But I’d never been particularly good at dodging anything. I was the girl in grade school gym who didn’t move fast enough and took a rubber ball in the nose.

“OxyContin. Grant likes to snort it. When he can’t get his hands on any for awhile, he gets a little edgy. I told Nathan he shouldn’t let him come around anymore, but Nathan is loyal.”

So Grant did drugs. I guess I wasn’t surprised, not really. He had the requisite dysfunctional family, the nervous twitch. It made sense. I was disappointed, though, because it meant that I had inaccurately assessed Grant. I had seen him as a male version of myself, quiet from a lack of social skills, nervous. But it wasn’t that at all, and I had projected what I wanted onto him.

The thought made me want to cry again.

“So you’re not?” I said, then immediately regretted it. It sounded almost accusatory, when the truth was, the silence was stretching out, a long rubber band that snapped with my unintentionally harsh words.

“Not when you’re doing drugs and kicking girls.”

That made sense to me.

I didn’t really know Tyler at all, other than that he was Jessica and Kylie’s party buddy, and on occasion he and Jessica hooked up. He almost never came to our dorm room and I had only been around him a few times at parties and at the apartment. We didn’t share any classes and he’d never made much of an effort to talk to me.

But suddenly I liked him a whole lot better.

Unsure what to say, as usual, I tucked my hair behind my ear, but I was spared from having to talk by his phone ringing. He glanced at the screen and swore.

“Yeah?” he said, after tapping the screen, turning the steering wheel with his left elbow, heading towards campus.

I wondered if it was Jessica. But I realized that it couldn’t be Jessica because she wouldn’t have called him. She was a texter and she always used an absurd shorthand with acronyms that no one but she understood, like
LULB
, which she insisted stood for
Love You Little Bitch
. Or my personal favorite,
W?
Jessica sometimes meant it as a general question, as in she didn’t understand what was happening, which most people would assume, or sometimes as “what time,” but no one but her ever knew which one she intended.

“No. In the kitchen. No,” he said into his phone, more emphatically. “I didn’t take it. The cat probably ate it.”

The woman talking to him was so loud that I could hear her, though the words were garbled.

“Well, stop leaving your shit laying around,” he said, and pulled his phone from his ear and dropped it into a dirty change compartment next to the gear shift with a sound of disgust. “Moms are a complete pain in the ass.”

If I hadn’t been drunk I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all. I would have just agreed or, most likely, just nodded. But my mouth seemed to move faster than my brain. “I don’t remember my mom being a pain in the ass at all. She was always smiling.”

Tyler glanced at me. “Remember? She run out on you or what?”

I wondered what the statistical odds were that someone would assume abandonment over death. “No. She died. Of cancer. When I was eight.” The beer was working overtime. I never told anyone that unless they really pressed me because the
C
word immediately brought both sympathy and fear to people’s faces. They felt instantly bad for me yet at the same time they were momentarily afraid that it would touch their life like it had mine, and they had to whisper the word.
Cancer
. Like if they spoke it too loudly it would be conjured up in their bodies like a destructive demon direct from hell. People had told me that straight out, that cancer was from the devil, a horrible affliction of otherworldly implications, unstoppable.

Others had told me that the government probably had a vaccination for cancer but was keeping a lid on it, to drive the medical economy. This seemed unlikely to me for more than a dozen reasons, not the least of which that it didn’t make sense on a cellular level. It wasn’t a virus but a mutation, yet I understood people wanted an answer for the randomness of why it struck, why it killed.

I had stopped asking why a long time ago.

Tyler seemed to get that. His response wasn’t an uncomfortable apology. He said, “Well, that’s about as fucking unfair as it gets, isn’t it? My mom is a selfish bitch and she’ll probably live to be ninety, and yet yours died.”

It was kind of nice not to get the same pat response of sympathy, the one where everyone was sorry but at the same time so damn glad it wasn’t them. I appreciated his matter-of-fact attitude. “You don’t get along with your mom?”

“Nope.” Tyler pulled into the driveway that led to my dorm. “She’s not all bad, though. She did give birth to me.” He turned and shot me a grin.

