Chapter 22: Genevieve
GENEVIEVE
These days, not much surprises me. For two months now, my life has become a predictable routine of the nine-to-five grind, with the occasional evening where I find a few hours to have a life. That isn’t so much a complaint as an observation, because I asked for this. I went to great pains to tame my wilder tides.
But Evan, well, Evan Hartley still manages to surprise me. The weekend after the regatta, he picks me up for our date looking all primped and polished. He’s wearing a clean white T-shirt and cargo pants without a single wrinkle in them. He even shaved—an especially rare treat. And where I expected one of his usual hairbrained schemes to get us into trouble on some ill-conceived adventure, we find ourselves sitting down to a late lunch at a modern vegan restaurant overlooking Avalon Beach.
“I have to ask,” I say, enjoying the roasted eggplant pasta. “What made you decide on vegan? I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen you eat a vegetable that wasn’t wrapped in meat or cooked in animal fat.”
As if to prove some point, Evan dabs the corner of his mouth with his napkin. “We’re going against the grain, aren’t we? I thought that
was the whole point.”
“I suppose.” Not sure I meant we had to apply that philosophy to food, but okay.
“Clean living, Fred.” Evan grins as he pops a bite of gnocchi in his mouth, then washes it down with a glass of water. He’d waved away the drink menu when we sat down. “Anyway, after our last dinner—”
“You mean my date you crashed.”
“I thought I’d show you I can be civilized.”
“You’re not funny.”
He ponders, then nods to himself. “Yes I am.”
It was only a week ago when he barged his way into yet another date with Harrison at the marina, smirking and quite pleased with himself. I might muster up more annoyance if it wasn’t so hard to be mad at him. With those eyes that dance with arrogance and mischief. The upturned corners of his lips that hint at secrets and whisper dares. He’s impossible.
“You know this isn’t what my life is now, right?” I gesture at the elegant table setting. “Dressing up in our parents’ clothes, playing adult.”
He snickers softly. “Not my parents.”
“Or mine, but you know what I mean.”
“You looked pretty comfortable in those clothes with him.”
And we were having such a nice time.
I swallow a sigh. “Do you really want to talk about Harrison?”
Evan seems to consider this for a second, then dismisses the thought. “No.”
“Good. Because I didn’t agree to this date because I want you to be more like him. Try to remember that.”
This, too, feels familiar—the somewhat adversarial rapport. Arguing for the sake of arguing because we like getting a rise out of each other. Never knowing when to quit.
Wrapped up in sexual tension so that our fights become indistinguishable from flirting.
Why do I like it so much?
“Tell me this,” he says roughly. “Who are you trying to be?”
Hell if I know. If I had that figured out, I wouldn’t still be living at home, afraid to break it to my dad that he needs to move on without me in the family business. I wouldn’t be dating one guy who I know is about as close to boyfriend material as anyone gets, while guarding myself from the million bad decisions sitting across the table.
“At the moment, shedding my bad girl reputation, I guess.”
He nods slowly. He gets it.
And that’s something I appreciate about Evan above all others—I never have to lie to him, or conceal something because I’m embarrassed about what he’d think of the truth. Whether I’m good, bad, or indifferent, he accepts me in all my iterations.
I offer a wry smile. “There’re only so many times a girl can break into the waterpark after-hours to tube down the raging rapids before delinquency loses all meaning.”
“I hear you. This is probably the longest I’ve gone without a hangover or a black eye since I was ten.” He winks at me, which might as well be an invitation to throw my legs over his shoulders. Gets me every time.
“It’s weird, though. Sometimes I’m out with the girls, and it’s like I don’t know what to do with my hands. If every instinct I have is what was getting me in trouble before, how am I supposed to know what the right ones are? What being good is supposed to look like, you know?”
“You’re looking at a guy who Googled
model citizen
, okay? I’ve narrowed it down to this: Whatever sounds like a good
idea, do the opposite.”
“I’m serious,” I say, flinging a sugar packet at him from the ramekin on the table. “What would you and I do on a normal date?”
“Normal?” He cocks his head at me, grinning.
“Normal for us.”
“We wouldn’t have left my bedroom,” Evan says. Deadpan.
Well, yeah. “After that.”
“Hit a bar. A party, maybe. End up in a stolen car doing laps at the old speedway until security chases us out. Getting drunk on top of the lighthouse while you suck me off.”
My core clenches at the naughty suggestion. I pretend to be unaffected by hurling another sugar packet at his face. “You’ve given this some thought.”
“Fred, this is all I think about.”
He needs to stop doing that. Looking at me like he’s starving, with his teeth nipping at his lower lip and those hooded eyes gleaming. It isn’t fair, and I shouldn’t have to put up with these conditions.