It was so unexpected that for a second, I blinked, then I let out a startled laugh. The sound was foreign and awkward to my ears but Tyler didn’t seem to notice. His face changed when he smiled, and his eyes warmed. In the dark they still looked like deep black holes, but with his lips upturned and the corners of his eyes crinkling, he wasn’t so intense, so remote.

I realized that was why I’d always been slightly nervous around Tyler. He was what people always accused me of being—there but not present. Easygoing, but distant. Smiling, but intense. Maybe it was the alcohol, my ears still buzzing, my insides hot but my skin cold and clammy, but for the first time I didn’t feel uncomfortable around him.

“So are you really a virgin?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Or were you just saying that?”

No longer comfortable. It went away faster than you could say Awkward Moment.

Why he thought I would want to talk about that made no sense to me at all. I was drunk, but I wasn’t
insane
. If I hadn’t even told my roommates until that night, why the hell would I sit in Tyler’s car and spill my guts? I wasn’t the confessional type. I never had been.

So I just looked at him.

“I’m going to take that as a
yes
.”

I wanted to tell him to mind his own goddamn business. To stop pressing a girl he didn’t know for intimate details about her sexual experience. That it was rude. But I remembered that he had in fact saved the very virginity he was questioning, so I didn’t want to be a bitch. I just shrugged. Really, what difference did it make? I was already a collegiate abnormality. Likes to study! Hates to talk! Won’t go tanning! See this freak-show exhibit in her natural dorm habitat . . .

But I actually surprised myself by opening my mouth and saying, “Yes, I am.”

My admission silenced him for a second, but then he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel as he put the car in park in front of my dorm, which was a seventies-built tower of glass and steel, the light from the lamppost flooding into his car, showing even more clearly how dirty and ancient it was, the slot for a cassette player crammed full of what looked like parking tickets.

“Do you have a purity ring or whatever?”

Now that I was in, and the beer had loosened my lips, I said the first thing that came into my head. “I prefer to call it my hymen.”

Tyler let out a laugh. “No, I mean one of those rings you wear on your finger . . .” He looked at me, comprehension dawning. “Oh, wait, you’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

Which made him laugh harder. “Rory, you are an interesting chick.”

Interesting wasn’t exactly a riveting compliment, but he hadn’t called me a freak, which was how I felt sometimes. Like I had been assembled in a different way altogether from everyone around me, and while I liked the end result, everyone else was confused as to how to interpret my very existence. They watched me, suspicious, as if I were a Transformer and they were waiting for metal arms to spring out from my chest cavity.

I didn’t think that I’d ever seen him laugh before, or maybe I had just never noticed, my attention focused on Grant, who I had thought was more likely to fall in with my plan of exploring human mating and relationships. But then again, Jessica and Kylie tended to dominate all conversation in a group setting, so maybe their own perfectly affected laughter had drowned out Tyler’s.

But for some stupid reason, I liked to think that he was laughing just for me.

Which was when I knew I was even more drunk than I had realized and I needed to get away from him before I sat there blinking at him like a baby owl indefinitely. Before I put some sort of hero worship onto him that he might deserve, but which didn’t mean a damn thing. Before I substituted one pointless crush for another.

I shoved open the door, half falling out, clinging to the handle and the remnants of my dignity, like he could hear my stupid thoughts. “Thanks,” I said over my shoulder, barely glancing back as I exited the car, clutching my bag.

There was no response, and when I struggled to slam the heavy door, which seemed to weigh a million pounds and required more coordination than my icy fingers had, I realized that he was just staring at me. There was a cigarette in his mouth, and he was lifting the car lighter up to it, his hand guiding it to his destination without thought. As he sucked on it to catch the paper and tobacco on fire, his eyes never left mine.

The smile was gone. There was nothing but a cool scrutiny.

I shivered.

Then I walked as fast as I could to my dorm, digging in my bag for my swipe card.

Once inside, I paused at the front desk to check in and I glanced out the front doors.

His car was still there, and I could see the shadow of his outline, the tiny red glow of his cigarette.

TURN THE PAGE FOR A PREVIEW OF ERIN M
C
CARTHY’S NEXT NOVEL

Full Throttle

COMING IN DECEMBER 2013 FROM BERKLEY SENSATION!

“I DOUBLE DOG DARE YOU.”

Shawn Hamby stared at Eve Monroe-Ford and remembered exactly why they had gotten in so much trouble together back in the day as the only two girls on the tween racing circuit. Eve had grown up with brothers and was a master at taunting manipulation. Shawn had grown up an only child and was eager for camaraderie, with an inability to keep a straight face. The combination had resulted in broken bones and many a grounding from their honked-off parents.

“I’m not falling for that,” Shawn told her now, with a laugh. “I’m not going to talk to a random guy in a fetish club because you dared me to.” She wasn’t twelve anymore, and she didn’t need to prove anything to anyone.

Which didn’t explain why she was here in the first place.

Damn. Maybe she hadn’t changed all that much.

“Oh, come on,” Charity Mclain said, lifting her cocktail towards her mouth as she leaned against the bar. “We’re here because of you, so you might as well have the full experience.”

They
were
here because of Shawn, in a roundabout sort of way, and as she looked around at the dimly lit club, she fought the urge to giggle, which was her usual reaction to situations that made her uncomfortable. How a book club meeting had resulted in her and three friends at a place called The Wet Spot—and no, they weren’t talking about spilled beverages—she couldn’t imagine.

“All I said was that people don’t really do what the chick in that book was doing. I didn’t say let’s go to a fetish club and see if it’s true or not.” It had just been a little hard for Shawn to believe that their fiction selection for the month had any basis in reality whatsoever, regardless of how enjoyable a read it had been. Average suburban women didn’t just up and go to a sex club after years of lame sex and let a total stranger blindfold them. She was sure of it. Not in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not in a day and age when true-crime shows about serial killers and date-rape drugs were on TV every day, all day.

Not only did it seem dangerous, but it seemed kind of silly. She wasn’t so sure what would be hot about having a man boss her around. Hell, she had that every day at the track and it just frustrated her. There was nothing sexy about it in the least. Not to her anyway. Hence the curiosity.

Harley, Charity’s twin, tucked her blond hair behind her ear, glancing around nervously. “Let’s just leave then.”

“No!” Charity rebuked her. “Shawn needs to admit that this is real, that people go to clubs like this.”

“I admit it,” Shawn said easily. She wasn’t exactly sure what people were doing here, or what drew them to the club, whether it was curiosity like it was for the four of them, or a genuine interest in BDSM or other fetishes, but she’d seen enough.

There were only so many adult men and women being pulled on dog leashes she could see before she lost it and started laughing. It wasn’t like she found other people’s choices amusing. It was that it just looked . . . fake. Like a movie being filmed. Like a giant skit being played out for her benefit. None of it seemed real, from the girl on the red velvet sofa allowing two different men to swat at her backside with a paddle to the extremely thin man who was shirtless and wearing nipple clamps,
SLAVE
tattooed across his chest, a lollipop in his mouth.

“This isn’t really what I pictured,” Eve said, scrutinizing the room. “I guess I thought it was going to be more tawdry. Nobody is having sex or anything.”

“Do you want to see people having sex?” Shawn asked, because she didn’t. She didn’t even really get the appeal of mirrors in a bedroom. Sex was not a spectator sport. Not that she remembered what sex was like, given how long it had been since she’d had it. Eve, on the other hand, was married to a sexy jackman, so she had no business being curious in Shawn’s opinion.

“No, I do not. I don’t even want to be here. My husband’s going to start to think our book club is a front for checking off items on my Bad Girl Bucket List. Last month we got drunk on margaritas and took a pole-dancing class, which was a huge leap from reading Margaret Thatcher’s biography. The month before you goaded me into waxing my cooter, though Nolan wanted to write you a thank-you note for that one.”

Eve had a point. Shawn wasn’t sure how this kept happening. She thought it had something to do with the prevalence of wine at their book club gatherings and the fact that she and Eve felt every one of the five years they had on the twins. Or maybe they were just repeating their childhood of stumbling into Bad Ideas together, though she had to primarily blame Charity for this particular outing. She was the one who had asked Siri on her iPhone where to find a fetish club in Charlotte and suddenly here they were.