“Well, like you said, we’re playing against type now, so …” I gulp my virgin cocktail, still expecting the burn of alcohol and left wanting. It seemed like a good idea at the time—trick my brain into believing it’s getting what it wants—but the overly sweet concoction feels like sucking down a bottle of straight corn syrup. “What else you got?”
“Alright.” He nods briskly, accepting the challenge. “You’re on. For the rest of the night, we do the opposite of whatever our instincts tell us.”
“You sure about this?” I lean in, elbows on the table. “I don’t want to hear about you bailing on the idea …”
“I’m serious.” He’s got that look. A man possessed with a consuming notion. It reminds me of another thing
that’s always attracted me to Evan. He’s shamelessly passionate. Even about the stupidest things. It’s endearing. “Prepare yourself for an evening of well-mannered civility, Genevieve West.”
I sputter out a laugh. “Hold on to your knickers.”
“What do you think?” Evan crouches on the worn green turf beside the imitation Polynesian totem. He lays his putter on the ground, aiming the head of the club at the wooden crate labeled
dynamite
. “Take the left route around the pile of gold doubloons, yeah?”
Bending over beside him, I align my view with his. “I think that patch of old bubble gum stuck at the entrance of the mouse hole is going to give you trouble. The left fork over the ramp is a trickier shot, but once you’re there, it’s a cleaner descent to the hole.”
“Let’s go already.” Behind us, a shaggy-headed kid grows testy. His friend sighs with loud impatience. “I’d like to get through this game while my clothes still fit.”
Evan ignores him. Still evaluating his shot, picking leaves and bits of debris from around his golf ball. “I’m going left. I don’t like the look of that turtle on the right.” He gets to his feet, adjusts his stance. He takes a practice swing and then another.
“Come on!”
The club smacks the ball, launching it toward the high embankment, up and around the spilled pile of gold doubloons, where it sails straight into the rushing stream and down a waterfall. With a plop, it lands in the pool below, filled with colored golf balls like a hundred painted clams.
“After all that!” the friend heckles, while Shaggy Head guffaws loudly.
“Hey.” I round on them, pointing my club. “
Get fucked, shit-heads.”
“Whoa.” The boys retreat a step with mocking expressions. “Ma’am, this is a family establishment.”
I’ve got a mind to dangle them over the water feature, because these dudes have been getting on my nerves since the second hole, but Evan throws his arm around my shoulder to hold me back.
“Best behavior,” he whispers at my ear. “Remember?”
Right. Nice young ladies don’t drown little punk teenagers at the mini-golf course. “I’m cool.”
“Get a handle on your chick, bro,” Shaggy says.
His friend makes a taunting face. “She’s crazy.”
That snaps Evan’s spine straight. Eyes glittering, he strides up, his fist tight around his club. He backs the kids up into the bushes as they stumble to escape him, expecting a beating.
Instead, Evan grabs a golf ball from the friend’s hand and stalks back to me.
“Hey!” the kid complains.
“Consider it an asshole tax,” Evan barks over his shoulder. He makes a grand show of sweeping his shoe over the ground to clear the tee for my turn. “My lady.”
I fight a smile. “So chivalrous.”
Then, knowing better, I hit my shot through the mouse hole, where it travels through an unseen underground passage and spits out from a canon, rather than the apparent turtle’s mouth exit, and straight into the hole. Too easy.
Looking back at Evan, I see him twist his lips, cocking his head. “Cold-blooded, Fred.”
At the next hole, we place a little wager on the game with the kids behind us after Evan decides to play nice and make friends. The matchup is closer than he’d like, in fact, but my hot hand keeps us up over the boys. In the end, Evan manages a clutch hole-in-one to push
us over the top.
“That was decent of you.” In the parking lot beside his motorcycle, I crack open a bottle of water. The afternoon is waning into evening, but the sun is still furiously insistent. “Giving the boys their money back.”
Leaning against his bike, Evan shrugs one shoulder. “Last thing I need is some irate mom hunting me down for hustling her kid, right?”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think you had a good time. Despite the lack of police chasing us.”
He straightens, closing the small space between us. His proximity makes it difficult to remember why we aren’t getting up to more tactile activities. I want to kiss him. Feel his hands on me. Straddle him over his bike until security chases us away.
“When are you going to accept that I’d be happy watching paint dry with you?” His voice is low, earnest.
“Challenge accepted.”
We end up at one of those paint-your-own-pottery places. It also happens to be overrun with a little girl’s birthday party. A dozen eight-year-olds run around while a haggard shop girl struggles to keep ceramic horses and knockoff Disney figures on the shelves before they topple into mounds of dust and sharp edges.