“We can go at any time,” Shawn said. “And I get to pick next month’s book selection. Plus it’s my birthday month so you’d better have cake for me.” She was turning thirty-three, which while not noteworthy, was fairly appalling. “Red velvet.”

“Fine. I’m going to the restroom first,” Eve said, setting down her beer and heading off.

Shawn wasn’t sure going alone was totally wise, but Eve could take care of herself. She was known around stock car racing as having a razor-sharp tongue and no hesitation whatsoever in using it to slice offenders to ribbons. It was a talent Shawn did not possess. She was the goofy girl, the one who cracked a joke at the wrong time, who no one took seriously.

“I’m kind of disappointed,” Charity admitted. She and Harley were identical twins, but only in appearance. While she was outspoken and wore significant makeup and teased and highlighted her hair, Harley was quiet and completely natural-looking. When they stood next to each other, it was like seeing a before-and-after pageant shot of the little girls on
Toddlers & Tiaras.
“I was hoping for something more glamorous.”

“I think if you join one of those members-only clubs, you get glam. Otherwise you just get skimmers,” Harley said. “People dabbling in the scene. Not that I know anything about it, really. I’m just speculating.”

“None of these guys are even cute,” Charity complained.

Shawn would have to agree, except right at that moment, a guy came around the corner from the other room, and he wasn’t just cute. He was beyond cute. He was smoking hot. He was wet-panty-producing sexy.

“Hubba hubba,” she said, before she could stop herself. “Now there’s a fine male specimen.”

He was ripped, but not bulky, filling his button-up shirt and jeans to perfection. Just a perfectly hard, muscular, lean man with a confident step—and an intense stare that swept the room and landed on her.

“Oh, damn, he
is
hot,” Charity said.

“And he’s looking at us,” Harley breathed, sounding panicked.

He was.

And then he strode right over to them, his eyes locked on Shawn. On her. Yikes. She swallowed and tried not to fidget. She didn’t really want to do this. She wasn’t really prepared to talk to a guy here. It was a dumb idea to even set foot in this place, and she certainly didn’t want to encourage any attention from a guy who would clearly be interested in areas outside her expertise and comfort level.

She would have to politely dissuade him.

Before he even spoke, his hand slid out and took hers, his thumb stroking across her palm, causing a shiver of arousal to take her totally by surprise.

“You should dance with me,” he said, already pulling her towards him.

“Okay.”

So much for turning him down flat. Why the hell had she just agreed to dance? Because he was hot. And there was something commanding about him that appealed to her. Which was annoying.

“I’m Rhett,” he told her.

Of course he was. Shawn squeezed her mouth shut so he wouldn’t see her desperately trying not to laugh. She imagined using a fake name was what you did in a place like this, but seriously? Rhett?

“Well, then I guess that makes me Scarlett,” she told him.

* * *

RHETT FORD SAW THE BRUNETTE THE MINUTE HE CAME
around the corner. She was smiling at her friends, and she looked relaxed, casual, dressed simply in jeans and a purple sweater that had fallen off one shoulder. Her friends were dressed similarly, and given that he’d never seen her at The Wet Spot before, he suspected she was someone just like him—curious and turned on by kink, but not sure where to start.

Aside from the fact that he was immediately attracted to her, she also didn’t appear to be the type that he’d always gone for, and which had always resulted in total disaster. He had a firm habit of choosing the shy, unassuming girls—like the blond twin currently standing next to the brunette—and invariably he scared the shit out of every single one of them. They all ran, terrified. Like his latest disastrous relationship with Lexi.

So this was a conscious choice, to be approaching a woman who looked confident and amused by her surroundings. He didn’t even mind that she thought he was giving her a fake name. Though God knew, if he had a choice of names, he never would have picked Rhett. It had been the bane of his existence almost since birth. If he went for an assumed identity he would probably pick Bill or Dave. No one could poke fun at a Dave.

Leading the woman by the hand to the back bar where there was a dance floor, Rhett glanced back at her. She was checking out his ass. Now that was promising. He had never actually hooked up with anyone he had met here, since for the most part, he had just been observing and working out his own personal sexual interests, but he was definitely intrigued by this so-called Scarlett. When they got to the small, dark room where only half a dozen people were moving to the baby-making music, he pulled her into his arms and studied her face.