At the back of the store, Evan and I pick our table and decide on our canvases.
“I just remembered we’ve been here before,” I inform him, pulling an owl off a shelf. A similar one sits in my bedroom at home.
Evan studies a giraffe. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, we left homecoming early freshman year and wandered in because you were tripping balls and saw a dragon in the window display, so you wouldn’t let us go until you painted a purple dragon.”
“Oh, shit,” he says, backing away
from the animals. “Yeah. I started freaking out because the dragon turned evil, and it was going to burn down the whole town.”
I chuckle at the ridiculous memory. Turned out he’d pre-partied a little without me and consumed some pot brownies before the dance.
A sudden shriek rips through the room. The birthday girl in her crown and pink feather boa is red in the face and gesticulating wildly, her mother wide-eyed and horrified as the girl’s friends cower in their seats. A tantrum poised to bubble over.
“I want the castle!” The girl fumes.
“You can have the castle, sweetie.” The mom places a clearly substandard royal dwelling in front of her petulant offspring with the deliberate motions and sweaty brow of a bomb tech.
“Not that one!” The girl grabs for another child’s far superior castle, which the other girl clutches, defiant. “It’s my party! I want that one!”
“If I ever have a kid like that,” I tell Evan, “I’m leaving it in the woods with a sleeping bag and some granola bars.”
“Remind me not to leave you alone with our kids.”
Casting a grin over his shoulder, Evan picks a seahorse off the shelf and strides over to the party. He gives the mom a reassuring nod then kneels in front of the angry birthday girl to ask if she’d do him the honor of an original artwork by painting the animal for him. Her bloodshot eyes and feral snarl return to a mostly human expression. She’s even smiling.
Evan sits with her, talking and generally maintaining her attention, allowing the mother to take a deep breath and the other girls to go about their projects without fear of reprisal.
A half hour or so later, he rejoins me at our table, now the proud owner of the pink feather boa. Which is oddly fetching on him, for
some reason.
“You’re some kind of brat whisperer,” I say as he takes a seat beside me.
“How do you think we’ve been friends for so long?”
For that I smear blue paint across his cheek. “Careful. I can do worse than throw pottery.”
He flashes a crooked smile. “Don’t I know it.”
I’d have never thought him capable of wading into such treacherous territory and emerging unscathed. Triumphant, even. Paternal. It does something to me on a primal brain-chemistry level that I’m not entirely ready to unpack.
When this date started, I wasn’t convinced we’d know how to be around each other if we weren’t drunk, naked, or some variation approaching one or the other. Now, we’ve been at this a few hours, and I can’t say I miss it. Well, I do, but not so much that I can’t find enjoyment in the mundane activities of dating. Turns out there’s something to be said for normal.
Leaving a while later with my new ceramic fish, we stroll the boardwalk, neither of us ready to go home but understanding the deadline fast approaching. Because once the sun sets, bad ideas come. We’re creatures of habit, after all.
“You never told me,” he says, reaching to hold my hand. Yet another surprise in this evening of firsts. Not that he’s never held my hand before, but this feels different. It’s not intentional or leading, but natural. Absent-minded. Like it’s the only place our hands belong. “How’d your interview go with Mac?”
“You tell me. Did she say anything?”
“She thinks you’re great. I’m more concerned how you feel. If you get the job, you two will be spending a lot of time together. That means Coop too. That means me.”
The thought hasn’t escaped me. Mac seems cool. It was only one meeting, but we got along well enough. Cooper, on the other hand, might be trickier. Last time we spoke,
he was all but trying to run me out of town. Burrowing deeper into his inner circle is likely not going to improve that rift. But that’s not what Evan’s asking, not really. We both know that.
“If I get the job,” I say with a poke to his chest, “that doesn’t mean anything about you and me one way or another.”
With that cocky grin, he doesn’t break stride. “You keep telling yourself that.”
Our path is interrupted by a group of old folks walking out of the ice-cream parlor. A couple ladies wave at Evan with disturbingly lewd intent. Meanwhile, a tall, gangly man whose sagging ears are racing his drooping jowls to his shoulders zeroes in on Evan.
“You,” he says in a hoarse grumble. “I remember you.”
Evan tugs my hand. “We better go.”
“Lloyd, come on now.” A man in a polo and name tag tries to coax the unruly seniors. “It’s time to go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” The man’s cup of vanilla soft serve splatters to the ground. “That’s the son of a bitch who killed my bird.”
Um,
what?
Evan doesn’t give me even a second to digest that. As the elderly man launches himself at us, Evan yanks my arm and rockets us forward.
“Run!” he orders.