She met his gaze steadily, her hands snaking up to wrap around his neck. He was tall, but so was she, and while he had to bend down to make eye contact, it wasn’t significant. Her eyes were an amber color, and they were shining with amusement and, if he wasn’t mistaken, attraction. As they swayed, his hands resting lightly on her trim waist, he gave her a slow smile.

“So what brings you here?” he asked her.

Her response wasn’t flirtatious, nor was it cryptic. It was just matter-of-fact. “Information.”

“Are you a reporter? A blogger?”

“No. We’re four women who like to be right. This is my friends’ attempt to prove me wrong.”

Interesting. Bored housewives? He couldn’t check her ring finger to see if she was married, but then again, if she was looking for a good time, she would take her ring off anyway. If she was, he would be disappointed. Married women weren’t his thing. He was loyal and committed to a single woman at a time, and he had no desire to serve as an itch-scratcher for a restless spouse.

“How so?”

“I didn’t think people came to places like this. Apparently they do.” She gave him a wry smile. “So why are you here?”

He had no problem being honest. Another lesson hard-learned. He needed to be upfront about his desires. “I’m looking for the right woman for me. One who likes to be led in bed.”

She gave a little laugh. “Oh, really?”

“Really.”

“Uh-huh.”

Rhett wasn’t sure if he should be offended or not. He did know he was turned on. There was something very compelling about the way she never broke eye contact. What could be hotter than a woman submitting to his desires but doing so out of titillation, boldly? Nothing, as far as he was concerned. But he was getting ahead of himself. Which was evidenced by her dropping her arms to halt his creeping progress lower and lower on her back. He was at the curve of her ass when she reprimanded him, gripping his hand to stop it.

“Hey now, sport, watch the sticky fingers.”

Rhett grinned. “Don’t you mean wandering hands? I’m not trying to steal your wallet.”

“Whatever,” she said dismissively. “You know what I mean.”

“I do.” He kept his hands far above the erogenous zone, wanting to respect her limits. “So give me your number.” The song was almost over and who knew what would be played next. She might use a booty-grinding song as an opportunity to leave the floor and return to her girlfriends. He didn’t want to waste time.

Her eyebrows shot up. “That’s a little presumptuous, don’t you think?”

“You never get what you want if you don’t ask.”

“How old are you?” she asked suddenly, putting more space between them as they swayed to the bass-pumping R&B.

So that was it. She was older than him. “Old enough to know what I want.”

“You’re younger than me.” It wasn’t a question. She seemed certain of it.

“Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.” Might as well make his stupid name work for him.

She gave a short laugh, smiling at him. “Nice. Corny, but effective. What’s your real name, by the way? I only give my number to Clark Kent, not Superman.”

He liked the sound of that. She was going to cough up her phone number, and he was suddenly glad she’d shifted away slightly because he was getting hard. There was something about her that he found seriously arousing, and she didn’t seem intimidated by what he’d told her, which further turned him on. “It really is Rhett.”

A flicker of annoyance crossed her face.

But before he could pull out his driver’s license and prove it, her friend approached them. “Shawn!” she said, urgently.

So her name was Shawn. It suited her. Unusual, unique. The tomboy who grew up to be a sexy woman. Or so he would guess given the muscle tone of her waist and arms, and the perky lift of her backside. This girl liked sports, or at least the gym.

“Sorry to interrupt,” her friend said, “but we need to leave. Emergency. Let’s go, now.”

Shawn stopped moving to the music entirely and dropped her hands to her sides. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. We just have to go. Come on.” The blonde wouldn’t face him at all, and when there was a hesitation on Shawn’s part, she actually took her friend’s hand and pulled her away.

“Wait,” Rhett said. “I still want your number.”

But to his disappointment, Shawn just gave him an apologetic smile and a wave. “Nice to meet you,” she said, as she was dragged away.

Rhett was left standing on the dance floor feeling a whole hell of a lot of sympathy for Prince Charming when he’d been ditched. But unlike Cinderella, Shawn didn’t leave any clues behind.