I’m struggling to keep my balance as Evan drags me behind him, hurtling down the boardwalk. I turn toward the wheezing exclamations at our backs to see Lloyd barreling after us. Unusually spry for a man his age, he’s at a dead sprint, dodging food carts and tourists. He’s got the devil in his eyes.
“This way,” Evan says, pulling me to the left.
We cut down an alley between a couple of bars that leads behind the boardwalk carnival that is set up through
much of the summer. We dart between a couple of midway games and through a back door, where we’re promptly bombarded by a soundtrack of something I can only describe as trance music overlaid on nursery rhyme melodies with the disconcerting laughter of clowns. It’s pitch-black, save for an occasional strobe light that reveals a maze of hanging painted mannequins.
“I always knew this is what I’d see before I died,” I say in resignation.
Evan nods solemnly. “There are definitely dead kids walled up in here somewhere.”
Catching my breath, I run a hand through my disheveled hair. “So. You killed a man’s bird?”
“No, Cooper’s Satan dog killed the bird. I strenuously object to any guilt by association.”
“Uh-huh. And this happened how?”
Before he can answer, a shard of daylight enters the room from somewhere unseen. We both crouch, hugging the wall to avoid getting caught.
“Who’s in here?” a voice shouts from the other side of the room. “We ain’t open yet.”
Evan puts his finger over his lips.
“You get out here, you hear me?” The angry man’s demand is followed by a loud, startling crack of noise. Like a bat hitting a wall or something. “If I gotta hunt you down, I’m gonna turn your insides out.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “We have to get the hell out of here.”
We feel around for the door we came through, but it’s still dark and disorienting, the music and haunting laughter, and the strobe lights make the whole room appear to stutter. Practically crawling, we creep off in another direction until we find a small alcove. We stop there, listening to our pursuer’s heavy footfalls.
Confined, hunted, not making a sound,
Evan presses us into the shadows of the tight corner. With his hands on my hips and his body warm against mine, I almost don’t hear the nightmare soundtrack anymore. Just the sound of my own breathing in my ears. My mind trips over random thoughts and sensations. The scent of his shampoo and motorcycle exhaust. His skin. Memories of it on my tongue. His fingers.
“Don’t do that,” he rasps in my ear.
“What?”
“Remember.”
It’d be so easy to grab handfuls of his hair and pull his lips to mine. Let him have me in this funhouse of horrors while we brace to be hacked up by Crazy Willy out there.
“We said we wouldn’t,” Evan reminds me, reading my mind because we’ve never needed words to speak to each other. “I’m trying to be a good boy, Fred.”
I lick my dry lips. “Just out of curiosity, what would Bad Boy Evan do?” I ask, because apparently I’m into self-torture.
He licks his lips too. “You really want me to answer that?”
No.
Yes.
“Yes,” I tell him.
Evan’s palms lightly caress my hips, sending a shiver up my spine. “Bad Boy Evan would take his hand and slide it under your skirt.”
To punctuate that, one big palm travels south to capture the hem of my pale-green skirt between his fingertips. He doesn’t pull it up, though. Just plays with the filmy fabric, while a slight smile lifts the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah?” My voice is hoarse. “And why would he do that?”
“Because he’d want to find out how hot you were for him. How wet.” He bunches the fabric between his fingers, giving a teasing tug. “And then, when he felt how bad you
wanted it, he’d put his fingers inside you. Wouldn’t even need to take your panties off, because Bad Girl Gen doesn’t wear ’em.”
I almost moan out loud.
“Then, after he made you come, he’d spin you around. Tell you to put your palms flat against the wall.” Evan brings his lips close to my ear, eliciting another shiver, a flurry of them this time. “And he’d fuck you from behind until we both forgot our names.”
Still smiling, he releases my skirt, which flutters down to my knees. That teasing hand glides back north, this time to cup my chin.
I stare up at him, unable to breathe. Crazy Willy’s footsteps have dissipated. And the clown music has all but receded into the background of my brain. All I hear now is the pounding of my heart. My gaze is stuck on Evan’s lips. The need to kiss him is powerful enough to make my knees wobble.
Feeling how unsteady I am, he lets out a husky laugh. “But we’re not going to do any of that, are we?”
Despite my body screaming
please, please, please
at me, I exhale a slow breath and manage a nod. “No,” I agree. “We’re not going to do that.”
Instead, we check that the coast is clear and then double back the way we came until we find the broken exit sign above the door. We emerge unscathed, but I can’t say the same for my libido. My body is throbbing with need that borders on pain. Not putting my hands all over Evan is much, much harder than I thought it would be.
I honestly have no idea how long I’ll be able to resist.